Portworx Bolsters Executive Team, Adds New Sales Regions to Support Global Expansion and Continuous Customer Growth

Former SAP and F5 Networks executives join Portworx to support enterprise demand to run stateful containers in production

Portworx, the cloud-native storage company modern enterprises trust to manage data in containers, today announced Steve Ackley as chief revenue officer and Kent Munson as director of solutions architecture and customer success.  Portworx also announced the opening of two new sales regions in EMEA and North America. Steve joins Portworx from SAP, where he served as vice president of global sales for SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services. As chief revenue officer, he will oversee global sales, channel, and partnership initiatives. Kent joins Portworx from F5 Networks, where he was a solution architect. As director of solutions architecture and customer success, Kent will build and manage the company’s customer success and solutions team. These executive additions bring vast experience in software-defined infrastructure and customer experience management and will support Portworx’s large and growing global customer base, including 22 of the Fortune Global 1000.

“Today’s most progressive businesses recognize container data management and multi-cloud operations as critical aspects of digital transformation and rely on Portworx technology to manage their stateful services on any infrastructure,” said Murli Thirumale, CEO and co-founder, Portworx. “Our vision is to provide a cutting-edge cloud native storage solution that speaks to the heart of our customers’ everyday business needs. With Steve and Kent’s combined experience, we look forward to continuing to enable leading enterprises to accelerate the deployment of containerized applications.”

Read More: Oracle Retail Recognized as a Leader in Point of Service in Independent Research Report

Steve Ackley 

Steve brings nearly thirty years of experience selling hardware, infrastructure software, and data analytics frameworks to global enterprises. Over the course of his career, Steve has generated over $1B in shareholder value leading global field sales team’s for SaaS based technology companies including SAP,  Altiscale (SAP), Packet Design (Ciena), Vicinity (Microsoft), Marimba (BMC), Tivoli (IBM) and Sun Microsystems (Oracle). Steve will apply his extensive knowledge in building worldwide sales teams and establishing strategic alliances as Portworx continues to develop its global footprint.

“Portworx is leading the charge in the new category of cloud native data management, and is changing how today’s leading businesses are able to better build and run cloud native applications at scale,” said Steve. “As the company succeeds at simplifying how enterprises manage cloud-native architectures, I’m looking forward to playing a part in the ongoing mission to modernize data management and extend this strategy into EMEA, APJ, and beyond.”

Read More: The Promise and Potential of AI for the Insurance Industry

Kent Munson 

Kent has more than twenty years of experience in managing cloud and software-defined data center technologies. In his previous positions at F5 Networks, Intransa, Spirent Communications, Microsoft and SwanLabs, Kent was pivotal in product development and advancing innovative solutions on current technologies virtualization platforms for cloud infrastructures. In his role, Kent will leverage this experience to extend Portworx’s reach into global enterprise brands.

Read More: Interview with David Sikora, Chief Executive Officer at ALTR

“What makes Portworx distinct is its rich customer base comprised of Fortune 1000 organizations,” says Munson. “While application containerization is growing rapidly, the benefits and long-term business value of adopting these architectures are still largely untapped. I look forward to working with this impressive customer roster and ensuring they’re making the most of their container investments.”

These hires and new sales regions come as the latest in a series of recent corporate momentum. Earlier this year, Portworx announced it achieved more than 73 percent customer growth since Q4 2017 including individual purchases of over a $1M and production clusters over 100 nodes in size. In addition to net new customers, Portworx has reported confidence from existing Fortune 1000 customers, including GE Digital, who have significantly expanded their usage of Portworx’s comprehensive solution for running stateful containers in production, PX-Enterprise. Of the company’s existing customers, 66 percent are already running Portworx in production, and 30 percent have purchased additional licenses after experiencing production success with stateful containers.

Read More: Insurtech: the new AI disruption is hitting insurance