Name: Dave Hitz

Company: Network Appliance

Job Title: Founder and Executive Vice President

Bio: As executive vice president, David Hitz is responsible for the future strategy and direction of Network Appliance.

Dave Hitz and James Lau founded Network Appliance in 1992 with a desire to simplify storage the way Cisco simplified networking. Hitz and Lau believed that general-purpose computing systems were too complex, so they built dedicated devices called appliances. These appliances were designed to do one thing well: storage. Thus, the word appliance was inserted into the company name.

Prior to this, Hitz worked as a senior engineer at Auspex Corporation, an enterprise storage solutions provider, where he was responsible for file systems and microkernel design. He also held engineering positions at MIPS Computer, focusing on file system and I/O subsystem design for the System V kernel development effort. Before his career in the computer industry, Hitz worked as a cowboy, where he got valuable management experience by herding, branding, and castrating cattle.

Hitz holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and electrical engineering from Princeton University.