NEC Corporation of America Advances IT Platform Offerings with Laser Focus, New Leadership

Davenport Joins NEC as Senior Vice President of IT Platform Group, Brings 30 Years of Executive Expertise to Newly-named IT Platform Group

Santa Clara, Calif.- NEC Corporation of America, a premier provider of IT, network and identity management solutions, today announced that the company will increase its focus on delivering world-class IT platform technologies by unifying many of the company’s portfolio of IT products within one group of the company and under new leadership. The newly-named IT Platform Group will be headed by Dave Davenport, a veteran corporate chief with 30 years of IT executive, sales and marketing expertise. Davenport, who will take on the role of senior vice president, IT Platform Group, will be responsible for developing the strategic vision and driving the sales growth for the organization.

This latest initiative of concentrated focus on IT platforms supports the company strategy, announced July 2006, to establish itself as the primary provider of robust, innovative product, service and solution suites for enterprise, carrier and small-to-medium businesses. Since July 2006, the company has introduced a number of new IT platform solutions designed for specific customer needs:
Expansion of the Express5800 Fault Tolerant server offerings to single-socket and Quad-Core® processors
HYDRAstor grid storage platform with integrated management services
Virtual PC Center for desktop PC virtualization
ExpressCluster® X WAN Edition for Windows and Express Cluster X WAN for Linux - integrated application and data disaster recovery solutions; and ExpressCluster X SAN for Windows - a high availability solution for server consolidation environments
D-Series storage systems - a new standard for massive scalability, high performance and high availability in storage that allows small to large enterprises to non-disruptively and cost-effectively scale storage from 219 GB to 1.152 PB
NEC Express5800/1320Xf and Express5800/1080Rf servers that incorporate the new Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processor that amplify the capability of the new Dual-Core Intel® Itanium® 2 processor 9000 sequence and offers the performance and reliability that enterprises require for mission critical operations
Professional services to the High Performance Computing (HPC) community through alliances and partnerships with vendors and channel partners. NEC has a worldwide reputation for providing innovative solutions to HPC customers. Our expertise in complex systems integration and applications is now available in the U.S.

In the next six months, each of the product areas within the IT Platform Group will be bringing new technologies to the market that will enable NEC customers to harness NEC’s extensive research and development in ways that empower them and their clients to be more productive and efficient. With the business climate changes that have resulted from Sarbanes-Oxley, increasing focus on security, and stricter compliance and electronic discovery expectations, the role of information technology is shifting. NEC’s new products are designed to help the CIO and IT manager shift their focus from the more administrative tasks of managing technology to the more strategic role of managing information.

“The IT Platform Group within NEC Corporation of America is in an exciting renaissance period,” said Davenport. “We already offer a unique portfolio of award-winning enterprise servers, storage products and software. I look forward to working with this global technology powerhouse to develop and distribute IT solutions that can be applied in innovative ways to empower people and increase productivity.”

New to NEC, Davenport held positions of CEO, president and board director at start-ups Stored IQ, Copan Systems and SANCastle Technologies over the last seven years. At Copan Systems, Davenport led the company through all phases of growth from initial product conceptualization to a recognized international storage company. Prior to that, he held various vice president and senior management positions with Hitachi, Ltd. and Hitachi Data Systems. As a member of the Executive Leadership Team for Hitachi, Ltd.’s Storage Division, he helped Hitachi expand their storage business through new products, alliances and distribution partnerships. He started his career with IBM and holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Baylor University.

“We’re pleased to have Dave join our organization,” said Jun Yoshida, executive vice president, NEC Corporation of America. “He brings a wealth of experience in executive management, business development, sales and marketing to NEC. Dave will be driving NEC’s efforts to deliver the products and services that our IT customers need most.”