Arkeia Corp. has announced the appointment of storage industry veteran Alain Pechon as its new chief executive officer. Pechon brings more than 20 years of leadership in IT companies to Arkeia, including previous management positions with Sun Microsystems, AMDAHL and EMC.

During his 15 years at Sun Microsystems, Pechon established and grew sales organizations to more than 800 people and $500M in revenue. Most recently, Pechon was CEO of Calendra Software and directed its merger with BMC in 2005. He replaces former Arkeia CEO Phil Roussel who remains on the Board of Directors.

"Arkeia has a proven product that has been in the market for more than seven years, a large and dedicated base of customers, and participates in a fast-growing market segment: data protection," said Pechon. "Customers such as Porsche, Disney and NASA already rely on Arkeia products, and I am thrilled to lead Arkeia through its next phase of growth."

"Alain has an outstanding track record of building world-class organizations," said Arnaud Filhol, general partner at SPEF Ventures. "As Arkeia matures into a leader in the data protection software market, Alain is the ideal person to direct and lead the company."

Just two months ago, Arkeia launched its revolutionary Smart Backup solution with an innovative volume-based pricing technology that enables small and midsize businesses to regain control of storage costs by paying only for what they actually use. The new software covers a wide spectrum of data protection strategies, fully supporting disk-to-disk backup environments as well as traditional disk-to-tape and tape autoloaders.

About Arkeia Corp.

Arkeia Corp. is a leading provider of enterprise-class backup and recovery solutions for all types of heterogeneous networks. Arkeia, specializing in Linux, offers data protection software designed to ease the life of system administrators by providing efficient technology at a competitive price.

Products include Arkeia Network Backup, Arkeia Smart Backup, bare-metal Disaster Recovery modules, NDMP support for NAS backup and hot backup plug-ins for Oracle, DB2, Lotus, Open-Xchange, MySQL, PostgreSQL, LDAP, MS SQL and MS Exchange Servers.

Protecting more than 100,000 networks worldwide, Arkeia solutions have been adopted by 5,000 corporate-class customers in over 50 countries since 1999. Arkeia is privately held, with investment funding support from two major banking concerns.

For further information visit http://www.arkeia.com