Converged infrastructure vendor Nutanix announced that it has appointed Wayne Neich to head its Sydney office. As Managing Director of the Australian and New Zealand region, the executive will be responsible for “all aspects” of marketing and customer support.

Neich brings more than 25 years of sales and business management experience to Nutanix. He is joining the company from WAN optimization firm Silver Peak Systems, where he served as the regional director for Oceania. Prior to his stint at Silver Peak he worked for Blue Coat, a Sunnyvale, California-based provider of web security and content filtering solutions.

“People are talking about so-called storage wars, but those on the data center front lines know that the only thing that really matters now is how storage and compute must converge into an almost infinitely scalable package,” Neich said in a statement. ”Frankly, anyone who isn’t doing convergence is selling something that’s already obsolete.”

Nutanix expanded to Australia in June as part of an aggressive growth strategy that spawned eight branch offices in 12 months. Since then, the company has partnered with a big-name distributor called WhiteGold Solutions and several smaller resellers throughout Australia and New Zealand. The vendor also signed high-profile clients such as the Australian Rugby Union, Sanity Music and Pearson Research and Assessment.

Three weeks ago, Nutanix rolled out a major update to the software platform that powers its converged offering. Nutanix OS 3.5 sports a dashboard for tracking system health, built-in analytics and a REST-based API that let users integrate their environments with third party visualization tools. Other features of NOS 3.5 include Elastic Deduplication Engine, a data-driven utility that promises to optimize performance and achieve massive increases in usable storage.