NWN Names Actifio President Jim Sullivan As New CEO

Sullivan succeeds NWN veteran Skip Tappen, who had been a top executive at the solution provider powerhouse for more than a decade.

Solution provider NWN Corp. has appointed a new CEO, Jim Sullivan, who had been serving as president of data management software company Actifio.

Sullivan succeeds Skip Tappen as president and CEO of Waltham, Mass.-based NWN. Tappen had held the top position since January of 2017 at solution provider powerhouse NWN, which was No. 73 on the CRN 2018 Solution Provider 500.

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Tappen had helped lead the growth charge at NWN since joining the company in 2004 from Accenture, where he was a consultant and partner.

He was promoted from executive vice president to chief operating officer of NWN in 2010, before moving up to CEO in 2017.

In recent years, Tappen oversaw moves at NWN into key areas of expansion such as managed print services and device-as-a-service.

At NWN, Sullivan will "drive the next phase of growth and leadership for NWN in the cloud era," the solution provider said in a news release.

Sullivan had served as president of Actifio--a privately held billion-dollar "unicorn" that specializes in copy data virtualization--since late 2011. Like NWN, Actifio is headquartered in Waltham, Mass.

Sullivan’s more than 30-year career in enterprise technology has also included serving as vice president of IBM Storage; as president of XIV (which was acquired by IBM); and as senior vice president of sales at EMC, according to NWN.

"He has been at the center of some of the most significant developments in IT, and has helped build the strategies and led the execution for industry leaders from EMC to Actifio," said Dave Blechman, chairman of the board at NWN and founder of New State Capital Partners, in a news release.