Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Tuesday, March 19, 2024

AI Career Notes: July 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:


Dan Fairfax

StorCentric appointed Dan Fairfax to its board of advisors. Fairfax has held executive roles at Brocade Communications Systems. He also serves on the board of directors at Super Micro Computer, Saama Technologies, and Energous.

"I am honored to have been invited to join StorCentric's Board of Advisors," said Fairfax. "StorCentric has garnered the attention of the storage industry in a very short period of time with a rapid pace of four acquisitions in the past two years and is seen as a trusted storage solutions provider with its reputable Drobo, Nexsan, Retrospect, and Vexata brands. StorCentric provides a broad set of data management solutions with world-class products, IP, and professional expertise focused on helping customers scale their businesses, and I am excited to be part of this journey."

Virginia Gambale

Nutanix announced the appointment of Virginia Gambale, a managing partner of Azimuth Partners LLC, to its board of directors. Gambale currently serves on the JetBlue, First Derivatives, Regis Corporation, and Virtu Financial boards, and has previously served on the Motive, Piper Jaffray, Workbrain, Synchronoss Technologies, and IQ Financial boards.

"Nutanix is a leader with an enormous amount of potential and a mission to make hybrid and multi-cloud easy. I've worked with Nutanix over the last few years and have observed that Dheeraj and the leadership team have always been willing to disrupt themselves to provide better solutions for their customers," said Gambale. "I look forward to working with Nutanix as they continue to leverage their superior technology to help make IT simple and affordable through disruptive technology."

Ken Grohe

WekaIO appointed Ken Grohe as president and chief revenue officer. He will be responsible for the organization's go-to-market strategy and reports to CEO and Co-Founder Liran Zvibel. Grohe has served leadership positions at Samsung's Stellus Technologies, SignNow, Virident, and Dell EMC.

"I have watched Weka's incredible growth since its launch from stealth in 2017, and I have a great appreciation for the work of the team to date," Grohe said. "Time and time again, Weka has proven they are delivering a highly differentiated and disruptive storage technology—with an epic performance at any scale for customers with data-intensive workloads. Therefore, I am grateful to join the leadership team and to have the opportunity to leverage my experience and proven success in this industry to help Weka grow exponentially and soar to new heights."

Gajen Kandiah

Gajen Kandiah joins Hitachi Vantara as the new chief executive officer. Kandiah replaces CEO and Chairman of the Board Toshiaki Tokunaga, who will transition all his responsibilities to Kandiah and will remain as chairman after October 2020. Kandiah spent 15 years at Cognizant, helping the company grown from $368 million to over $16 billion in annual revenues.

"Hitachi is a market leader at the intersection of innovative industrial solutions and IT services, and it is a brand trusted worldwide to deliver business, environmental and social benefits," said Kandiah. "These attributes give Hitachi Vantara an incredible set of advantages that I believe the company and its cloud and strategic go-to-market partners are only just beginning to realize. The opportunity to lead Hitachi Vantara is a thrilling one. I am confident that if we align our broad portfolio of data storage, analytics, industry-specific solutions and IT services behind a singular vision to delight our clients, we will become a true digital leader."

J Michel Metz

Dr. J Michel Metz was selected to serve as interim chair on the Storage Networking Industry Association board of directors. Metz replaces David Dale, who has been with SNIA for seven years and is also retiring from NetApp. Metz has served on the board of directors since 2013. He works at Rockport Networks as field CTO. Metz also serves on the SNIA Computational Storage Technical Working Group and the Networking Storage Forum.

“The SNIA organization is stronger than ever,” said Metz, “and this is due in no small part to David Dale’s excellent leadership. I feel honored and privileged to accept the responsibility of carrying the banner forward. This is a very exciting time for SNIA as we explore new technology standards for the emerging storage and memory technologies to help transform the industry.”

George Mogannam

SnapLogic appointed George Mogannam as chief revenue officer. Mogannam's responsibilities include: managing the company's field organization, overseeing sales, sales engineering, professional services, customer success, and partnerships. Mogannam has held leadership positions at BlueJeans Network, Actiance, Avid Technology, Crossbeam Systems, and IBM.

"This is an exciting time to be joining SnapLogic," said Mogannam. "The company brings its proven technology leadership, strategic partnerships, and track record of customer success to the fast-growing enterprise automation market. All the pieces are in place, and I look forward to working with the team to get SnapLogic's leading platform into the hands of more and more customers around the world."

Robert O'Donovan

Robert O'Donovan joined Cohesity as chief financial officer. O'Donovan will be responsible for the company's financial strategy. Prior to Cohesity, he held the role of CFO at DataStax and Pivotal Software (acquired by VMware).

"The scale and growth Cohesity has achieved is testament to the tremendous value that its data management innovations bring to organizations, and my role is to ensure the company has the best framework to continue transforming the industry," said O'Donovan. "I'm honored to join this team of talented executives as we continue on a course of rapid and sustainable growth."

Mike Palmer

Mike Palmer joins Sigma Computing as chief executive officer. Palmer brings over 20 years of experience serving as CMO, CPO, and GM. At Druva, he held the role of CPO and was responsible for defining a lower cost revenue acquisition model, increased net retention, and reimagined processes and technology.

"Sigma is an incredibly exciting company to be joining right now as organizations around the world are transforming their data strategies, stacks, and processes to leverage new cloud technologies, like cloud data warehouses," said Palmer. "I believe that data, analytics, and business intelligence should be accessible to everyone, which is what drew me to Sigma - its the only company that is helping organizations truly maximize the value of their data by providing a tool that is both powerful enough for the data team yet easy for anyone to use. I share Rob and Jason's vision of a world where everyone can do meaningful analyses on real-time data to fuel innovation and accelerate success."

Hasmukh Ranjan

Xilinx announced the addition of Hasmukh Ranjan under the role of chief information officer. He will be responsible for managing the company's information technology group driving the IT strategy, systems, and processes.

Before Xilinx, Hasmukh built a 20-year career at Synopsys, serving as CIO and corporate vice president leading the company's IT department. He was awarded a "Top 500" supercomputing rank. Other notable accomplishments by Hasmukh include implementing the use of private cloud for engineering and a distributed processing library.

David Raun

One Stop Systems announced the appointment of David Raun as its new president and CEO. Since February 2020, Raun has served as interim CEO. He has also served on OSS's board since 2016. Ruan has served as an audit committee chair and a member of the nominating committee. Before OSS, He was president and COO of ASSIA.

"I am excited to have this opportunity and look forward to continuing to work closely with our management team, talented employees and recently expanded board of directors," said Raun. "While there is still much to do, over the last few months, we've made strong progress with our reorganization, expense reductions, and strengthening our balance sheet with additional working capital. Recent project wins, new orders, and industry-leading product launches highlight the tremendous opportunities ahead. Moving forward, we will continue to focus on increasing our market position while driving expanded margins, operational efficiencies, and shareholder value."

Chris Riley

Automation Anywhere tapped Chris Riley as its chief revenue officer. He will manage global sales for the company that includes serving customers and managing an ecosystem of 1,900 partners. He comes from Dell Technologie Select, where he held the role of president of global sales. Before Dell, Riley was vice president and general manager for HP's storage portfolio.

"I am excited to join Automation Anywhere to help extend the company's market-leading position in the RPA space," said Riley. "Their customer-centric focus, strong people culture and innovation come at a time when companies globally are looking to increase the productivity of their workforce, digitally transform their business and become more resilient."

Umesh Vazirani, David Wineland, Margaret Williams, and Kenneth Brown

IonQ announced the additions of Umesh Vazirani, David Wineland, Margaret (Peg) Williams, and Kenneth Brown to its advisory team. Vazirani is a Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the co-director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center.

David Wineland is a Nobel Laureate and Philip H. Knight Distinguished Research Chair at the University of Oregon. Williams is the former senior vice president of Research and Development at Cray Inc. Lastly, Brown is an associate professor at Duke University within the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.


To read last month’s edition of Career Notes, 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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