Violin Memory has made two key appointments to the company’s global sales organisation. Carlo Wolf, formerly of Pure Storage, joins Violin as vice president of sales for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Magnus Almquist steps into the role of Violin’s vice president of sales for Asia Pacific, Latin America and emerging markets. Both executives have extensive experience in international sales management, go-to-market strategies, channel development and customer engagement working at companies including Cisco and Philips, as well as Ericsson and Redback Networks, respectively. Wolf and Almquist report to Said Ouissal, head of Violin Memory’s worldwide field operations, who is committed to cultivating top industry achievers to create a premier sales organisation and an exceptional customer engagement experience. Their work together will drive the widespread adoption of the company’s flash storage platform (FSP) in the enterprise storage space. “Carlo and Magnus bring strong international backgrounds, sales leadership, and industry insight, so customers around the globe will receive excellent guidance and support as they migrate from legacy disk to an all flash data centre” said Said Ouissal. “They will be instrumental in helping our customers realise the real value FSP delivers — an affordable, simple-to-deploy, true enterprise-class primary storage with the highest levels of performance, availability and protection.”
Prior to Violin, Wolf was regional director of central Europe at Pure Storage. His IT industry experience also includes 18 years at Cisco where he was managing director for Germany, and grew the technology business revenue to over $1 billion, leading 1,000 employees and building one of the strongest partner networks in the region. Wolf began his career at Philips in Germany. He completed the Stanford Executive Programme at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in Palo Alto, California.
Almquist has more than 25 years experience in executive sales management and strategic sales to customers worldwide. Before joining Violin, Almquist was the vice president worldwide sales leader at a cyber security start-up. He has worked at start-ups, medium-sized and fortune 500 companies, including Ericsson and Redback Networks, where he built highly efficient and effective sales organisations. Almquist speaks fluent English, Spanish, French and Swedish and holds an MSc in Industrial and Management Engineering from the Institute of Technology in Linkoping, Sweden.
