Back in May, SiliconAngle published a note that Rich Pappas was joining DataDirect Networks (DDN).  Last week the company made it official, announcing Pappas has joined the privately held company as VP of OEM and Channel Sales. I know Pappas pretty well. I first met him when he was working with John Ives at Storage Markets, the now defunct prediction market for storage happenings. I loved the idea behind Storage Markets, a community-based prediction market that hoped to democratize the forecasting of trends in the business. Great idea but ahead of its time.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Pappas was really a storage BD maven. Earlier this year he opened several OEM doors for Storwize (which as SiliconAngle predicted was sold to IBM) and before that was working for Emulex. Pappas is a great addition for DDN – the company needs someone like Rich and I hope the firm gives him time to do his thing. Pappas is a relationship seller and will put DDN in front of every major OEM. He’s very creative, a great listener, really smart and knows a bazillion people – I wish him great success.

DDN is a strange beast. I’d never heard of the company and then it came out of the woods in early 2008. I met a number of the company’s technical and business executives, including Alex Bouzari, the firm’s CEO whom I met in the summer of 2008 when he was on a road show in NYC prepping for an IPO. Bouzari told me the company was doing roughly $100M in sales, was privately held, growing at a 30% clip and profitable. By the fall it was clear that the financial crisis was going to derail any aspirations of an IPO and as the recession tightened its grip on spending, DDN went dark. Word is that DDN has just kept its head down and has almost doubled in revenues since 2008. If this is true it’s pretty astounding and suggests that DDN is approaching the size of a 3PAR and could be well-positioned for a public offering next year. If Pappas opens some opportunities the firm’s prospects will improve even more.

DDN’s roots are in high performance computing markets but the company has been branching into adjacent commercial segments in the past couple of years. It does business in many Hollywood studios with high performance video production systems and has gone after emerging cloud markets. Microsoft Xbox Live is a big DDN customer and I’m sure the intent of the Pappas hire is to hasten that diversification.

The company has some really interesting secret sauce and owns notable pieces of intellectual property. Specifically, it has developed a deep pipeline architecture to provide highly parallel access to and from disk devices. It uses specialized silicon to perform on-the-fly error correction to ensure data integrity. The deep pipeline gives it amazing performance which is vital in rich media applications because read errors will kill performance. Specifically, the DDN architecture avoids re-reads in such use cases. If you’re into architectures, David Floyer wrote a piece describing the system which is worth a read.

I love the idea that there are small, nimble, niche storage companies out there that are out-innovating the big guys. There seem to be not enough these days and I hope DDN is for real—I think it is based on some of the DDN customers I’ve met. I’m thrilled to see the investment in new sales capabilities with the addition of Pappas and I’d like to see a more sustained marketing cadence from the company going forward.

Keep and eye on DDN—while it has what I would describe as a quirky past, it may yet emerge as a serious player able to differentiate from the big boys and drive significant valuation for its investors.