Latest in long line of wannabes steps up to helm X-IO

It's Miller time

Bill Miller, X-IO executive chairman and CEO

Yes, new CEOs have to be cheerleaders: that’s understood. Saying X-IO is perfectly positioned for new market opportunities is in line with that. Its products face an intensifyingly competitive storage market where its old sealed box-o-disks uniqueness is getting irrelevant and its newer hybrid disk/flash and all-flash models have some difficulty standing out from the crowd.

There are any number of all-flash array vendors and hybrid flash/disk array vendors with better funding and stronger general positions in the market than X-IO – all-flashers EMC, Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, Kaminario, NetApp, Pure Storage, and SolidFire, and the hybrid startup/post-IPO trio of Nimble Storage, Tegile and Tintri, followed by NexGen Storage.

X-IO has its work cut out and Miller, with Owen, revamped the exec roster in April with four senior people focused on North America sales, global sales ops, field/channel marketing and demand generation. He has a new CFO – Bill Alexander – and now holds the reins at X-IO absolutely. What’s his background?

Miller's background

Miller gained a degree in chemistry and then worked in the semiconductor process industry for several years. With colleagues, he holds a stack of patents, many to do with non-volatile storage using ferroelectric capacitors, and also compression, dated between 1989 and 1992.

He was a VP of engineering and ops at CERAM from 1990 to 1993, where he built memory and storage subsystems. Then he was a founder and CTO at Storage Networks from 1997 to 2001: it IPO’d in 2000, and a former X-IO CEO – Alan Atkinson – worked for him there.

After that, he took up a string of board positions, being on the boards of Andiamo and PolyServe, and then of Quaddra, a startup developing high-performance, highly scalable file analytics software for managing unstructured data.

He became exec chairman of X-IO in February this year, part way through Owen’s time as CEO, and has gained the control reins quite quickly, not least because Brian Owen realised he would make a better CEO than Owen himself, or so he says. He had the storage background and resided in Colorado, where X-IO has its HQ. Miller says Owen actively recruited him to be the CEO.

He thinks X-IO had great technology but sold engines to people who built cars, when most people wanted just to buy cars, as it were. The strategy is to finish the job and add the enterprise features needed to complete the product so that, seen as a car, people could buy it and drive it away.

Miller says you need good hardware engineering in storage, and Pure just made a move in that direction. The storage suppliers are in a long haul and he’s convinced X-IO has a great shot at a win or a place in the race. ®