Virtual Iron announced the hiring of former Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst and consultant Tony Asaro as chief strategy officer. In his role, Asaro will focus on business strategy, ecosystem development, evangelism and education of Virtual Iron to the market and complement the company’s worldwide go-to-market efforts.

Asaro has been in the high tech industry for 22 years in a wide range of roles including sales, systems engineering, business development, marketing and as an entrepreneur. Most recently, he was with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), a leading industry analyst and consulting firm. During his tenure there, Asaro was a trusted adviser to many established and emerging infrastructure vendors including EMC, NetApp, and VMware to name just a few. He provided strategic guidance and consulting on product direction, positioning, and business development and is considered a thought leader on IT infrastructure, data center environments, storage systems and networks, virtualization, power and cooling issues, and disaster recovery solutions.

“Tony Asaro is a great addition to the Virtual Iron team as we continue to expand our presence in the fast-growing server virtualization market,” said Ed Walsh, president and CEO of Virtual Iron. “We will leverage Tony's deep experience and abilities to sharpen our business, marketing and product strategies and continue to increase our visibility across our user, partner and channel communities.”

“Implementing server virtualization is one of the highest priorities in IT regardless of size, industry or region in the world,” said Tony Asaro. “Virtual Iron has a field-proven solution that our customers find is easy to use, cost effective and provides them all of the advanced management capabilities needed for a true server virtualization environment. Virtual Iron will continue to focus on raising its visibility to this wide audience so they know they have a choice - one that has been validated by over 1,500 end users just like them.”

Virtual Iron competes in the growing server virtualization market where industry experts expect software sales to grow as high as to $7 billion in 2011 from $800 million in 2006. Current penetration of virtualization on installed x86 servers is estimated at just 6% today. By delivering comprehensive, easy-to-use capabilities, the company has quickly positioned itself as the leading solution for the untapped mainstream market. Virtual Iron currently has over 1,500 organizations using its product and it has built a strong worldwide channel network including distribution agreements with Tech Data in North America and Europe, and Avnet in Europe and Australia.