SAN JOSE, Calif. – May 5, 2025 – Today, NetApp® (NASDAQ: NTAP), the intelligent data infrastructure company, announced two new strategic appointments to its sales leadership team to supercharge growth in the North American market.
Jim Gannon, Vice President of Strategic Sales and Darrin Hands, Vice President of Corporate, Midmarket and SMB (CMS) Sales, join NetApp as part of a larger growth strategy focused on strategic innovation and operational excellence, strengthening its competitive edge as the data infrastructure vendor of choice for AI workloads. Hands and Gannon will report to NetApp’s Senior Vice President of North America Sales, Riccardo Di Blasio.
Gannon is a seasoned sales leader, specializing in building and scaling high-performing teams. He held senior leadership roles at Pure Storage, VMware, and Dell EMC, most recently serving as SVP of Global Sales at Sysdig where he led the strategic transformation of its go-to-market function and helped drive double digit compound annual growth rate over three years.
"It’s an exciting time to join NetApp – the latest advancements in data, AI, and cloud technologies are enabling businesses to unlock new possibilities like never before,” said Jim Gannon, Vice President of Strategic Sales at NetApp. “I’m confident that my experience, combined with NetApp’s market leadership, will help our customers achieve their goals and outpace the competition.”
Darrin Hands will lead NetApp’s new Corporate, Midmarket and SMB segment as Vice President of CMS Sales. He brings over 20 years of leadership experience in the data storage and data center industry. Most recently, as Vice President of Americas Commercial Sales at Pure Storage, Hands was responsible for driving strategy, execution, and growth across the commercial segment, leading high-performing teams focused on delivering cutting-edge storage solutions that help customers modernize their IT infrastructure.
“This role is somewhat of a homecoming for me after spending four years with NetApp earlier in my career,” said Darrin Hands, Vice President of CMS Sales at NetApp. “I am eager to bring NetApp’s innovation to this critical customer segment and continue NetApp’s remarkable legacy of innovation and customer success.”
“These leaders bring valuable perspectives and experiences to help us unlock new opportunities and deliver for our customers," said Riccardo Di Blasio, Senior Vice President & General Manager of America Sales. “We look forward to their leadership and positive impact as we continue to grow and innovate.”
NetApp is dedicated to bringing in leaders who inspire and enable our teams to successfully navigate the fast-evolving industry landscape, ensuring we consistently prioritize and serve our customers.
About NetApp
NetApp is the intelligent data infrastructure company, combining unified data storage, integrated data, operational and workload services to turn a world of disruption into opportunity for every customer. NetApp creates silo-free infrastructure, harnessing observability and AI to enable the industry’s best data management. As the only enterprise-grade storage service natively embedded in the world’s biggest clouds, our data storage delivers seamless flexibility. In addition, our data services create a data advantage through superior cyber resilience, governance, and application agility. Our operational and workload services provide continuous optimization of performance and efficiency for infrastructure and workloads through observability and AI. No matter the data type, workload, or environment, with NetApp you can transform your data infrastructure to realize your business possibilities. Learn more at www.netapp.com or follow us on X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.
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