Virtual Instruments Names Sean Maxwell Vice President of Sales

Former EMC Sales Executive to Lead Global Expansion of Virtual Infrastructure Optimization Solutions


SCOTTS VALLEY, CA--(Marketwire - April 2, 2009) - Virtual Instruments, a leader in virtual infrastructure optimization, today announced that EMC veteran Sean Maxwell has joined the company as vice president of sales. Maxwell will be based in the Scotts Valley headquarters office and will lead the Virtual Instruments' global sales efforts for both direct and indirect channels as well as pre-sales system engineering. Maxwell has spent the last 10 years in the storage, SAN, WAN, HBA and virtualization markets, and will be responsible for expanding the global sales team and building out the company's channel strategy for its industry-leading virtual infrastructure optimization solutions.

News Highlights

--  Maxwell brings more than 20 years of proven Sales leadership
    experience building and managing successful sales, channel, OEM and
    alliance teams to Virtual Instruments.
--  Before joining Virtual Instruments, Sean was Area VP of Sales with
    EMC, running global and large enterprise sales teams in their Western
    Region.  Despite a down economy, his core business grew by 45 percent in
    2008, taking significant share from competition.
--  Prior to EMC, Sean was VP of worldwide business development for Q-
    Logic, spearheading Q-Logic's efforts to call into end-user accounts,
    instead of relying wholly on OEM relationships.
--  Before Q-Logic, Sean served as Regional VP of Sales for McDATA/CNT
    (now Brocade), and led the Sales merger/integration efforts for both
    acquisitions.  He led his sales teams to #1 in the company each year he was
    there.
--  Sean began his career in sales in the Consumer Packaged Goods
    industry, running field sales & corporate sales business planning roles for
    Nestle, Clorox and Coca-Cola, owning the launch of several well known
    global products & the business planning responsibilities for a billion
    dollar business.
--  He is a graduate of San Francisco State University with a degree in
    Business Administration.
    

Quotes

From Mark Urdahl, CEO, Virtual Instruments: "Sean is a proven sales executive with an outstanding track record and reputation for working in partnership with Global 500 enterprise customers. We value Sean's track record of successfully growing and building successful sales organizations. And his sales executive experience with EMC, QLogic and CNT makes him uniquely qualified to expand the global sales of VirtualWisdom, which we believe will become an essential ingredient of every virtualized data center."

From Jim Davidson, Investor and Board Member, Virtual Instruments: "Sean is a great addition to our management team. He has been extremely successful wherever he has been and will be joining a very strong executive leadership team that truly acts as a partnership for success. We are very excited to have him join us."

From Sean Maxwell, Vice President of Sales at Virtual Instruments: "It is very clear to me that the trend to virtualize business-critical applications in the data center is creating enormous opportunities for Virtual Instruments. Customers are just now beginning to realize that virtualizing mission-critical applications in live production requires comprehensive visibility into physical infrastructure. NetWisdom and VirtualWisdom provide an enabling platform for Global 500 customers to improve virtual infrastructure performance and gain full control over their capital and operational IT expenses. Virtual Instruments' solutions are unique, critical enablers to virtual infrastructure optimization."

About Virtual Instruments

Virtual Instruments offers the award-winning NetWisdom and VirtualWisdom virtual infrastructure optimization solutions that provide deep monitoring and analysis of how the virtualized IT infrastructure and SAN affect business-critical application performance. Customers such as Barclay's Card Services, Kaiser Permanente and McKesson Corp. achieve significant cost savings in virtualization and SAN deployments by optimizing utilization, performance and availability of IT resources. Leading system and storage vendors including IBM, HP and EMC leverage Virtual Instruments to design and optimize SAN solutions for enterprise customers. The company was founded in June 2008 via a spin-out from Finisar Corp.; it has headquarters in Scotts Valley, Calif., and can be found online at http://www.virtualinstruments.com.

Contact Information: Contact Info: Elizabeth Hilton Eastwick Communications 650-480-4018 ehilton@eastwick.com

Sean Maxwell, Vice President of Sales at Virtual Instruments