Overland Storage Gets New Marketing Chief

Ravi Pendekanti on Tuesday stepped into his new role just a couple days after leaving SGI, of Sunnyvale, Calif., where he handled industry marketing and solutions engineering for global solutions.

The best thing Pendekanti can do is not change anything for now, said John Zammett, president of HorizonTek, a Huntington, N.Y.-based Overland solution provider.

"Our Overland relationship is so good," Zammett said. "We wish him well in his new job. The best thing he can do is maintain the status quo. Their reseller program is the best in the market."

Pendekanti said that solution providers should expect changes from the San Diego, Calif.-based disk-based and tape-based storage appliance vendor, but for the better.

"Going forward, it's all about ramping up," he said. "Ramping up revenue. Ramping up partner revenue. Ramping up partner margins. Ramping up the channel. We want to see how to help our partners leverage our expertise."

Pendekanti said he will bring his experience at SGI and Sun Microsystems, of Santa Clara, Calif. to building solutions to Overland's channel partners.

"At the end of the day, customers and channel partners aren't looking at products," he said. "They are looking at solutions. They don't look at speeds and feeds. They look at how we can solve their issues."

Overland has a brand recognition that helped attract Pendekanti to join the company. "I recall watching these guys for years," he said. "A recruiter said there's an opportunity here. I saw a diamond that just needs a little more polishing. I like the history of Overland. They probably have one of the cleanest channels anywhere."

The position of vice president of marketing was previously held by Christie Huff, who was laid off a year ago this month.

That layoff was part of a restructuring the company did following a couple of significant OEM losses, the decision to restart in-house manufacturing of its storage arrays after a disastrous experiment at outsourcing the function, and the departure in the previous November of company president and CEO Christopher Calisi.