As a storage expert and director of global strategic alliances for HGST’s Datacenter business unit, Stefaan Vervaet heads up market development strategy in vertical markets as Media & Entertainment, LifeSciences, Finance and horizontal enterprise workloads as backup & archive. He also heads the partner ecosystem driving innovation and business growth for HGST’s scale-out cloud and storage solutions.

Stefaan brings 15 years of experience in the data storage and backup industry. As a business-focused technologist with an extensive start-up background, he brings a unique perspective to HGST. His background includes product management and go-to-market positions in the backup space (Veritas), as well as technical sales and support executive positions in the object storage world (AmpliData).

As an innovator with a proven track record, Stefaan successfully helped build startup companies like DataCenter Technologies, a dedupe technology (acquired by Veritas in 2005) and Amplidata, a leading object storage vendor (acquired by HGST in 2015, a Western Digital Company). Immediately before joining HGST, he established and built the US office running operations, technical sales and support world- wide.

Vervaet holds a master’s degree in Applied Informatics from the University of Ghent, Belgium and is currently based out of HGST’s San Jose headquarters