Heers relinquishes SNIA ANZ chairman's post
Heers relinquishes SNIA ANZ chairman's post
Apr 18, 2005: The inaugural chairman of the ANZ chapter of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has stepped down from the role, a little over a year after the organisation came into being.
Mark Heers, who also recently left his post as product marketing manager for EMC's ANZ operations to take up the position of director, marketing and alliances ANZ at rival storage vendor Network Appliance, explained why he relinquished the post.
"Every twelve months, according to the SNIA affiliate rules, we have an election. I had been chairman since August 2003 [during the set-up process prior to the official launch] so in the discussions we had as a board we kind of felt that it was inappropriate that I continue for another year, so I decided some time ago, in discussion with the rest of the board, that I would not run for chairman again."
The rules established by SNIA ANZ state that any member of the board can stand for re-election once. As for whether Heers would have been keen to stay on a bit longer if encouraged to do so by the board, he said: "I would have been happy to stay on but I thought it was appropriate for SNIA to have a new face at the top as well, as they need to keep refreshing ideas."
IBM's senior storage sales specialist for ANZ, Garry Barker replaces Heers as SNIA ANZ chairman. It's not all change though, with six of the inaugural board members having been re-elected, with a sprinkling of new faces making up the ten-strong board.
"I think we have now a good balance of continuing board members and new board members, which will both allow continuity and bring new ideas to the table."
Heers also stressed that his recent move to Network Appliance had no bearing on the decision.
"Network Appliance is also a member of SNIA ANZ so I was eligible to remain. I just thought it was appropriate that we made the change, and I have had a couple of discussions with Garry [Barker] to make sure we have a smooth handover."
Heers said that while he will not have a place on the board in 2005, he will still play an active role in furthering the aims of the association, and is currently in talks with SNIA ANZ to determine in what form that support will take, but the likelihood is that he will continue to help with the planning and staging of the upcoming Storage Networking World conference in Sydney, of which SNIA ANZ is a co-host.
Meanwhile, newly elected chairman, Garry Barker said of SNIA's plans for 2005: "In the year ahead, we intend to build on the achievements of 2004, leveraging our experiences to further increase the value to members and the user community. In areas like storage management, storage virtualisation, data management and protection, regulatory compliance and storage security, SAN infrastructure, IP storage, and more, we're guiding the storage industry and serve as a valuable part of a worldwide resource for storage vendors and IT managers. In 2005 we intend to raise our profile further, in particular via our co-owned Storage Networking World event later in the year.”
Vice chairman Andrew Manners, director of network storage solutions at HP, reported on the success SNIA has experienced in its first year. “We are delighted in attaining our initial goal of building an increased awareness of storage networking within the Australian and New Zealand user community. We have over 750 users receiving our material, have 25 leading vendors from within the storage industry as paid members, have signed up over 200 corporate and government members, and run a series of seminars around the country on the business benefits of storage networking and standards.”
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