People

posted on 22 April 2008 16:36

Ravi Pendekanti has joined Overland Storage as its VP of marketing.

The Overland-provided potted CV says he comes from SGI where he was senior director for worldwide solutions marketing. Before SGI he was at Sun where he held positions in the intellectual property and reference architectures marketing groups. There he won the Chairman's Award for innovative marketing efforts involving the storage and server product lines.

After Sun he worked as VP Marketing at Intransa and spent time at HP and Compuware, before Sun.

Interestingly his ZoomInfo page shows time at Pivot3 after his time at Intransa. He was Pivot3's VP Marketing before joining SGI. At that time, around August 2006, Lee Caswell, one of Pivot3's founders, was president and CEO. He's currently Pivot3's chief marketing officer and Robert Fernander is the president and CEO.

Perhaps, as marketing VP, generally meaning the head of marketing, it wouldn't be practical to have a chief marketing officer as well, and Pendekanti left Pivot3 to make room for Caswell. 

But that can't be right as Pivot3 does have a current VP marketing; Jeff Bell, who replaced Pendekanti it appears, coming, in about May 2007, from Pillar where he was also VP marketing.

What on earth does Lee Caswell do and why did Pendekanti leave Pivot3? The omission of Pivot3 from his potted CV in the Oveerland announcement suggests that all was not sweetness and light concerning his tenure at Pivot3 and its ending. Pivot3 sells a Redundant Array of Gigabit Ethernet (RAIGE) product. Perhaps there was a bit of rage about when Pendekanti's Pivot3 time ended.

It's good that Overland can attract Ravi to a marketing role; he must see that there is a good job to do and that the job is do-able.

Oveerland's CEO and president, Vern LoForti, said: "We are extremely pleased to welcome Ravi to our executive team as the head of global marketing. His impressive accomplishments and in-depth industry knowledge will prove instrumental as Overland continues to develop strategic product plans and innovative marketing programs that support our channel partners while serving the needs of our growing base of worldwide customers."

Pendekanti said this about his joining Overland: "I am thrilled to join Vern and the rest of the Overland team and further reinforce the company's tremendous brand recognition with high-impact marketing programs and best-of-class products that solve real-world business problems. The best is yet to come for Overland as the company's awesome talent pool, broad product line and long-standing relationships with loyal channel partners serve as essential ingredients for ground-breaking marketing programs that produce high rates of success."

You can see why he is in marketing!

^{[Chris Mellor.]}