Panasas has announced the appointments of Bill Ribera to vice president of worldwide sales and Celeste Baranski to senior vice president of engineering, deepening its executive bench.  In his new role, Ribera will be responsible for continuing the company’s aggressive sales trajectory and implementing strategies to expand its global reach.  Baranski will focus on hardware and software development, quality assurance, engineering services and operations at Panasas. She will lead the R&D team to advance the company’s dominance in high performance parallel storage products for the energy, government, finance, manufacturing, bioscience, and other core research and development sectors.

Ribera has spent the majority of his career in the enterprise storage and software markets.  He has held leadership roles in both start-ups and large companies, including EMC, VERITAS, CommVault Systems, Silver Peak Systems and most recently Precise Software. He is adept at building winning teams and implementing effective revenue growth strategies. Ribera holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame.

Baranski comes to Panasas with over 25 years of executive engineering leadership and design and management experience. Most recently, she was founder and CEO of Vitamin D, Inc., a software company in the home monitoring space. Prior to that, she served as senior vice president, engineering, at Palm, Inc., and vice president, engineering, at Handspring, Inc., where she led the company’s engineering efforts to build highly integrated, high-quality smart devices. Earlier, Baranski held senior R&D positions at Hewlett Packard. She has built successful teams ranging from a few developers to teams of over 500 engineers and brings a strong bias for software processes and product quality. Baranski holds Bachelor of Science and Master degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

“Bill and Celeste have proven their ability to build highly productive teams in their respective disciplines,” said Faye Pairman, president and CEO of Panasas. “After a thorough search, we are confident we now have a complete executive leadership team in place that will take Panasas to new heights in terms of aggressive sales growth and product development while we continue to push the limits of the high performance computing parallel storage market.”