SNIA EMEA Board of Directors

Daniel Sazbon

Chair Emeritus

Daniel Sazbon was the Storage Sales leader for IBM Europe, and held several responsibilities within the Storage Sales and the Networking Sales organizations with more than 20 years experience.

He is a founding member of SNIA EMEA, member since 2000 and was appointed Chair Emeritus in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the storage industry.

Alex McDonald

Chair, SNIA EMEA

Standards and Industry Associations (SIAG), NetApp, UK

Alex has been active in the Storage Networking Industry Association since joining member company NetApp in 2005 after more than 30 years in a variety of roles in the software industry. With a background in software development, support, sales and a period as an independent consultant, Alex is now part of NetApp’s Office of the CTO that supports industry activities and promotes technology & standards based solutions. He is a Board of Director for SNIA EMEA, Co-Chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative, Co-Chair of the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative, and Vice Chair of the SNIA Networking Storage Forum.  

Peter Ceploe

Board Director

Head of Global Storage and Back up Operations (SBO)

T-Systems International GmbH

Experienced Executive Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. Skilled in Business Process, Operations Management, Business Process Design, Service-Level Agreements (SLA), and IT Service Management. Strong information technology professional with a Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.) focused in Management Studies from The Open University.

Paul Arts

Board Director

EMEA Product Marketing Director for Storage

Dell EMC

Passionate marketing professional with 20+ years of experience in IT, product marketing, B2B sales & marketing, omni-channel go-to-market and business development. Business professional with demonstrated planning and execution skills as well as proven capabilities to effectively lead a team. Proven track record in IT Distribution (10+ years experience) and strong entrepreneurial spirit (started my own company at the age of 17).

Olivier Fraimbault

Board Director

Storage & Software Defined Infrastructure, Technical Manager, IBM Systems, Hardware, Europe

Jean-Francois Marie

Board Director

Chief Solution Architect, Data Center Business Unit, Kalray

Jean-François has more than 30 years of experience in the high tech industry. He started his career dealing with real time systems, before joining Sun Microsystems as a data center architect, then EMC² and finally NetApp in 2006, where he had various roles in a 13-year career. He held various roles, from Chief Technologist and Product Marketing Director for EMEA, to French Expert team manager to handle new technology introduction. He also managed global and regional accounts, alliances and partners.

Jean-François was also an active SNIA member for 10 years and French SNIA President for 2 years. He has a Masters degree in Electronics, specialized in microprocessor design and embedded systems.

On a personal note, he has been a Basket Ball player, a coach and head coach for 25 years.

Fausto Vaninetti

Board Adviser

Senior Consultant Systems Engineer 
Cisco Systems, Italy

Dr. Fausto S. Vaninetti is a senior Technical Consultant for Datacenter technologies at Cisco Systems. With over 20 year experience in the ICT sector, he primarily focuses on storage networking, Datacenter interconnection, unified computing and application acceleration solutions.

Before joining Cisco in the technical sales organization back in 2000, he was a Research and Development engineer on optical components and DWDM platforms at Pirelli Optical Systems. During his tenure at Cisco, Fausto expanded his technology coverage from telecommunication systems into storage networking, unified computing, virtualization and application acceleration.

Fausto holds a degree in Electronic Engineering from Polytechnic Institute of Milan. He is part of Cisco Systems’ EMEAR Datacenter organization and based off the Milan office, Italy.