Jillian Mansolf of Overland Storage Recognized by Everything Channel’s CRN Magazine

Overland Storage, today announced that Jillian Mansolf, Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing, has been recognized by Everything Channel’s CRN Magazine as one of the top Women of the Channel. CRN’s annual list recognizes female executives across vendors’ channel organizations, distributors and solution providers for their accomplishments over the past year and the far-reaching impact they are having on the technology industry going forward. This year’s Women of the Channel were chosen by the editors of CRN magazine based on their achievements as executives and the amount of influence they wield over the technology channel.

Leveraging 20 years of experience successfully driving sales and marketing initiatives at innovation-oriented technology companies including Dell, Maxtor, Snap Appliance and Data Robotics, among others, Jillian is committed to, and succeeding in, rejuvenating Overland's channel strategy while increasing revenue for Overland and its partners worldwide. After joining Overland in the fall of 2009, Mansolf spearheaded the company's initiative to deliver high-margin, effortless data management and data protection solutions to the channel. In addition to overseeing the launches of three new products sold exclusively through the channel, Mansolf unveiled an expanded channel program that offers new ways for partners to increase profitability, including a more robust deal registration program and a partner portal with new sales enablement tools, training and resources.

“Women hold many prominent executive positions at vendor organizations, distributors and solution provider organizations, providing critical insight and influence when it comes to technology and the channel. We want to honor and congratulate these women for their contributions to the industry and their respective organizations,” said Kelley Damore, VP, Editorial Director, Everything Channel.

"All of us at Overland Storage are proud of our strong channel heritage and to be one of the few companies that can truthfully make the bold claim that we have never sold direct—we've been committed to our channel strategy since day one. To that end, we strongly value the relationships that we've built and are as dedicated as ever to our partners worldwide," said Jillian Mansolf. "This recognition from Everything Channel's CRN Magazine is a testament to that dedication and our providing partners with best support and resources possible to maximize revenue opportunities."

A special feature of the Women of the Channel is in the July issue of CRN Magazine and expanded coverage is featured online at www.crn.com.

Overland Storage Wins Storage Vendor of the Year

Overland Storage a global provider of effortless data management and data protection solutions across the data lifecycle has won the ‘Storage Vendor of the Year’ category at the 2010 MicroScope ACEs channel award ceremony held at the Lancaster Hotel, London.

Congratulations to Overland for winning Storage Vendor of the Year at this year’s Microscope ACEs Awards. The awards are designed to recognize resellers, distributors and vendors who deliver excellence in IT products and services. HTML clipboardThis award reflects our commitment to the execution of our plan to deliver new technology to the market and to our channel partners who are remain loyal and committed in helping us take the Overland Storage brand to the next level.

Overland Storage - SnapServer Will Move From Milpitas to San Jose

Overland Storage, Inc. has completed plans for a July 2010 move from its Milpitas, California office to a new location in downtown San Jose, California. The newly designed offices in San Jose's Cityview Plaza Towers will accommodate current staff, centralizing the company's sales and marketing organizations, and provide room for expansion to keep pace with planned growth for the organization. Overland's new location offers a modern, open layout created to provide a working environment that fosters creativity and the open exchange of ideas among Overland employees and between Overland's staff and clients.

"Silicon Valley is widely recognized as a center of excellence for the high tech industry. We have carefully selected Overland's new location to take advantage of that reputation and provide our team a great work environment," said Eric Kelly, president and CEO of Overland Storage. "Employees will be within walking distance to countless restaurants, hotels and art and cultural venues. In addition, our team will have walking access to public transportation and new housing options, offering employees efficiencies in their work day travel by facilitating walking, biking and use of public transportation. We recognize that access to travel alternatives not only offers many benefits to our team, but to the community as well, by promoting less stress, cleaner air, reduced consumption of resources and less traffic congestion."

Jonathan Praw, vice president of BPG Properties, the group that owns Cityview Plaza, also pointed to the region's rich history as a high tech pioneer as the reason why companies find San Jose a great place to do business. "Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of high tech workers of any metropolitan area, and downtown San Jose has long been recognized as the Capital of Silicon Valley," said Praw. "As a recent winner of multiple awards recognizing excellence in facilities and building management, we are proud of Cityview Plaza and pleased that Overland Storage has chosen it for their new Silicon Valley location. With onsite retail services, high-end restaurants, a fitness facility and state of the art conference center, Cityview Plaza provides a premiere facility and ideal location for Overland and its employees."

With the announcement of Dr. Geoff Barrall as CTO and vice president of engineering earlier this month, the company will also be combining its product management and product development groups for disk-based data storage at the new location. This will allow Overland to enhance collaboration and accelerate the development of next generation storage technologies.

As part of his employment agreement, Dr. Barrall was granted an inducement stock option for the purchase of up to 218,356 shares of its common stock in accordance with NASDAQ Listing Rule 5635 (c)(4).

Overland's move to the Cityview Plaza Tower location will initially occupy 21,000 square feet of the 159,000 square foot 13-floor tower, with the option to occupy additional space as the company further expands its sales, marketing and engineering efforts. Overland will continue to operate out of its current Milpitas location until July 2010, after which its new Silicon Valley address will be: 125 South Market Street, San Jose, California 95113.

Vendor Metamorphosis, Or Resurrection?

Back in July, I was skeptical that longtime tape automation vendors Tandberg Data and Overland Storage would successfully transit the tempest that is the SMB storage market in the recession. Both are announcing products and road maps that fit their SMB customers better, and Overland has both managed to raise another $12 million and hire Geoff Barrall to be their CTO, which could keep them around long enough to deliver on the vision. MAID pioneer Copan wasn't so lucky, however.

The core of Overland's vision is to make the transition from collecting 80 percent of revenue from HP's OEM tape automation sales to resurrecting the once incredibly valuable SnapServer brand. Their new CEO, Eric Kelly, has an attachment to Snap, having been part of the team that bought it from Quantum for $10 million and sold it to Adaptec for $100 million, now bringing it to Overland for $3 million. As often as Snap's been bought and sold, a guy could make a good living just being their investment banker. Kelly's made some good decisions at Overland, killing off their Ultamus SAN array being at the top of my list.

I had lunch with Eric and Overland's marketing and sales VP Jillian Mansolf a couple of weeks ago, and they get that the keys to the SMB market are making things easy to use and developing channel loyalty. This is, by the way, a model that the pre-Dell Equallogic executed very well.

Now they've added Barrall, who founded BlueArc, which makes high-speed NAS devices. Barrall also founded Data Robotics, which makes the Drobo NAS, and he developed the "Beyond RAID" technology that allows a NAS to use different sized disks in a RAID array. Barrall clearly understands how to make a successful NAS company, so I won't count Overland among the walking wounded just yet.

The new S2000 iSCSI array isn't just a re-package of the iSCSI target Snap servers have had for years. They've re-written both the iSCSI target to make it faster, and the user interface, replacing the web GUI with Windows plug-ins that greatly simplify provisioning. They've also added a vCenter plugin and high availability for VMware via replication and failover. With SAS and SATA options and expandability to 120TB via SAS JBODs, S2000 is competitive with other entry-level SAN arrays like HP's MSA and Dell Equallogic and is probably a step up form EMC's AX.