Ron Nash named CEO of Pivot3

AUSTIN, Texas—Ron Nash is the new CEO of storage provider Pivot3. An investor and board member in Pivot3 since 2005, Nash's business pedigree includes serving as SVP of Perot Systems in the 1990s, when the company grew from a $100 million company to a $1.2 billion company before being acquired by Dell in 2009.  

Asked what change his appointment signals at Pivot3, Nash told Security Systems News: “The only change you'll see is acceleration. We want to accelerate and be more aggressive in the market.”

Nash takes over for Bill Galloway, who had served as interim CEO since April. Galloway founded the company in 2003 and is CTO. Galloway said he's eager to return to his R&D duties. “That's the reason I brought Ron in,” he said. “I'm the expert on the technology behind this stuff. I want to work on adding new features for the surveillance market.”

Galloway said, “Ron is well versed and has done all of this before on the marketing, sales and partnership side. … And we've worked together for many years.”

Nash is a partner in Pivot3 investor InterWest Partners, which led Pivot3's new $14 million credit facility, announced Oct. 24.

Look for Pivot3 to “deepen partnerships” with integrators, other vendors and end users, Nash said. It will be a “sophisticated and multi-layered go-to-market approach,” he said.

One year from now, Pivot3 will “be bigger, more organizationally advanced … with processes more buttoned down … [and we will] start to look like a multi-product company,” Nash said.

It is committed to the surveillance industry, but it will also focus efforts on its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) product. “It's more of a horizontal play,” but the technology has “extreme advantages” and Pivot3 now has “a dozen or so [VDI] customers,” Nash said.

And while surveillance storage and VDI are two different lines of business, Galloway said “they aren't as disparate as they first sound.”

“I believe VDI will become an important part of the security industry,” Galloway said. “It doesn't have the same CapEx up front; it's all about security and operational efficiency.” VDI can be particularly useful in industries such as health care, he said. 

Nash believes Pivot3 and the security industry are at a turning point, similar to the transition the telecom industry underwent in the 1990s. “When industries go through [a transition like this] there's a lot of opportunity to build a great company,” Nash said. “And the neat thing about Pivot3 is that operationally [our products] work like purpose-built equipment … but internally we ride the cost curve of the broader IT industry.”