Fountain Valley’s D-Link Systems Inc., a maker of networking gear for consumers and small businesses, has continued reshuffling its executive ranks.
D-Link, part of Taiwan’s D-Link Corp., is in the midst of a reorganization.
In the latest round, the company promoted Nick Tidd to president of D-Link North America. He was brought on last year as vice president of marketing for North America and vice president of sales for Pan-America operations.
Tidd is a veteran of Marlborough, Mass.-based 3Com Corp.
Big changes began in May after the departure of Steven Joe, former U.S. president and chief executive who spent more than 20 years at the company.
Keith Karlsen, former executive vice president, also left during the reorganization when D-Link consolidated operations in North America and South America.
As part of the restructuring, D-Link named Carlos Casassus Fontecilla as president of Pan-America.
The company has been hiring executives at a rapid clip, mostly in sales, operations and marketing.
In the same announcement, D-Link said Michael Fox has been promoted to vice president of U.S. solutions channels sales, overseeing the pending launch of D-Link’s latest reseller program. Fox is set to focus on selling to the government.
It also named Patrick Piwowarczyk vice president of U.S. enterprise sales, Michael Walsh as vice president of information technology for North America, Phyllis McCullagh as vice president of sales operations and Mark Ciprietti as general manager of business solutions in D-Link’s Canadian operations.
Funding, Relocation
Coraid Inc., a startup maker of data storage computers and electronics for corporate networks, last month landed $10 million in venture funding and moved its headquarters from San Clemente to the Bay Area.
The company has coalesced around its investors in temporary offices in Redwood Shores, a company spokeswoman said.
Investors include San Francisco’s Azure Capital Partners and Palo Alto’s Allegis Capital.
Coraid maintains a small operation in San Clemente, where former chief executive Jim Kemp resides. He is heading the local office of about half a dozen workers as vice president of operations.
Coraid’s products focus on Ethernet-based storage that runs on the Linux operating system.
The company said it has some 1,000 customers, including large corporations, schools and the government.
Coraid, which started in 2004, also named several new executives in light of the funding, including a chief executive, chairman and vice presidents of sales and business development, as well as new board and advisory board members.
Quartics Funding
Irvine-based startup Quartics Inc., a maker of chips that help consumer electronics stream high-definition video, raised $6.5 million in a recent round of venture funding, according to reports.
News of the funding was disclosed in a regulatory filing and reported on Southern California technology news Web site socaltech.com.
A spokesperson for Quartics declined to confirm and said the company “doesn’t comment on its financing activities.”
Quartics’ chips are designed to improve both standard and high-definition video from a variety of sources, including online streaming video, as well as Blu-ray discs and high-definition movies and computer games.
Quartics is aiming to sell its chips to companies that make PCs, digital TVs, set-top boxes and graphics cards—processors that help video and other graphics download faster.
Customers include PC maker Acer Inc., D-Link Systems and ViewSonic Corp., which is just over the county line in Walnut.
Initial investor and cofounder Safi Qureshey stepped aside as Quartics’ chief executive in 2008 and now is chairman.
He’s best known as the founder of computer maker AST Research Inc., the defunct Irvine company that once ranked among the top computer makers before crashing in the mid-1990s. Samsung Electronics Co. bought AST in 1997 and later dissolved the business.
Bits and Pieces
Solid state drives, which use flash memory and have no moving parts and are quickly replacing disk drives in some computers, are seen as having an average 54% annual growth rate until 2010, Framingham, Mass.-based market researcher IDC Corp. forecast. Last year, solid state drive shipments passed 11 million units, up 14% from 2008, IDC’s data showed … Irvine-based chipmaker Broadcom Corp. is thought to have several chips in Apple Inc.’s latest wonder-gadget, a tablet computer called the iPad, according to Barclays Capital, the research unit of Barclays Bank PLC. Broadcom is likely the supplier of the touch panel controllers, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips for the iPad, a Barclays report showed … Last month Broadcom cofounder and former Chief Executive Henry Nicholas gave a talk at the University of California, Irvine School of Law that focused on victim’s rights. The information session came a year after the passage of Marsy’s Law, which was sponsored by Nicholas and named for his sister, who was murdered in 1983 by an ex-boyfriend.
