Pliops Adds Henri Richard to Advisory Board
SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 15, 2020 -- In a move that greatly enhances the company as it enters its next phase, technology innovator Pliops today announced that Henri Richard has joined its advisory board. A charismatic leader with a track record of achieving results, Richard brings with him decades of experience leading teams and growing revenue for prominent storage and semiconductor companies. Most recently, Richard served as executive vice president of worldwide field and customer operations at NetApp, where he managed customer, partner and ecosystem relationships.
In his role as an advisor to Pliops, Richard will focus on expanding engagement with customers, partners, analysts and executive leadership among top cloud, server, storage and software companies. Having recently announced that its Storage Processor has been successfully tested and evaluated by more than 10 tier-one cloud and enterprise companies, Pliops is currently in an expansion phase that encompasses both its team and industry reach.
“Pliops accelerators are to storage efficiency what GPUs are to AI and ML,” said Richard. “With this groundbreaking technology, Pliops is tackling one of the greatest challenges the storage industry faces today – scalability of performance in a world of increasingly large datasets. I look forward to helping them find new opportunities for growth.”
Pliops is fundamentally simplifying data storage, management and analysis by removing bottlenecks and inefficiencies accumulated over decades. The Pliops Storage Processor enables cloud and enterprise customers to access data up to 1,000 times faster, using just a fraction of traditional computational load and power. By achieving the holy grail of high, consistent performance with extremely low infrastructure cost, Pliops enables data intensive technology, databases, storage systems, analytics and machine learning platforms to scale to reach their full potential. With this new class of processor, Pliops solves challenges inherent in many critical industry trends such as explosive data growth, compute-storage disaggregation, software-defined storage, DPU integration and the decline of Moore’s Law.
Over the past 40 years, Richard has held various senior management positions with leading IT companies, including serving as vice president of EMEA strategic accounts for Seagate Technology. After moving to the U.S. in the late ‘90s, Richard acted as vice president, sales and support worldwide distribution and e-business for IBM Technology Group, and was a member of IBM's top 300 executives group. Richard also served as senior vice president, chief sales and marketing officer for Freescale Semiconductor, a world leader in the embedded semiconductor industry, and led worldwide OEM sales at SanDisk Corporation until the sale of the company to Western Digital. Richard's academic credentials include a master’s program in sciences and physics from the University Paris Jussieu, and he is an accomplished sports car racing driver.
“I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Henri in a professional capacity for years,” noted Steve Fingerhut, president and chief business officer for Pliops. “Having Henri’s active support, as well as his vote of confidence, by joining our advisory board is extremely exciting. As we shift gears to expand to address surging customer demand, we couldn’t ask for a more qualified person to help drive us forward.”
Pliops’ Storage Processors are now sampling to select customers, with general availability on track for later this year. Please visit www.pliops.com for more information.
About Pliops
Founded in 2017, Pliops is a technology innovator focused on making data centers run faster and more efficiently. Its technology addresses skyrocketing data volumes and solves the slowing compute performance problem. The company's Storage Processor is built upon a groundbreaking patent-pending approach that accelerates storage functions. Focused on creating the next wave of the accelerated data center, the Pliops Storage Processor enables cloud and enterprise customers to access data up to 100 times faster – using just a fraction of the computational load and power consumption. With Pliops technology, databases, analytics and other data-intensive applications are able to reach their full potential. Investors include Softbank Ventures Asia, Intel Capital, Western Digital, NVIDIA, and Xilinx.
Source: Pliops
