Management & Directors

John D. Beletic
President and Chief Executive Officer

John Beletic joined X-IO after nearly a decade serving as Venture Partner and board member of numerous firms while at Oak Investment Partners. Prior to Oak, he spent nearly 25 years in senior executive roles – principally as President and Chief Executive Officer – of high-growth technology and communications companies including Tigon, PageMart and Weblink Wireless. Mr. Beletic is currently Chairman of the Board of iPass, Inc. (NASDAQ: IPAS) and Lead Director of Tessco Technologies (NASDAQ: TESS). Previously, he also served on the boards at Scale Eight and Data Return.

Mr. Beletic received a BSBA in Finance summa cum laude from Xavier University and an MBA with high distinction from the Harvard Business School.

Stephen Sicola
Chief Technology Officer

Stephen J. Sicola was VP and GM of the Advanced Storage Architecture group for Seagate Technology. With over 32 years of experience in the storage industry, he was a Compaq Fellow, former CTO of StorageWorks at Compaq and Digital Equipment Corporation. Mr. Sicola has led developments on several generations of storage arrays, storage architectures, and software & hardware teams. Mr. Sicola has 50 patents pending or granted in the areas of storage architecture, RAID, fault tolerance, caching, disaster tolerance, and virtualization.

Mr. Sicola has a BSEE from Stanford University in Electrical Engineering and a master's degree from NTU in Computer Architecture/Fault Tolerant Computing.

Edward Welch
Chief Financial Officer

Mr. Welch brings to his position with X-IO over 25 years of managerial and hands-on experience in all aspects of finance and accounting. Before joining X-IO, he served for six years as Chief Financial Officer for NEC Unified Solutions, Inc. He previously held CFO and senior finance positions with Haemonetics Corporation, Ericsson USA Inc., Lucent Technologies/Avaya Communication and Unisys Corporation.

Mr. Welch holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Excelsior College, and a Master degree from the University of San Francisco School of Business and Professional Studies.

Ronald George
Vice President, Global Services

Ronald “Ron” George joined X-IO after 27 years at Hewlett-Packard in the Global Services and Consulting organizations. While at HP, he served one year assignments in both EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions. Mr. George lead a 550 person Technical Solution Center for the Americas, helped grow and mature a 3,000 person Global Solution Center while living in Bangalore India, and also lead Supply Chain, Field Services, Project Management, Business Process Management and Business Intelligence/Analytics teams globally over the years.

As Vice President of Global Services at X-IO, Mr. George oversees Global Solution Center Operations, Field Services, Global Parts Supply Chain Operations, Customer Training, and Professional Services.

Mr. George holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Design and Telecommunications, an MBA Degree in International Business, and is Project Management Certified through PMI.

David Gustavsson
Vice President, Engineering

David Gustavsson is Vice President of Engineering at X-IO, and is instrumental in defining and setting direction for the ISE Storage Blade product family and X-IO's flagship Intelligent Storage Element (ISE™) technology.

Mr. Gustavsson has been with X-IO for two years, coming to the company through the Advanced Storage Architecture group acquired from Seagate Technology in November 2007. Prior to that, he worked for four years at Seagate in a variety of engineering managerial roles, leading efforts to stabilize code, develop and deliver firmware and design the ISE unit. Before that, he worked as an engineer and project lead for EMC and Autodiagnos AB in Sweden.

Mr. Gustavsson holds a Master of Science degree in computer science from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the University of Dalarna in Sweden.

Richard Nelson
Vice President, International

Richard "Rick" Nelson joined the senior team at X-IO in late 2011 where he rejoins his former CEO from WebLink wireless. Mr. Nelson is building the international business unit to be a significant portion of the company's revenue.

Among other executive assignments, Mr. Nelson served 10 years in a number of roles at WebLink Wireless including VP of Marketing, VP of Business Development, Sr. VP of Sales, and President of the International PageMart division where he was instrumental in helping the company grow from a start up to over $300m in revenues.

Mr. Nelson made his name as a corporate innovator at American Airlines where he spent 20 years and was the co-creator of the well-known Sabre Travel Reservations System, which became the largest Global Distribution System in the travel industry. After that he moved back into more traditional airline management roles where, with the approval of the CEO and board, he created and built American Airline's American Eagle division and served as its VP of Marketing. American Eagle rapidly grew to be the largest regional airline network in the world.

Mr. Nelson received his B.A. in Political Science from Northwestern University and his M.B.A. from the University of Dallas. Mr. Nelson is married with two children.

David Ornstein
Vice President, US Sales

David Ornstein joined X-IO in 2008 and is responsible for all sales and pre-sales activities and is instrumental in setting go to market strategies for X-IO.

Mr. Ornstein brings over 15 years of sales and sales management experience in the technology industry to X-IO. Prior to joining X-IO, Mr. Ornstein held various sales and management positions at Compaq and HP in both the direct and indirect channels. Before that, he held various sales, management, and consulting positions within the IT industry.

Mr. Ornstein holds a BS in Accounting from the University of Central Florida.

Blair Parkhill
Vice President, Marketing

Blair Parkhill joined X-IO in 2010 and oversees marketing operations, product management, alliances, and analyst relations, guiding the definition and demonstration of the company's vision.

Mr. Parkhill brings more than 15 years of experience in customer-focused technology solutions and technical marketing. He began his career at X-IO as a member of the Technical Marketing team and assumed the role of Director of Product Management and Product Marketing. Prior to joining X-IO, Mr. Parkhill served as the technical team lead and manager within the Enterprise Backup Solutions division of Compaq Computer Corporation and Hewlett-Packard (HP). In 2005, he became the Master Systems Engineer with HP's Customer Focused Test team, responsible for understanding, testing, and delivering application-focused solutions through outbound marketing collateral, training, and speaking at industry events.

Mr. Parkhill holds a Bachelor's degree in Package Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Roger Walton
Vice President, EMEA

Roger Walton joined X-IO in 2011 and is responsible for all sales and pre-sales activities for Europe, Middle East and North Africa.

Mr. Walton brings more than twenty five years of experience in sales management, alliances and business development to X-IO, having worked in Europe and the USA he has a rare understanding of how different countries and markets have differing needs, cultures and processes. Before X-IO, Mr. Walton was Vice President EMEA at Triple Point Technology, the leading global provider of solutions for managing commodities and enterprise risk. He has also held senior operational management roles at Skinkers, a leader in enterprise communications software, DecisionPoint Applications, a package data warehousing provider, Sequent, IBM and HP.

Mr. Walton holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Electronics) from the University of Liverpool, England.

Jerry Gallagher
Director - General Partner, Oak Investment Partners

Gerald Gallagher is a General Partner of Oak Investment Partners, a venture capital partnership. For 30 years, he has been involved with the retail industry, holding positions as an analyst, manager, and venture capitalist. Before joining Oak in 1987, he was Vice Chairman of Dayton Hudson Corporation where, during a ten year period, he served in both operating and staff positions. Prior to 1977 he was the retail industry analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. Mr. Gallagher is currently a director of five privately held companies. He received an undergraduate degree from Princeton University and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Ed Glassmeyer
Director - General Partner, Oak Investment Partners

Edward F. Glassmeyer is a founding General Partner of Oak Investment Partners. Mr. Glassmeyer was with Citicorp Venture Capital from 1968 to 1970, followed by The Sprout Capital Group where he was Managing Partner from 1971 to 1974. Ed led the first round venture financings in both Shugart Associates (1973) and Seagate Technology (1980). Shugart Associates was the first floppy disk company later sold to Xerox; Seagate was the first 5 1/4 hard disk company, and today is an industry-leading disk drive company. Mr. Glassmeyer has invested successfully in the IT and telecom industries over the last three decades, and continues to be an active investor in the data storage industry. He graduated from Princeton University in 1963, served as an officer in the Marine Corps from 1963 to 1966, and received his MBA with distinction from The Tuck School in 1968. Mr. Glassmeyer was a founding Director of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) in 1973, and is an Overseer of The Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

Richard Lary
Corporate Fellow

Richard (Richie) Lary is corporate fellow at X-IO, and joined the company in December 2009.

Mr. Lary has been in the computer industry for 40 years. He began his career as a software engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), building operating systems and compilers for the PDP-8 and PDP-11 computers. In 1975, he served as a member of the core team that defined the VAX computer architecture, and later the implementation team for the first VAX computer. After joining DEC's Storage Business Unit in 1978, Mr. Lary was a key architect of the Digital Storage Architecture and a key implementer of several of the hardware and firmware components of the associated product family. He became DEC's Storage Architect in 1990, Storage Technical Director in 1994, and Compaq Computer Corporation's Storage Technical Director in 1998, where he was responsible for technical oversight of the entire corporate storage architecture and product line. Prior to joining X-IO, he had been an independent consultant in the storage industry and a technical advisor to several emerging storage companies since 2000.

Mr. Lary holds 32 patents for his work in processor and storage system architecture and design, and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Server I/O Conference in January 2000. He also frequently speaks at industry events.

Mr. Lary holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

Jeff Nicholson
Fellow

As the Storage Management Fellow at X-IO, Jeff Nicholson is instrumental in developing the architecture and implementation of the CorteX RESTful Web Services management platform for the Intelligent Storage Element (ISE) technology.

Mr. Nichoson has been with X-IO since the Seagate Advanced Storage Architecture group was acquired in November 2007. Earlier, Mr. Nicholson joined the Seagate ASA division in 2003 at the beginning of the ISE project to architect and develop the ISE storage management layer. Before that, he was the Director of Advanced Storage Technology for three years at StorageNetworks working with storage vendors to enhance their products in support of Storage Service Providers. Mr. Nicholson was a Member of the Technical Staff and a Principal Engineer at Compaq Computer and Digital Equipment developing storage management applications for multiple storage products. He also developed disk drive firmware solutions for both Digital and Maxtor. Further, Mr. Nicholson developed digital hardware solutions for Digital's magnetic disk technology and Sperry Defense Products Group's optical disk and fighter avionics technologies.

Mr. Nicholson holds MSEE and BSEE degrees with an emphasis in Computer Engineering from Oklahoma State University.

Ken Bates
Fellow

Ken Bates is a storage fellow working at X-IO in Colorado Springs, CO, where he is responsible for the measurement and analysis of X-IO's ISE storage products, as well as investigating and developing new algorithms and methodologies to improve the performance of those products.

Mr. Bates began working with storage at Digital Equipment in 1981, where he developed the disk server code for the HSC-50 controller, followed by the development of Digital's first shadowing (Raid-1) specification and first striping driver for VMS. He switched into the storage performance area in the mid 1980s, where his responsibilities included analysis of storage performance through measurements, analytical models, and discrete event simulations, as well as competitive product analysis. Mr. Bates has developed several tools to enable storage customers to analyze and predict performance on their systems, and has published many performance related articles in industry magazines as well as a book on storage performance. Ken has been a frequent presenter at computer symposia and customer events at Digital, Compaq, and HP, as well as teaching storage technology seminars, both domestically and internationally. He was the primary representative to the SPC for both Digital and Compaq, where the work he had previously done on customer I/O trace analysis provided the initial specification that was the basis for the current SPC-1 I/O workload.

Prior to Digital, Mr. Bates worked at Voiceprint Labs where he designed a point of sale hardware system for reading and processing magnetically encoded credit cards. While at Voiceprint Labs, Mr. Bates also worked to develop software for a speaker recognition system. Prior to Voiceprint, he worked at Farrington Electronics as a hardware engineer assisting in the development hardware optical character recognition systems.