Former EMC and Hitachi Executive Set to Expand APJ Market Share:

QLogic today announced the appointment of Martin Darling to vice president of Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) Sales. Set to begin scaling the company's APJ market share, Darling brings to QLogic an established, successful track record of cultivating high-impact sales and marketing teams and building sustainable, high performance sales operations across APJ, for storage technology leaders such as EMC and Hitachi, Ltd.'s Data Systems unit.

Darling will be responsible for strengthening QLogic's presence across APJ to expand its networking business, specifically optimizing the company's sales organization and channel partners for new business opportunities in the 8Gb Fibre Channel, FCoE and Ethernet markets while reinforcing its competitive position. Darling will report to Scott Genereux, senior vice president of Worldwide Sales and Marketing.

"The Asia Pacific IT sector is growing at a rate faster than many other regions; Japan is the second largest storage market in the world while China's economy is performing better than expected in the current business climate. The opportunity for growth and market expansion is significant," said Genereux. "Having spent the past decade in Asia spearheading highly successful sales strategies for some of the world's leading storage companies-many of whom are QLogic OEM customers-Martin will enable us to expand upon existing relationships, successfully forge new ones and accelerate our growth in this important region."

Commenting from his office in Singapore on his appointment, Darling said, "QLogic offers an impressive portfolio that spans storage, server and data networking markets and is considerably well-positioned to address the broad networking requirements of leading companies across China, Japan, Korea and other countries in the Asia Pacific region. I look forward to expanding our sales presence and strategic initiatives
on this side of the globe."

Darling has deep domain expertise, with a career that spans a multitude of sales and general management roles over a period of 15 years in the storage industry. Most recently, he was at DataDirect Networks (DDN) as vice president and general manager of Asia Pacific, where he successfully expanded the company's presence in Asia, igniting new business in Korea and India. Prior to DDN, Martin was at Copan Systems, where he was responsible for sales in Asia Pacific and increased revenue tenfold per quarter in only one year and established new vertical business operations in the video gaming, Internet and energy sectors. Prior to Copan, Martin headed up the Asia Pacific Dell Business Sales Unit at EMC, where he materially increased the company's revenue and presence throughout the region. Martin also worked at Hitachi, Ltd.'s Data Systems unit where he doubled channel sales in just three years.