NASHUA, N.H. -- Plexxi, a pioneer of next-generation networking products, today named former top EMC executive and serial entrepreneur Richard Napolitano as CEO to continue the company's expansion and help drive the networking industry's transition to an application- and data-focused era powered by the explosive growth in mobile, social media, cloud and Big Data.

As an independent board member with the company, Napolitano and Plexxi founder David Husak worked in tandem to chart the company's future while preparing to bring Napolitano on board as CEO to scale its growth. Napolitano will continue to work closely with Husak who will serve as executive vice president of strategy and engineering, focusing on the development of Plexxi's industry-leading networking technology and products.

Napolitano has a long track record of scaling businesses to record growth while disrupting established industries. He has held many top leadership roles in the technology industry, including president of the Unified Storage Division at EMC Corporation, the world's largest data storage provider, and president and general manager of U.S. sales for Sun Microsystems, which was acquired by Oracle. He also served as chairman, CEO and president of Pirus Networks, which was acquired by Sun, and cofounder and CEO of Data Kinesis, which was acquired by Adaptec.

Plexxi also appointed Tim Lieto as senior vice president of sales and customer service to lead the company's worldwide sales and channel effort and expand its ecosystem of distribution partners and systems integrators. Lieto, who has held similar positions at Sun Microsystems, 3Com and Lucent, has helped develop small companies into large corporations throughout his career by building direct, channel and OEM sales growth.

As a key component of its strategy to accelerate growth and address the changing IT landscape, Plexxi is focused on three market solutions: agile IT datacenters, scale-out application infrastructure and distributed cloud environments. Plexxi's agile IT datacenter solutions create an automated, intelligently managed datacenter network leveraging a flat, scale-out architecture ideal for enterprise applications and their growth. Plexxi's scale-out application solutions deliver a purpose-built network for horizontally scaled, distributed applications like Big Data, clustered compute and clustered storage. Plexxi's distributed cloud solutions create a high-capacity network for distributing resources across multiple sites regardless of distance.

Plexxi