Mark Ward, the last CEO at collapsed storage vendor Copan, has turned up in the top sales role at Attivio.

Copan provided MAID (Massive Array of Idle Drives) storage arrays in which three quarters of the drives were spun down to conserve energy and generate less heat, allowing the drives to be packed more closely together than in traditional storage arrays. However the firm ran out of cash as Ward's spending on development and a world-wide sales infrastructure and other things outstripped sales revenue.

Ward was let go in July last year, with no new CEO being appointed.

The firm more or less collapsed in December last year with most workers laid off and the remaining management aiming to refocus it as a supplier of channel businesses. IBM has been mentioned as a possible partner. So far nothing has emerged about any success in that re-orientation of Copan.

Ward is now the executive vice president of sales for Attivio, an enterprise data search product company. Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine (AIE) has just had a v2.0 release which includes new features: "like low latency indexing, Structured Query Language (SQL) support and a JDBC driver for providing unified information to business intelligence (BI) reports and dashboards."

The AIE pitch is that data is held in many places, such as databases, spreadsheets, documents, emails, blogs, and so forth. Attivio, it says, integrates search, business intelligence and process automation capabilities to provide query answers and intelligence from one query, report or dashboard.

Attivio's release says Mark Ward will be: "responsible for expanding all aspects of customer and partner education, support and success. He joins Attivio with deep information management experience, having maintained executive-level positions with EMC, Enterprise Storage Ventures, Storage Technology Corporation and Copan Systems." ®