Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Thursday, March 28, 2024

AI Career Notes: March 2020 Edition 

In this monthly feature we bring you up to date on the latest career developments in the enterprise AI community -- promotions, new hires and accolades:


Tom Addis

Kinetica appointed Tom Addis as chief revenue officer (CRO). Under this new role, Addis is responsible for expanding Kinetica's global sales operation and reports to CEO Paul Appleby. Addis brings 30 years of experience in developing and growing businesses across the tech sector. Before Kinetica, Addis held the role of CRO at Box, helping to increase the company's revenue from $20 million to $700 million. He's also held senior executive positions at Salesforce.com, Siebel Systems (Oracle), and IBM.

"Having worked with many of the world's largest companies in my prior roles, I am excited to join Kinetica at a time where we are rapidly expanding our global presence and delivering game-changing technology across the Global 2000," Addis said. "The Kinetica Active Analytics platform recognizes that the most valuable business asset is data, and underpins the active analytical applications that deliver immediate, actionable, mission-critical information to our customers."

Robert Calderoni and Ravi Vijayaraghavanto

Ansys, Inc. appointed Robert Calderoni and Ravi Vijayaraghavanto to the company's board of directors. Calderoni brings over 30 years of executive experience, spearheading multinational software, technology and service companies. Currently, he is chairman of Citrix Systems, Inc., and before Citrix, he was the chairman and chief executive officer of Ariba, Inc.

Ravi Vijayaraghavan is a senior partner at Bain & Company, Inc. Vijayaraghavan is credited for playing a leadership role in establishing and expanding Bain's technology and telecommunication practice across the Asia-Pacific region. He is a senior member of Bain's mergers and acquisitions, private equity and telecommunications, media and technology practices. Ravi is also a member of the board of overseers for WGBH.

Mark Chen

SoftIron's co-founder, Mark Chen, returned to the company as chief security officer. Chen, who served as SoftIron's chief scientist before taking a professional sabbatical, will now lead the company's secure provenance strategy. Before SoftIron, Chen was a senior engineer and security architect for Intuit. At Intuit, he designed and built the security system for an online retail banking system.

"Protecting our critical technology base against a growing and diverse array of adversaries becomes ever more important as society's reliance on technology increases," Chen said. "The industry's constant drive to minimize production and material costs through outsourcing has created a situation where complex supply chains with opaque, multi-tier relationships are the norm. This environment offers deep shadows in which spies and hackers can thrive and invites root-level exploits in both hardware and software. A compromised technology base, in turn, threatens industries such as energy, financial services, health care, and government. As I return to SoftIron as CSO, I am resolved to help drive our approach to secure provenance and to lead the industry in a new direction where root-level security becomes a planned priority, not a reaction to events that have already threatened lives and fortunes."

Viv Craske

Spoon Guru tapped Viv Craske as for the role of senior vice president of Commercial Development to expand the strategy and sales team. Craske's experience includes selling data products into grocery retailers and has built sales teams at tech startups such as mySupermarket. He is also the author of 'Surviving Digital Disruption.'

"I am thrilled to be joining Spoon Guru's leadership team and capitalizing on the company's expansion," Craske said. "My role will include driving the business forward by scaling sales operations in the U.S., driving brand awareness, along with growing revenue across territories and the company's market share. I'm looking forward to helping partners see significant increases in consumer conversion rates, basket size, return rates and customer lifetime value through Spoon Guru's food discovery AI platform," adds Craske.

Stephen Dilbeck

Tachyum announced the addition of Stephen Dilbeck under the role of senior director, system on chip. Dilbeck has been with the company under contract since 2019. Under this new full-time role, he is responsible for customer-owned tooling physical design and SoC of the company's data processing chip. He will work with engineers to achieve timing, area, performance, and power goals of the company's Prodigy Universal Processor Chip.

"Having been with Tachyum for a while, it is abundantly clear that they are not only developing a revolutionary product but a revolutionary approach to the semiconductor market as a whole," Dilbeck said. "I am looking forward to working full time with the engineers at Tachyum to ensure that their task remains on track and that they are able to achieve their goals of providing unprecedented performance, power efficiency, and cost savings to the industry."

Phil Fasano

Splice Machine announced the addition of Phil Fasano to its board of directors. Fasano has over 30 years of experience in sectors that include financial services, technology, insurance, and healthcare. He currently serves as CEO at Bay Advisors LLC. Fasano has held senior executive positions at American International Group and Kaiser Permanente.

"I'm excited to join the board of directors at Splice Machine, at a moment of unprecedented technological advancement," Fasano said. "What were once innovative concepts, like AI, machine learning and big data management, are now prerequisites of conducting business. Splice Machine is in a unique position to help organizations face the challenges of modernization and build an infrastructure that drives growth and innovation."

David Goeckeler

Western Digital tapped David Goeckeler for the role of chief executive officer and a member of the Western Digital board of directors. He succeeds Steve Milligan, who will remain under an advisory role until September 2020. Currently, Goeckeler serves as executive vice president and general manager of Cisco's Networking and Security Business. Goeckeler has been with Cisco for 19 years, and in 2012 he was awarded the Frost and Sullivan's Excellence Award in Engineering Operations.

"The industry is facing an exciting inflection point where customers of every size, vertical and geography are deploying business infrastructure that is software-driven, enabled by data and powered by the cloud. This megatrend has only just now reached an initial stage of adoption and will drive a massive wave of new opportunity," Goeckeler said. "In this IT landscape, the explosive growth of connected devices will continue fueling an ever-increasing demand for access to data. With large-scale hard disk drive and semiconductor memory franchises, Western Digital is strongly positioned to capitalize on this emerging opportunity and push the boundaries of both software and physical hardware innovation within an extremely important layer of the technology stack."

David Nagle

Pliops announced that David Nagle joined its advisory board. Nagle is considered an influencer in the creation of exabyte-scale databases and storage solutions for the hyperscale industry. He has held senior positions at Facebook, Google, and Panasas. Nagle also holds an assistant professor position at Carnegie Mellon University. As an advisor, Nagle will lead the company's vision for the development of cloud architecture and promote collaboration with other technology developers.

"As data and compute demand increases, a new way of scaling is needed," Nagle said. "Pliops' novel architecture creates the closest possible connection between application and flash storage, eliminating decades of accumulated legacy application, file system and storage layers and the associated inefficiencies. I am excited to work with Pliops to drive the next generation of accelerated datacenters."

Dean Neese

Kinetica tapped Dean Neese for the role fo chief financial officer (CFO). Neese is responsible for overseeing Kinetica's economic activities while driving vital initiatives for growth under this new role. Neese's 30-year career includes executing over 30 acquisitions, joint ventures, divestitures, and IPOs across the globe. He's also taken leadership roles in two Series E investment rounds. Before Kinetica, Neese held the position of CFO at Qubole and Shape Security. He also was the senior vice president of Strategy and Corporate Development at DocuSign.

"Data is the business world's most valuable asset, and Kinetica can help transform the world's largest organizations into data-driven companies," Neese said. "I'm excited to join a blue chip executive team at a rapidly growing company in an explosive and exciting industry, and look forward to building the next true category disruptor."

Naveen Rao

Intel's vice president and general manager of its AI Platforms Group, Naveen Rao, announced he is leaving the company. Rao will be replaced by Gail Signer, who was with the company for 36 years running the Inference Products Group under Rao. Rao and the AI Platforms Group were responsible for artificial intelligence product development and strategy. His group was also responsible for deploying hardware architectures built to advance deep learning in the data center and at the edge.

"It has been a remarkable experience building a new brand within Intel and sharpening the focus around AI at the company! I wish all of my colleagues well as the field of AI matures," Rao said in a tweet.

David Raun

One Stop Systems, Inc. tapped David Raun for the role of interim president and CEO. He is succeeding Steve Cooper, who will continue as a member of the board of the directors. He has held several senior management roles over the past 24 years, including serving on the OSS board since 2016 and the OSS audit committee since 2018.

Before OSS, he served as president and COO at ASSIA. He holds a B.S. in computer and electrical engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Raun will serve in an interim capacity until the board selects a new president and CEO.

Barry Russell

Qumulo appointed Barry Russell as senior vice president (SVP) and general manager (GM) of cloud. As SVP and GM, Russell will spearhead Qumulo's cloud strategy across business development, alliances, and market execution. Before Qumulo, Russell led cloud field sales, solution architecture and the overall alliance strategy at F5. He is credited with growing the company's cloud software revenue by over 90 percent within his first year. He also executed a global strategic collaboration agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

"Qumulo is a perfect fit for uniting my passion for disruptive technologies with customer-obsessed solutions," Russell said. "Qumulo is enabling enterprise customers around the world to digitally transform and create impactful, data-driven outcomes. From producing animated films to crucial health research, Qumulo's innovative approach is disrupting old-guard storage technologies that don't run natively in the cloud, failing to meet the needs of distributed workloads or the large volumes of data used by cloud-based applications. I am super excited to join the Qumulo team and to help customers turn data into business outcomes."

Gilma Saravia

Altair tapped Gilma Saravia for the role of chief people officer. Under this new role, Saravia will oversee all aspects of Altair's HR functions globally and will support strategic company initiatives to ensure Altair's goal to continue to cultivate a culture that attracts the best talent.

"I am energized and honored to help shape the future of Altair," Saravia said. "What I admire most about Altair is its outstanding culture and the leadership team's commitment to its people. Those two essential elements create a culture of innovation that delivers ground-breaking technologies for our customers."

Dan Wright

DataRobot tapped Dan Wright for the role of president and chief operating officer. Wright comes from AppDynamics, where he held the position of CEO as well. He is credited with helping AppDynamics increase its revenue and establish itself as an APM vendor.

"With its combination of a large and rapidly-growing market, cutting-edge technology, a visionary founder with a passionate team, and support from top investors, DataRobot is uniquely positioned to lead the AI revolution," Wright said. "Jeremy and the rest of the team are laser-focused on maximizing their positive impact on customers, employees, communities, and the world. I am honored to join them on that mission and excited to build on the tremendous foundation they have put in place to create an iconic company."

Atos Group Management Committee

Atos announced the new members of the Group Management Committee comprised of the company's executive leadership team. The committee aims to execute the group's strategy initiated in 2020, which focuses on reshaping its portfolio offerings, reinforce its market approach, and to set up an industry-led organization to ensure value is delivered to customers and stakeholders alike.

Members include: CEO Eli Girard; Eric Grall, who leads the manufacturing segment and is chief operating officer; and Adrian Gregory, who leads the financial services and insurance and is also head of Atos|Syntel. Jean Phillippe Poirault, head of public sector and defense as well as big data and cybersecurity, is also part of the committee. To see the full committee list, click here.


Do you know someone that should be included in next month's list? If so, send us an email at [email protected]. We look forward to hearing from you.

 

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