UPDATED 10:50 EDT / DECEMBER 04 2012

Oracle Hires Cloud Startup CEO Scott Genereux to Boost Global Infrastructure Strategy

According to updates posted on LinkedIn, Oracle has hired enterprise cloud storage veteran and cube alumni Scott Genereux as its Senior Vice President of Global Hardware Strategy, Planning and Product Management.

Genereux was previously CEO of Nirvanix growing cloud startup.  This appears to be a new role, where Genereux will be responsible for all strategy for Oracle infrastructure platforms, from its Sun servers to ZFS storage appliances, networking products and Exadata/Exalogic database acceleration machines.

Oracle has been super aggressive in the cloud and big data space and rounding out it’s hardware strategy.  This is a great move for Oracle as it brings a proven high powered storage exec to its ranks in the battle for the next generation converged data center and the enterprise cloud.

Genereux earned his stripes as President and CEO of enterprise cloud storage provider Nirvanix, where he racked up petabyte-scale wins at companies like Cerner, Credit Suisse and USC; as SVP of Worldwide Sales & Marketing at QLogic, where he inked a major OEM deal with HP for QLogic switches while HP dumped Cisco; and at Hitachi Data Systems where he headed up their $2.7B worldwide storage business as SVP of Worldwide Sales, Marketing & Support and waged a multi-year war for the high-end enterprise storage market, ultimately leading HDS to nearly 40% market share in that space.

We’ve been coving Oracle in a big way going back 3 years by bringing our live web TV #theCUBE to Oracle Open World.  Oracle is tightly integrating both its’ hardware and its software. Oracle contends that while other vendors are busy mixing and matching Oracle software with their unrelated hardware products and hoping for the best results, Oracle is delivering a unified, completely integrated solution. We’ll be watching Scott closely to see how he exploits this advantage to expand Oracle’s market share versus its key competitors, including IBM, HP, and EMC–who all rely on Oracle software to sell much of their big hardware to large enterprises.

In related news that we’ve confirmed, Nirvanix appointed Dru Borden as its new CEO. Dru was most recently Chief Strategy Officer of Nirvanix, and recently appeared on the Cube at VMworld 2012 highlighting his experiences with Nirvanix cloud storage technology on the customer side, when he was Chief Software Architect of NBCUniversal–now a multi-petabyte customer of Nirvanix.

Dru has big relationships in the entertainment industry and we expect him to leverage those relationships to win more accounts for Nirvanix in that high growth vertical in upcoming quarters. As we noted in an article on Dru before:

“Borden brings the best of both worlds to the company: executive experience coupled with the industry-specific IT expertise that Nirvanix needs to be able to market its services in this market.  He was in charge of engineering for CBS as vice president of application architecture and served a similar role as NBCUniversal’s chief software architect. The job descriptions at both companies were fairly similar, covering not only R&D but also implementation and deployment. He has about 15 years of experience in this field.”

Clearly the competition for top talent in the storage space is heating up and we only expect it to increase from here.

Note:  One thing that I love about SiliconANGLE.com WebTV #theCUBE is that we can have documented videos of execs over the years.  Here is a playlist of Scott’s interviews with me and Dave Vellante on SiliconANGLE.tv

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEF0D6C7CE63FE793


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