AI Career Notes: May 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:
Roger Blanchette and Stephen Rioux
Element AI announced the addition of Roger Blanchette and Stephen Rioux under the roles of chief financial officer and chief revenue office, respectively. Blanchette and Rioux will work with the executive team to help the company emphasize financial collaborations between business units.
As CFO, Blanchette is responsible for leading Element AI’s financial activities. Before Element AI, Blanchette was the CFO of Skyword. As CRO, Rioux will establish strategic alignment for all revenue-related functions. Before joining Element AI, Rioux held the role of global CRO at JW Player. He was also the vice president of Adobe’s North America Strategic Verticals, M&E, FSI, and Retail.
Qumulo appointed Craig Bumpus to the newly created role of chief revenue officer. Bumpus will oversee the fast-tracking of Qumulo’s revenue growth, drive adoption of Qumulo’s solutions, and expand to service customers in the Americas, EMEA, and Asia. Before Qumulo, he was CRO at UiPath and is credited with growing the annual recurring revenue by an 812-percent increase during a two-year period.
“Qumulo’s cloud and file software are unparalleled in its ability to support a wide variety of applications, to scale massively and to provide fast, data-driven insights to accelerate innovation and business outcomes,” Bumpus said. “I see tremendous opportunity to grow and expand the business as organizations around the world look to leverage file services in the cloud and the data center.”
Mindtech Global Limited announced the addition of Justin Bronder as for the role of VP-AI Strategy. Justin’s responsibilities include Mindtech’s research program, which focuses on aspects of using both synthetic and real data for training. Bronder comes from Microsoft, where he led a team of computer scientists that developed machine learning solutions using AI. Before Microsoft, he was a certified series 65 investment advisor at Resnick Investments.
In addition, at Cardinal Optimization, Bronder participated in several real-world projects involving the behavioral understanding of various environments and analyzing their visual data to solve their problems.
Thomas Cornely joins Nutanix as senior vice president of Product Portfolio Management. As VP, Cornely is responsible for producing a seamless portfolio. Cornely has a 20-year professional career holding leadership positions at Rubrik as vice president of Product Management, and at Nexenta Systems as chief product officer. He’s also held leadership roles at Greenplum, Violin Memory, and Symantec.
“I am delighted to join a company with such a rich portfolio and strong commitment to their customers,” Cornely said. “Nutanix’s dedication and unrelenting focus on the customer experience is proven in their achievement of averaging an NPS score of 90 over the past six years, and I am excited to contribute to a company with such passionate and innovative leaders. I look forward to embarking on this new journey as we continue to make infrastructure invisible - anywhere.”
Nutanix announced the promotions of Dave Gwyn and Keith Moran. Gwyn was promoted to the newly created position of worldwide sales chief operating officer, while Moran was promoted to senior vice president of sales of the Americas. Moran and Gwyn will be responsible for helping to drive the company’s go-to-market sales and operations, and at the same time, transition the company to a subscription business model.
Moran started at Nutantix about six years ago as a regional sales director. He has over a 20-year career in technology sales and holds a B.A. from College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. Gwyn started at Nutnatux as director of federal sales over eight years ago. He was promoted to worldwide sales chief operating officer from his most recent position as senior VP of sales in the U.S. West, East, Public Sector, and Latin America. He started his sales career at companies such as Sybase, BEA, and VMware.
Xilinx, Inc. appointed Brice Hill to the position of executive vice president and chief financial officer. Under these new roles, Hill will oversee all aspects of the financial management of the company. He brings over 30 years of experience in finance. He comes from a 25-year career at Intel, where he held the role of CFO and COO within the Technology, Systems and Core Engineering Group, where he managed the financial aspects of the company’s manufacturing, research and development, and product engineering operations.
“Xilinx has impressed me with its leadership team, vision, long-term growth strategy, and broad portfolio of differentiated technologies in adaptive computing, from the cloud, to edge, to endpoint devices,” Hill said. “I can’t imagine a more exciting time to join Xilinx. I look forward to the opportunities ahead.”
Mike Houghton joins Cohesity as vice president of the Americas channels. Houghton has a 30-year career in technology and channel experience. His responsibilities include empowering partners to increase revenues and bringing value-added solutions and services to their customers through Cohesity’s solutions. He will also expand Cohesity’s portfolio in the Americas market.
“Cohesity’s breakthrough data management platform uniquely solves business challenges customers face today in a way that legacy products simply fail to address. I’m very excited to reach more of these organizations in the Americas through our exceptional global channel ecosystem,” Houghton said. “I’m honored to work with the incredibly talented team at Cohesity, and engage in a market that is rapidly embracing new, innovative approaches to data management.”
John Josephakis
John Josephakis joins NVIDIA as the company’s global vice president of sales and business development for the HPC/Supercomting division. He comes from Cray (acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise), where he was VP of worldwide sales. Prior to joining Cray in 2013, he spent over 10 years at DataDirect Networks holding several positions.
“After spending over 20 years in the industry, I am extremely excited to join NVIDIA at this time,” Josephakis stated on a LinkedIn post. “With huge investments in R&D, NVIDIA has been a leader in the technology transformation we are witnessing. I am confident that with our technology, NVIDIA will make a big difference in helping solve some of the grand challenges our world is facing, and I am thrilled to be part of that.”
Puppet tapped Abby Kearns for the role of chief technology officer. Kearns has 20 years of experience in the cloud computing and open source industries. She’s held leadership positions at Cloud Foundry Foundation, Pivotal Software, and Verizon. As CTO, Kearns will nurture and advance the company’s portfolio.
“Puppet is a pioneer of the DevOps movement, ushered in the concept of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and drives efficiency through infrastructure automation for 80 percent of the Fortune 5000. I couldn’t be more excited to join such an amazing team and to further the potential we have in a market that is changing quickly,” Kearns said. “As Puppet’s CTO, I look forward to working with leading enterprises to effectively shift how they are managing and scaling their infrastructure in an increasingly hybrid world; something never more important than now with COVID-19 fundamentally changing how we need to work and run our operations.”
Tachyum Inc. promoted Elena Zokhidova to vice president of finance from senior director. Zokhidova joined Tachyum in June 2019 and is credited with boosting the company’s revenue. She is credited with the successful closing of Tachyum’s series A funding round and the completion of several corporate government transactions.
Before Tachyum, Zokhidova served as the financial business controller of NVIDIA’s GeForce business unit. Prior, Zokhidova was the FBC at AMD. She is a graduate of the Tashkent Financial Institute in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
IBM recognized 35 business leaders from 12 countries on its annual list of Women Leaders in AI. IBM selected these exceptional women because they effectively demonstrated how AI can help enterprises. The annual recognition also creates a network for each of these leaders to discover new approaches for applying AI in their business. For the full list, click here.
"Artificial intelligence will be at the center of business transformation over the next decade, and for us to mitigate bias moving forward, we need women and diverse teams at the forefront of AI. That's why we are proud to share the stories of 35 remarkable women who are driving progressive use of AI using Watson," said Michelle Peluso, IBM's senior vice president for Digital Sales and chief marketing officer. "Their accomplishments are an inspiration to all of us."
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.
