Michael McGuire, described as an ex Sun VP for Americas storage sales, has joined Nexsan, where he becomes the grandly titled Chief Commercial Officer. In fact he joins from the data highway road kill that was once known as agámi.

His title translates into being responsible for worldwide sales, marketing and business development activities. So not a chief operating officer, more like a CXX way of describing a VP or SVP for sales, marketing and business development. He reports to Nexsan CEO Philip Black and, presumably, will have Nexsan's Bob Woolery, SVP for marketing, reporting to him amongst others.

At Sun McGuire was was responsible for sales, field marketing, business development, channel management, finance and administration in the Americas. He came to Sun via the StorageTek acquisition and left in October 2007 to join the ill-starred agámi startup, which did indeed start up but crashed and burned in somewhat mysterious circumstances before it properly left the runway.

Nexsan sells storage arrays with a spin-down capability called AutoMAID and does so through the channel. McGuire will continue the channel strategy and his joining statement in the Nexsan release is full of phrases like: "Capitalize on our momentum ... deliver on our track record of storage innovation ... exceptional channel partnerships ... overwhelming demands...” It leaves out his agámi experience completely and is a fine example of failed startups disappearing from the public CVs of executives. Associated with failure? Me? No, no, that was er, Nexsan is a fine company and I'm real happy to be joining it - you betcha!

Nexsan looks to have recruited a guy with lots of channel experience, and the ability to drive channel sales through the next year or two will be highly valued. Ask Isilon, which has just recruited NetApp's ex-global channel sales boss, Leonard Iventosch. ®

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