GOVERNMENT

Crosswalk, a provider of high-performance technologies that enable scalable and resilient collaborative computing, today announced the addition of Gary Francis to its management team as Senior Vice President of Marketing. In his new position, Francis will oversee the development of Crosswalk's strategy, market programs and communication of Crosswalk's mission to provide the industry's most scalable, powerful and resilient storage system. "2006 marks a breakthrough year for Crosswalk's strategy as we enter the high performance computing arena with iGrid," said Jack McDonnell, CEO of Crosswalk. "Gary will bring the strategic leadership and marketing expertise needed to help guide our management team through this next evolution in IT." Francis brings more than 30 years of experience in the information technology industry to Crosswalk. He spent 27 years at Storage Technology Corporation (StorageTek), where he served as corporate vice president and general manager of the Automated Tape Solutions business group, as well as held a variety of other management positions within the information systems organization, disk and tape product marketing, and corporate strategic planning. In 2004 he founded InflectionPoint Strategies, Inc., a management consulting firm specializing in the high technology market with a focus on strategic planning, marketing strategies, business development and management. "The launch of iGrid propels Crosswalk to the center of a rapidly growing market opportunity," said Francis. "There are critical information storage problems to be solved in the area of high performance computing and iGrid's unique architecture creates a strong foundation to establish the standard in the industry, today and in the future." Crosswalk recently launched its first storage grid product, the iGrid Intelligent Storage Grid System, a vendor agnostic grid technology that enables any application to access any authorized storage resource, any iGrid node to access any and all file systems, and all users to concurrently access any data they need for collaborative projects. Well-suited for high performance computing users in academic research, rich media and bio-science environments, iGrid allows customers to create a single scalable shared resource for their entire storage infrastructure.