Fusion-io Hires Steve Wozniak as Chief Scientist

Apple's employee number one is back in the game.

Steve Wozniak, the technical genius behind  and co-founder of Apple, Inc. has taken a job with a new startup company. According the New York Times, "the Woz" is the new chief scientist for Fusion-io. Wozniak was already on the advisory board for Fusion-io, but has decided to make a more hands-on position. “I have a pretty quiet life, and I like to watch technology evolve,” Wozniak said to the New York Times. “In this case, I like the people and the product, and said I would like some greater involvement.”

Based out of Salt Lake City, Fusion-io has been around for about three years, and is looking to change how people think about computer data storage. The company's flagship product, the ioDrive, is a PCI Express-based storage solution that offers data at much higher speeds than traditional magnetic hard drives that connect through SATA or IDE. Fusion-io also offers the ioSAN, which is a networked enterprise-grade solid state drive, as well as the ioXtreme, a "consumer product based on the company’s ioMemory technology".

“With the revolutionary technological advances being made by Fusion-io, the company is in the right place at the right time with the right technology and ready to direct the history of technology into the 21st century and beyond,” said Wozniak in Fusion-io's press release. “The technology marketplace has not seen such capacity for innovation and radical transformation since the mainframe computer was replaced by the home computer. Fusion-io’s technology is extremely useful to many different applications and almost all of the world’s servers.”

Fusion-io has seen some play amongst bigger tech companies. Supposedly, it offers $10,000 server storage solutions comparable to offerings from EMC and NetApp that cost ten times as much. Fusion-io has also seen investment cash from Dell, and calls them as well as Hewlett-Packard and IBM customers.

“Steve Wozniak has been among the most elite innovators of his age and we are honored by his enthusiasm for our technology and our company,” said Don Basile, CEO of Fusion-io. “Steve’s inventions and insights have inspired generations of IT professionals and we look forward to the influence he will have on the future direction of Fusion-io as we continue to transform the enterprise."

If the Woz has the same impact in his new environment that he did at Apple, Fusion-io may be on the fast track to success.