QLogic today announced the appointment of Minoru Yasuda to general manager, QLogic Japan. Set to expand the company's operations and market share in Japan, Yasuda brings to QLogic a longstanding track record of developing highly successful sales and marketing strategies in Japan for technology leaders such as AMD, Dell and Sun.

Yasuda will be responsible for building a platform for growth in Japan, amplifying the company's sales focus with Tier One server and storage OEMs and pushing the company further into Fibre Channel switching and InfiniBand solutions for high performance computing applications. Yasuda will report to Martin Darling, QLogic vice president of Asia Pacific and Japan Sales.

"QLogic has impeccable high performance networking technology and one of the broadest portfolios in the industry," said Yasuda. "I look forward to building the QLogic brand in Japan, and hope to duplicate the success the company has enjoyed in the United States and other regions."

"With Japan ranked by IDC as the second largest storage market after the U.S., the time for QLogic to strengthen its presence there and capitalize on these opportunities is now," said Darling. "In addition to expanding our Fibre Channel and InfiniBand business, we expect customers in large cities such as Tokyo to address city power restrictions by deploying VMware, Nehalem-based servers and QLogic FCoE networking solutions with significantly lower power consumption characteristics."

Yasuda's career spans a multitude of technology sales and management roles over a period of 24 years. Most recently he served as general manager for Sun Microsystems x86 System Sales in Japan where he successfully managed a strategic team and worked with channel partners to greatly expand the company's share in x86 servers. Prior to Sun, Yasuda was at AMD Japan, where he served as regional sales director and headed distribution sales, which accounted for material contributions to revenue. As regional sales manager at Dell Japan, Yasuda succeeded in driving revenue growth by 20 percent on a year-over-year basis.