Ahmet Houssein Joins Solarflare as VP of Marketing & Strategic Development
Nov. 21 -- Solarflare, a global leader in networking solutions for modern datacenters, announced the addition of Ahmet Houssein as Vice President of Marketing & Strategic Development, adding another industry luminary to its distinguished leadership team.
Mr. Houssein’s hiring comes at an important time, both for Solarflare and for the broader market in general. The exponential growth in datacenter traffic—precipitated by the growth of IoT technology, social media, Web video, and Cloud-based applications—is putting greater strain on datacenter infrastructure. Over the past decade, server processors and storage have largely evolved to keep pace with this reality. The burden is now on the network. Hardware and software solutions that have stagnated since the nineties are being asked to mediate traffic across complex, virtualized datacenters—while meeting increasingly stringent security requirements. This requires companies to look newly at their networking.
Solarflare is poised to dramatically innovate the way networking hardware and software can uniquely meet the dynamic demands of scale-out datacenters by adding value at the threshold to the server: the network interface. Whether data is moving in and out of the datacenter or between servers, it inevitably crosses this threshold no less than twice. This affords Solarflare the occasion to add value to the data—reducing latency, adding visibility, and securing it, among other benefits—all while affording valuable analytics to datacenter managers. It’s this ability to customize the role of the network adapter as part of a broader data management strategy that has helped fuel Solarflare’s success to date.
"I considered this move very carefully,” states Mr. Houssein. “There are a lot of companies offering solutions for the scale-out datacenter—inside and outside the server itself. There are also a lot of industry inflection points pervading the market. And when I looked for the perfect union of unique offering with high market demand, it was clear that no one is better positioned for explosive growth than Solarflare. Realizing this, I knew this is exactly where I needed to be."
Mr. Houssein brings more than 25 years of experience in the server, storage, datacenter and networking industry to Solarflare. During this time, he has held senior level executive positions in product development, marketing and business development at Intel, Adaptec and Honeywell, among others. Most recently, Mr. Houssein held the role of SVP/GM at QLogic where he successfully shepherded the first 25GB Ethernet products to market. Among numerous accolades, Mr. Houssein is a recipient of the Intel Achievement and Adaptec CEO Recognition Awards.
"Solarflare’s success to date is a result of really smart people designing exceptionally intelligent products. Bringing Ahmet into the fold grows our collective expertise significantly,” states Solarflare CEO Russell Stern. “We’re excited about where his unrivaled experience and insightful vision can help drive us."
About Solarflare
Solarflare is the leading provider of application-intelligent networking I/O software and hardware platforms that accelerate, monitor and secure network data, and is the pioneer in high-performance, low-latency 10/40GbE server networking solutions. With more than 1,400 global customers, the company's products are widely used in scale-out server environments such as electronic trading, high performance computing, cloud, virtualization and big data.
Source: Solarflare
