SANTA CLARA, CA, April 1, 2010— BLADE Network Technologies, Inc. (BLADE), the trusted leader in data center networking, announced the appointment of former EMC executive Eric Shefler as the company’s senior vice president of Worldwide Sales. Shefler has extensive sales leadership experience in both North America and Europe. Shefler is a native of Canada and will lead BLADE’s global sales organization from Canada.

Shefler joins BLADE after a very distinguished 10-year career at EMC where he was most recently EMEA vice president Enterprise and Global accounts. His responsibilities also included EMC’s EMEA Marketing, Alliances and Networked Storage Sales organizations.

Prior to becoming vice president EMEA for EMC Computer Systems, Eric held a number of increasingly responsible positions at the company, including country manager for Canada and regional vice president for Western and Northern Europe. Prior to that, Eric was regional vice president for Cabletron Systems, responsible for Northeast Regional Sales and Operations.

“Eric joins BLADE Network Technologies at an incredibly exciting time,” said Mehta. “Last year was a record year for the company, and we’re on track to break all previous records in 2010. Eric’s impressive experience as a sales leader will help us further accelerate the momentum we’ve established in the global enterprise data center marketplace.” 

“BLADE Network Technologies is one of the most well regarded companies in today’s data center industry,” said Shefler. “BLADE’s brand is extremely well respected in all corners of the globe, and its products are vital to the world’s largest enterprises. As the data center network becomes increasingly central to enterprise business goals, BLADE has proven its ability to satisfy customers’ most demanding requirements. I am very excited about the opportunity to help lead the company in continuing to achieve its commitment to customer satisfaction as job number one as we expand our presence across all market segments and regions of the world.”

About BLADE Network Technologies
BLADE Network Technologies (BLADE) is the industry’s leading provider of network fabrics for high-performance data centers. Its blade switches, top-of-rack RackSwitch™, VMready™ network virtualization software and Smart Server Control™ software are key elements of the company’s Unified FabricArchitecture™. BLADE’s “Rackonomics” approach makes it simple for businesses to rapidly deploy and configure massive amounts of server and storage infrastructure, interconnect the various infrastructure elements, virtualize the infrastructure to maximize efficiency and utilization and easily manage the infrastructure to achieve the most optimal TCO. With 7.9 million ports in production deployment, BLADE’s proven fabric products connect millions of server and storage systems at over 9,500 enterprises in over 26 different industry verticals, including 350 of the Fortune 500. Visit: http://www.bladenetwork.net.