Press Release
April 15, 2008
Pliant Technology names Gary Stager Vice President of Engineering
Stager to Head World-Class Engineering Team Developing New Enterprise Flash Drives for Delivery Later This Year
Milpitas, Calif. – April 15, 2008 – Pliant Technology, developer of a new class of high-speed, solid state storage devices for the enterprise, today announced the appointment of Gary Stager as vice president of engineering. In this new position, Stager will lead Pliant’s engineering programs as the company moves toward market availability of its Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) storage devices later this year. Pliant’s EFDs will deliver dramatically higher levels of performance while meeting the growing need for increased energy efficiency and reliability in enterprise computing environments.
Stager has more than 20 years of experience as a design engineer, technical leader and system architect. He has established and led global engineering organizations in the development of several industry-leading storage, semiconductor and networking products in a broad range of technology industries. In addition, Stager has extensive experience managing cross-functional product development teams, and a proven track record in effectively defining, planning and achieving corporate objectives. He will report directly to Mike Chenery, president and co-founder of Pliant Technology.
“Gary’s breadth and depth of experience and his past accomplishments position him as the ideal individual to lead our very strong engineering team,” said Chenery. “Pliant has received an exceptional response from partners and potential customers regarding our unique enterprise storage technology, and I look forward to working with Gary to bring our EFD device to market later this year.”
Prior to joining Pliant Technology, Stager was the vice president of engineering at Avistar Communications, a leading provider of enterprise video communications solutions. At Avistar, he was responsible for engineering and product development, and was instrumental in the company’s growth by restructuring the engineering organization and development process for greater productivity. Prior to Avistar, Stager was senior vice president of engineering and operations of Exavio, Inc., a provider of high-throughput Fibre Channel systems for digital media distribution. He has also held senior positions at Cisco and Fujitsu. Stager has a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering; digital electronics and computer systems and a Bachelor of Arts in liberal arts from the University of Florida.
Stager joins a seasoned executive team at Pliant Technology, which includes several of the foremost experts and innovators in the data storage industry. The Pliant executive team collectively has more than 100 years of storage industry experience developing new technologies, bringing products to market, rapidly capturing dominant market share, and providing significant returns to investors.
Pliant’s EFD storage solution is based on a new and advanced controller design and software architecture, and will integrate seamlessly into existing enterprise information systems. Delivering exponential improvements over today’s highest performing hard drive and SSD storage solutions for a range of data I/O intensive enterprise applications, Pliant’s solution is expected to be available to OEM and data center customers in the fourth quarter of 2008.
About Pliant Technology
Pliant Technology is developing Enterprise Flash Drives (EFD’s), a new class of solid state storage devices, that integrate seamlessly into enterprise information systems and dramatically improve performance, reliability, energy efficiency, and TCO. The company was founded by a team of successful storage executives and engineers from Fujitsu, Maxtor, Quantum, and Seagate. Pliant is based in Milpitas, Calif., and is available on the Web at www.plianttechnology.com
Media Contact
Andrew Staples
Walt & Company
2105 South Bascom Avenue, Suite 240
Campbell, CA 95008
(408) 369-7200, Ext. 1056