Xcedex Executive Leadership
Chris Taylor, Founder, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer
Chris brings 16 years of experience to Xcedex with demonstrated leadership capabilities in both start-up and publicly-held corporations. He has a strong track record of positioning companies as market leaders, creating new market segments and driving innovative and effective direct and channel go-to-market sales strategies. As Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing, he expanded the firms customer base to over 1,000 accounts worldwide and its development of business alliance relationships with OEMs such as EMC, Microsoft, NetApp, Dell and Xiotech, regional and national value-added resellers and global systems integrators. Prior to his positions with Xcedex, Taylor led the Professional Services & Solutions Group for Minnesota-based Evolving Solutions, an IT solutions company recognized as a Finance & Commerce Magazine’s “Innovator of the Year” company, CRN Magazine Fast Growth 100 and Minneapolis / St. Paul Journal “Fast Growth 50” company. Before joining Evolving Solutions, Taylor served as National Director of Solutions Development for the Computer Network Technology Corporation, a market leader in delivering end-to-end storage network software solutions and products globally. Prior to CNT, he held various corporate and field business development and sales leadership positions within both EMC’s Professional Services Group and the Microsoft Corporation, where he played a key role in the roll-out of the Microsoft Dynamics™ line of integrated business management solutions.
Gary Johnson
Gary is an accomplished Senior Executive with proven track record of driving business development, revenue growth, and profitability. During his 23 years of technology experience Gary has demonstrated strategic skills and expertise in market analysis, business planning, marketing, organizational development, leading product design & development, and relationship management that has led to 4 successful business unit startups. Gary spent 14 years in various executive roles at Computer Network Technology (CNT) where he helped the company grow revenue from $15 million to $360 million. Gary is also a patent holder and published several articles ranging from storage optimization over the WAN to other pioneer forages centered around datacenter centric areas.
Advisory Board
Tom Hudson
Prior to its acquisition by McDATA, Mr. Hudson was Chairman and CEO of Computer Network Technology Corporation (CNT) where the revenue grew from $65 million to $360 million under his leadership between 1996 - 2005. Mr. Hudson has more than 20 years in the computer industry. Prior to joining CNT, Hudson served as senior vice president of corporate development at McGraw Hill Companies. Mr. Hudson began his professional career in 1968 at IBM where he served in a number of management positions, including vice president of the services sector division. During his tenure at IBM, he managed a variety of strategic, development, and marketing activities for financial services, international operations, and the large systems business. Mr. Hudson holds a BS from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA from New York University.
Mark Schrandt
As an Advisory Board Member to the Xcedex Corporation, Mark Schrandt brings extensive and proven senior management and technology development expertise, which includes engineering operational management for storage divisions at Cisco Systems, NuSpeed and StorageTek. As Director of Engineering for Cisco, Schrandt delivered the industry’s first standards-based IP storage area networks, including the industry’s first multi-protocol storage switches. Mark was also instrumental in establishing iSCSI as the industry standard for IP storage networking. Prior to Cisco, Schrandt was Co-Founder and Vice President of Engineering at NuSpeed, a recognized storage market leader responsible for building and delivering the industry's first IP-based storage routers. In less than one year, Schrandt helped found NuSpeed, built its engineering organization and brought the industry's first iSCSI product to market. Mark was also a key member of the NuSpeed management team that negotiated a $450 million acquisition by Cisco Systems in the Fall of 2000. His extensive senior management experience and background in establishing and managing successful engineering teams tasked with driving the rapid deployment of product development strategies fits perfectly with the Xcedex Corporation’s strategy to evolve as the #1 provider of virtualization solution software globally.