Enstor appoints new managing director

Terry Semple, the man who installed Australia’s first fibre channel SAN, is the new managing director at storage integrator Enstor.

On 13 May, Semple made a substantial investment in Enstor giving him majority stake in the company, diluting the shareholdings of Ken Wood and technical director Bart Steanes, who founded the company in 1998.

Wood has been away from the business for the past 12 months but still holds a minority shareholding, Semple said. Other owners include general manager Tony Bagala and one private investor.

In his role, Semple would expand the integrator’s vendor and reseller partnerships and position the company as the top storage integrator in Australia.

The company works with technologies manufactured by the likes of EMC, Legato, StorageTek (Sun), Veritas (Symantec), Brocade and VMware.

He joined the integrator in September 1999 as a technical consultant and in May 2000 was promoted to sales executive where he established the company’s largest account. He has held several roles in the storage industry over the past 25 years.

He also runs a specialist electronics design company dubbed Semimath Engineering and also spent eight years at Seagate. “I was the fibre channel expert for Seagate in Asia-Pacific. My claim to fame is that I built the first fibre channel SAN in Australia,” he said.

Enstor has 38 staff in Sydney and Melbourne. “I love working with these people here -– almost everybody has an engineering degree,” he said. Another six staff would start with the company shortly.

“We were at that awkward stage –- that’s why we need the injection of funds.” He said that organisations with 25 to 35 staff trim back or grow rapidly. “I want to see this company grow rapidly,” he said.

Enstor had invested over $1 million in developing ‘Enstor Coherence’ a middleware product that glues the storage systems from multiple vendors together. The company had already received interest from distributors in Europe wanting to sell the forthcoming software.

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