Nirvanix storage cloud spills executive blood

Comment Nirvanix lost a few executives when its incoming CEO stripped out unwanted VPs and SVPs, and brought in his own team.

What appears to have happened is that Scott Genereux became Nirvanix' CEO in November of last year, coming in from QLogic. Some $10m of C-round funding came in at the same time – which, with a B-round in 2009, took total funding to around $28m. In January, Genereux began a substantial culling of Nirvanix' senior executives, and now has pretty much his own team piloting the enterprise cloud storage ship.

Edgard Devielle has left Nirvanix where he was business development VP up until January of this year, and is now at Data Domain as senior product management director.

Eric Hardy joined Nirvanix in late January to become its SVP for worldwide sales, replacing Joseph Lyons.

Adrian Herrara left Nirvanix in January. He ran marketing there and was part of the founding team. He joined object-storage supplier Caringo in April to become its senior marketing director. Steve Zivanic came in from QLogic, Genereux' old stomping ground, and replaced Herrera.

Geoff Tudor, a Nirvanix cofounder and SVP for strategy and business development, is also no longer on Nirvanix' management team. He is now the director for global cloud strategy and solutions at HP, joining HP in March, officially leaving Nirvanix in April according to his LinkedIn entry. Ironically, Tudor is now a colleague of Patrick Harr, a cofounder and ex-CEO of Nirvanix, leaving in February 2009, and currently VP for cloud strategy and solutions at HP.

Nirvanix has just appointed Karen Sigman as its VP for OEMs and alliances, a new position.

The word we hear is that the Nirvanix investors are happy with the way Genereux is running things. Recent Nirvanix initiatives include an offer to aggrieved Iron Mountain cloud customers, the launch of its Cloud Sideloader technology to encourage data transfer from other cloud service providers, and marketing alliances with Front Porch Digital and Riverbed, for its Whitewater cloud gateway appliance.

Nirvanix has its own hNode, a managed private cloud service. The company says: "The standard configuration is two hNodes, with a minimum of 200TBs each, scalable to multiple petabytes per location."

NIrvanix presents this as the hNode providing private cloud-storage facilities to an enterprise with the back end being the Nirvanix public cloud service, a hybrid approach. We expect to hear much more about this.

With Cirtas scaling down its cloud ambitions and Iron Mountain facing cloud difficulties, Nirvanix, founded in 2007, is maintaining its marketing momentum. The big question is revenue, meaning whether is it making sufficient progress towards profitability so that impatient venture capitalists can stage an IPO and make big bucks - or sell the company, of course.

Genereux' job is to fatten the Nirvanix goose for them and make it golden, enabling the VCs to get their hoped-for reward. ®