Catalogic Software announced plans to bring on Ed Walsh as its new CEO. Walsh has become a household name in enterprise IT for being a startup energizer, propelling several startups onto success, including Avamar, now part of EMC, and Storwize, now part of IBM.

Walsh brings to Catalogic 20 years of experience and a healthy list of venture-funded startups that he has guided to exponential growth. He served as GM and VP at EMC after the sale of Avamar to EMC , CEO and President of Virtual Iron Software, Inc. and CEO of Storwize. After IBM’s acquisition of Storwize, he became VP and Business Line Executive at IBM Storage.

Speaking about his previous work with IBM Storage, Walsh demonstrated his industry knowledge and provided insight useful to his new position with Catalogic. Noting a number of challenges companies currently face in today’s computing world, Walsh proposed, “How do they innovate and drive new capabilities and more out of their data? How do they get more out of their environment? And how do you do that and save money?”

“We believe software defined storage 3.0 is going to be analytics driven and application driven. It has to be open,” Walsh continued. Along with a new family of analytics coming on, “in 3.0 you will be able to virtualize your environment,” but analytics will be key.

Unlike his startup endeavors, Catalogic is not a new company but rather an offspring of Syncsort, a mainframe computing firm founded in 1968. Walsh will be at the forefront of its new vision that focuses on intelligent data protection management solutions.