HelioVolt Hires VP of Sales and Marketing To Lead Global Energy Market Expansion

HelioVolt Corporation, a producer of highly efficient thin film solar energy products, appointed Haresh P. Patel as vice president of sales and marketing. Patel joins HelioVolt with more than 20 years of experience driving high revenue growth through sales at both emerging and established electronics technology companies, including Agilent Technology, PMC Sierra and Texas Instruments. In this newly created position at HelioVolt, Patel will direct the planning and execution of global sales and marketing efforts along with related technology development for the company’s advanced solar products.

“Haresh shines at building a strategic customer base for new technologies and developing a product roadmap to fit, ideal expertise as we prepare to bring our first thin film products to market next year,” said HelioVolt CEO and founder Dr. BJ Stanbery. “Assessing the enormity of the global energy market and the undeniable need for better, cleaner solutions, I am confident that Haresh and the rest of HelioVolt’s strong sales and marketing team are up to the task of managing growth and optimizing market adoption.”

HelioVolt is bringing a suite of high performance copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) thin film photovoltaic products to market based on the company’s rapid FASST® manufacturing process. FASST has been proven to deliver integrated solar devices exceeding 12 percent conversion efficiency in a record setting six minutes. These efficiencies place HelioVolt’s CIGS products among the highest performing solar thin film modules on the market today. HelioVolt is using FASST to develop both conventional module and next-generation building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) products for the global solar energy market. The company’s consistent achievements in technology innovation and commercialization progress recently garnered the company a global R&D 100 award as well as an AlwaysOn GoingGreen 100 award.

“HelioVolt has proven its ability to consistently set and achieve aggressive technical and business milestones. That demonstrated strength in execution will serve HelioVolt well as we focus our efforts on meeting market needs and getting a new generation of solar energy products onto the buildings of customers worldwide,” said Mr. Patel.

Prior to joining HelioVolt, Patel served for three years as senior vice president of sales and marketing at WJ Communications, Inc., where he drove growth for the company’s RFID and wireless infrastructure product lines. Patel was previously vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for Agilent Technology’s $2B Semiconductor Products Group, where he managed a 350 person sales and marketing organization.

Patel also served as vice president of worldwide sales for PMC-Sierra, Inc., where he grew a six person sales organization into a 120 person direct sales team. During his tenure at PMC-Sierra revenue grew from $139M in 1997 to peak revenue of $695M in 2000 with gross margins in excess of 75 percent. Additionally, Patel spent more than ten years in senior sales and product management positions at Fujitsu Microelectronics America and Texas Instruments. He holds an executive MBA from Stanford Business School and a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame.