Walter (Walt) Hinton is Senior Global Director of Enterprise & Client Compute Solutions Marketing at Western Digital. He is responsible for Solutions Marketing, aligning a broad platform of storage devices to traditional and emerging data center applications.  With a unique background in cloud-based services operations, product development, and marketing, Walt leads a non-traditional team of Data Champions who focus on “how things work” with technical proof points, not marketing hype.  Over a 25-year career in data storage, he has helped build successful startups like McDATA, ManagedStorage International, and Virident Systems. He also served as Chief Strategist at StorageTek, partnering across the industry to foster the creation of the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA).