Education and Business Career
After graduating from high school, Reyes attended Saint Mary's College of California in Moraga, CA, where he obtained a degree in Business Administration in 1984. During his studies there, Reyes obtained an internship with Convergent Technologies (Unisys) in its sales department. Reyes began working full-time position at Convergent while taking evening classes in order to complete his degree. After obtaining his degree, Reyes became an OEM sales representative for Convergent, then left to become Vice President of Sales and Support at Banyan Systems, a networking and data communications software firm.
Reyes obtained his first CEO position with Wireless Access, a Silicon Valley start-up company specializing in two-way pagers. Reyes served as President and CEO until Wireless Access was bought out in 1997 by Glenayre Technologies.
In 1998, Reyes became the CEO of Brocade Communications, where he led the company to its Initial Public Offering in 1999. As CEO of Brocade Communications, Reyes sold SAN (Storage Area Network) infrastructure to a number of companies, including IBM, EMC Corp., Compaq, Dell, NEC, and HP.
During Reyes's time as CEO, Brocade was the largest manufacturer of networking equipment that provides data storage in the world. Under his leadership, the company went public in May 1999, growing from a small startup business into one of the largest and most successful technology companies in the Silicon Valley - a leadership position that it maintains to this day. Brocade showed 7 quarters of profitability and revenue growth during that time – in the first two years alone, revenue growth exceeded 150% altogether. In addition, Reyes actively pursued the recruitment of more than 1150 employees, multiplying the company’s workforce by a factor greater than six from 1999 to 2002 until the company implemented massive layoffs in response to the burst of the dot-com bubble.
Reyes resigned from Brocade when he was indicted by the U.S. government for accounting irregularities associated with corporate stock options backdating. Reyes was originally convicted in 2007, but the conviction was overturned on appeal. He was retried in 2010, and again convicted; the second conviction was upheld on appeal.
Reyes is the first corporate official to be convicted of concealing stock options backdating in the United States.
Read more about this topic: Gregory Reyes
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