Panasas Strengthens Sales and Marketing Leadership With Four New Executives

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Panasas^®, a long-standing leader in high-performance data solutions, has just announced the appointments of Jeff Whitaker as VP of Marketing and Product Management, Kieran Penwill and Chris Sassone as Sales Directors of EMEA and APAC, respectively, and Mike Sheppard as Global Director of Channels and Alliances.

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Jeff Whitaker, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management for Panasas (Photo: Business Wire)

Brian Peterson, COO of Panasas, remarked, “I’m thrilled to announce these new appointments. The ActiveStor Ultra product line has received high praise from both established and new customers, and Panasas has enjoyed a sharp increase in demand over the last 18 months. As a result, we are investing further in our teams and our products to support our expanding global customer base.”

Jeff Whitaker, former VP of Product at Excelero and a founding member of the cloud team at NetApp, said: “One of the reasons I joined Panasas is its commitment to making the world a better place with data. Our products are critical to the success of organizations that are transforming healthcare and life sciences, advanced AI and predictive analytics, manufacturing, and climate and energy exploration.” Jeff aims to make inroads into new markets and to expand revenue growth. “I am bringing a disruptive way of thinking from my success in the cloud storage industry to the high-performance data industry.”

With Jeff on board, Brian Reed, formerly Panasas’ VP of Product and Alliances, has taken over the position of VP of Corporate Development as the company prepares for a surge in international growth and to expand its strategic partnerships and alliances.

Kieran Penwill, Sales Director for EMEA, said, “Over the past 30 years, I have built new markets and expanded the footprint of several technology manufacturers by leveraging market trends and emerging opportunities. I look forward to driving Panasas’ market share across the EMEA region.”

Before joining Panasas, Kieran held positions at Intel, Dell, and Microsoft, and Chris Sassone spent the past 10 years with Intel. Mike Sheppard counts DDN, Intel, and Strongbox among his previous companies.

Panasas COO Brian Peterson shared that “Kieran Penwill, Chris Sassone, and Mike Sheppard were instrumental in building out end-customer installations of the Lustre parallel file system across the globe during their tenures at Intel. They each bring strong customer and partner relationships with them, which they will use to deliver Panasas’ stability, easy manageability, and optimized performance to organizations throughout the world.”

Panasas customers are driven by innovation. To date, the company has helped organizations including Airbus, Boeing, Canon, Goodyear, Honeywell, McLaren, P&G, STFC, and many more streamline and scale their storage environments to remain agile and cutting-edge. This impressive leadership expansion will extend the reach of both sales and marketing, enabling Panasas to quickly grow its market share and coordinate future product development with organizations’ evolving data needs.

About Panasas

Panasas, the data engine for innovation, provides purpose-built data solutions for high-performance and AI applications in manufacturing, life sciences, energy, media, financial services, and government. The company’s flagship PanFS® parallel file system and ActiveStor® solutions uniquely combine ease of management with extreme performance, scalability, security, and reliability for modern workloads. The Panasas data engine solves the world’s most challenging problems: curing diseases, designing the next jetliner, creating mind-blowing visual effects, and using AI to predict new possibilities. For more information, visit www.panasas.com.

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