AI Career Notes: February 2021 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:
Jill Altruda
AI-powered legal spend management and matter management platform provider Brightflag welcomed Jill Altruda as its vice president of marketing. Altruda will be responsible for the company’s marketing strategy, customer acquisition and customer-facing communications.
“I am delighted to be joining such an innovative company with a strong, collaborative culture,” said Altruda. “I look forward to building upon Brightflag’s success in helping corporate legal professionals better manage their engagement and spend with outside counsel using AI software that enables more informed decisions.”
Tim Banks, Ben Smith, and Michael Zimmerman
Green Revolution Cooling, providers of single-phase immersion cooling for data centers, welcomed Tim Banks as its director of strategic alliances. Banks will be responsible for identifying and supporting partnership opportunities, creating strategy and executing the plan for expanding GRC’s relationships with key technology partners.
Ben Smith and Michael Zimmerman also joined GRC as its chief product officer and vice president of operations, respectively. As CPO, Smith will be responsible for developing and launching new products while managing the lifecycle of existing GRC’s immersion cooling offerings. As VP of operations, Zimmerman will be responsible for the worldwide manufacturing of GRC products, quality and supply chain.
Joan Palmiter Bajorek
Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek joined conversational AI start-up NLX as its head of user research. Bajorek will oversee the acceleration of the company’s voice compass product. Bajorek is a finalist for the “Voice AI Pioneer of the Year” 2020 award, an Alexa Champion and is ranked the #4 influencer by Voicebot.ai in 2020.
“I was looking for a great team and with products that push the tech forward,” Bajorek said. “For me, it’s crucial to be with a team that values both my technical chops and strategic perspective on Voice AI. Being a champion of the future of multimodal voice-enabled tech for years, it is a fantastic fit to join such a fast-moving, early-stage start-up as NLX, signing many clients and rapidly iterating multimodal experiences.”
EVOTEK, a data center and cloud solutions provider, appointed James Caswell as its director of high performance computing. Caswell will be leading a new team that will focus on the next generation of data center technology and on growing the market. He comes from Dell EMC, where he held the role of enterprise district manager of its data protection division.
“Computing needs are at an all-time high while customers balance their own private computing needs with applications running in the public cloud,” said Caswell. “Disaster recovery, ransomware and a whole new set of opportunities are at the forefront of customer discussions. EVOTEK has been on an impressive hyper-growth trajectory since its 2014 inception. I’m excited to be joining the team to build out this growing business.”
Jonathan Chadwick and Elena Donio
Databricks appointed Jonathan Chadwick and Elena Donio to its board of directors. Chadwick serves as a board member and advisor to various private and public companies, including Zoom, Stripe, Elastic and ServiceNow. He has served as the executive vice president, chief operating officer and chief financial officer of VMware and CFO at Skype.
Formerly president at Concur, Donio currently serves on the board of directors at Twilio. She has also served on the board of directors at PayScale before its acquisition in 2019. Donio’s most recent position was serving as chief executive officer of Axiom.
Ken Denman
Ken Denman was elected to the VMware board of directors. Denman currently serves on the board of directors of Costco Wholesale, LendingClub and Motorola Solutions, where he is the lead independent director and chair of the nominating and governance committees. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business and serves on the boards of the Foster School and the University of Washington Foundation.
“I am thrilled with the appointment to the VMware board,” said Denman. “VMware is a proven market leader that is continuing to evolve and is committed to helping its customers transform in these unprecedented times. I am pleased to join the team and contribute.”
Betsy Doughty and Rich Gadomski
The Active Archive Alliance elected Betsy Doughty, vice president of corporate marketing at Spectra Logic, and Rich Gadomski, head of tape evangelism at FUJIFILM Recording Media U.S.A., as its co-chairpersons of the board of directors.
“Active archives are more relevant today than when we founded the Alliance a decade ago as users place increasing value on unstructured data for creating time to market advantage, research and development and business intelligence,” said Doughty. “We are also eager to continue the Active Archive Alliance’s momentum and drive to educate end-users and facilitate the implementation of active archive solutions to solve today’s data growth challenges.”
Rick Franke, Helen Protopapas, and Tom Whaley
VAST Data, a storage solutions provider, appointed Rick Franke as its vice president of global customer success, services and support; Helen Protopapas as its VP of finance; and Tom Whaley as its VP of sales. Franke will be responsible for growing VAST’s customer experience. He comes from VMware, where he held the role VP of global customer services and support.
Protopapas will be responsible for the company’s financial operations. Protopapas comes from the Ringier Group, where she served as divisional CFO. As VP of Sales, Whaley will oversee VAST’s initiatives in customer adoption. Whaley has more than 20 years of experience focusing on Fortune 50 customers.
Raj Gandhi
Netlist, Inc., provider of high-performance SSDs and modular memory subsystems, announced the addition of Raj Gandhi as its vice president of the ASIC engineering unit within the company’s research and development team.
Gandhi has more than 30 years of experience developing integrated circuits. He comes from Marvell, where he served as the VP of IC engineering. He also served as principal engineering and VP of the IC engineering division at QLogic Corp. Gandhi holds an MS in computer and systems engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Intel appointed Pat Gelsinger as its chief executive officer. Gelsinger has over 40 years of experience serving in technology and leadership roles, most recently serving as CEO of VMware. He also spent 30 years at Intel, becoming the company’s first chief technology officer and driving the development of technologies such as USB and Wi-Fi. He will also join Intel’s board of directors upon assuming the CEO role on Feb. 15, 2021.
“I am thrilled to rejoin and lead Intel forward at this important time for the company, our industry and our nation,” said Gelsinger. “Having begun my career at Intel and learned at the feet of Grove, Noyce and Moore, it’s my privilege and honor to return in this leadership capacity. I have tremendous regard for the company’s rich history and powerful technologies that have created the world’s digital infrastructure. I believe Intel has significant potential to continue to reshape the future of technology and look forward to working with the incredibly talented global Intel team to accelerate innovation and create value for our customers and shareholders.”
Paul Jacobs and Matt Grob
EdgeQ Inc, a 5G systems-on-a-chip company, appointed Dr. Paul Jacobs and Matt Grob to its advisory board. Jacobs served as the chief executive officer and executive chairman of Qualcomm. Grob also comes from Qualcomm, where he spent over 20 years and served as chief technology officer and executive vice president of technology.
“The advent of 5G comes with changes in the architecture of wireless networks and an exciting expansion in the types of applications and services,” said Jacobs. “This inflection point creates the opportunity to build and leverage an open ecosystem based on new platforms and a greater diversity of participants. EdgeQ's solution, based on the open design of RISC-V processors, enables innovation deeper in the wireless technology stack. This will allow both general performance improvements as well as the design of wireless systems that are tailored to specific use cases. I look forward to working with new entrants and pioneers, such as EdgeQ, to capitalize on wireless innovations and market forces that will bring to life the expected benefits of 5G and beyond."
David Mettler
CPG, a data center service provider, welcomed David Mettler as its chief revenue officer. Mettler will be responsible for growing CPG’s revenue across North America. Mettler comes from Iron Mountain Data Centers, where he helped the company grow its global colocation services.
“Over the last two decades, CPG has established itself as unique in its ability to support customers at every stage of the data center lifecycle, with capabilities spanning the full range required by today’s leading companies,” Mettler said. “Leveraging my two decades in the industry, I look forward to working with CPG’s executive and sales team to accelerate the company’s growth trajectory across all lines of business.”
Brian McCarthy
Brian McCarthy joined Rubrik, a cloud data management company, as its chief revenue officer. McCarthy will oversee Rubrik’s worldwide go-to-market strategy and continue to scale the company in the enterprise. He comes from ThoughtSpot, where he held the role of CRO.
“I’ve been closely watching Rubrik and have admired the company and its incredible growth,” said McCarthy. “Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to lead sales and market strategy for a number of high growth companies, and I see an incredible opportunity to further scale Rubrik to meet the escalating global customer demand."
Shay Mowlem
Illumio, a provider of end-to-end zero trust segmentation solutions, appointed Shay Mowlem as its chief marketing officer. Mowlem has more than 25 years of marketing leadership experience. Most recently he was the senior vice president of product and strategy for Rubrik.
“Illumio is a pioneer and leader in zero trust and I am thrilled to be joining the team that has helped so many companies achieve this level of comprehensive protection,” said Mowlem. “I am excited to support the company in strengthening cybersecurity safeguards and making devastating breaches a thing of the past.”
Alexander Picchietti
Verne Global, a provider of data center solutions for high performance computing, appointed Alexander Picchietti to the newly created role of senior director, strategic alliances. Picchietti will be responsible for developing relationships with key partners and growing the ecosystem of service providers and vendors required to meet the needs of global organizations locating their compute-intensive workloads in Iceland.
“Verne Global has a strong history of partnering with industry-leading companies in order to offer its customers the best technology that’s backed-up with the best service, all within a highly specialized and optimized data center environment,” said Picchietti. “I’m excited to be joining the team to grow this ecosystem of companies and services and ultimately make Iceland the go-to destination for global HPC projects.”
IBM appointed Martin Schroeter as is the chief executive officer of NewCo, which is the upcoming independent company that will be created after it separates from IBM’s Managed Infrastructure Services business. NewCo will focus on the management and modernization of IT infrastructure in industrries around the world. Schroeter previously served as IBM’s senior vice president of the global markets division.
“NewCo is a trusted partner to the world’s most global enterprises with a team that has the best skills and experience in the industry,” Schroeter said. “I look forward to developing a diverse ecosystem of partnerships and alliances, to continuing a deep relationship with IBM, and to the creation of market-leading capabilities.”
Thirty-three-year Intel veteran Sunil Shenoy returned to the company as its senior vice president and general manager of the design engineering group. Shenoy, who departed in 2014, will be responsible for managing the design, development, validation and manufacturing of intellectual properties and system-on-chips for client and data center applications.
Shenoy was senior vice president and general manager of RISC-V at SiFive, an Intel Capital portfolio company working to commercialize the RISC-V open architecture. At Intel, Shenoy was a corporate vice president in charge of Intel’s Platform Engineering Group, responsible for microprocessor and SoC design across Intel’s product groups. He also led Intel’s Visual and Parallel Computing Group and server and PC silicon development R&D and engineering, among other responsibilities.
Mike Staiger
Lacework, a security platform provider for the cloud, appointed Mike Staiger as its chief financial officer. Staiger comes from SaaS-based network intelligence platform provider ThousandEyes, where he held the role of CFO. He has also held leadership roles at Guavus, Tabula, and Copper Mountain Networks.
“This is an exciting time to join Lacework after a significant growth round and when we’re on the path to dominating the market for cloud security,” said Staiger. “I’m looking forward to joining the impressive leadership team at such an exciting time in Lacework’s growth.”
Bonita Stewart
Bonita Stewart joined PagerDuty, Inc.’s board of directors. Stewart has more than 20 years of experience leading multi-billion dollar operations, accelerating digital technology adoption and driving digital transformation at scale. She currently serves as vice president of global partnerships at Google.
“PagerDuty leads the way in making life better for teams tasked with managing complex digital operations in real-time. The company’s focus on customer devotion, coupled with its progressive approach to building a balancing team at all levels aligns with my goal of moving the tech industry towards inclusion to drive better business outcomes,” said Stewart. “I believe we’re at the beginning of a new era in tech, and I look forward to joining the team as PagerDuty continues to lead by example.”
Dan Wilson
WorldQuant Predictive, a quantitative AI-based predictions solutions provider, appointed Dan Wilson as its head of sales. Wilson will be responsible for growing WQP's proprietary prediction technology revenue. Wilson comes from Element AI, where he held the role of head of sales of the North America region.
"The power of prediction to drive exponential business value for the world's greatest companies is significant and compelling," said Wilson. "I strongly believe that WorldQuant Predictive has the right, unique combination of people, experience, platform, and process to help our clients confidently capture the value of prediction. I look forward to working with our partners, and helping our clients differentiate their business, create new business models and drive exponential value from predictions."
AMD Leadership Promotions
AMD promoted Martin Ashton, Mark Fuselier, Darren Grasby, Devinder Kumar, and Sam Naffziger (photo, left to right) to senior leadership positions. Ashton now holds the role of senior vice president of Graphics Architecture and Radeon Technologies Group Intellectual Property. Fuselier is the senior VP of Technology and Product Engineering. Grasby holds the roles of executive VP and chief sales officer. He is responsible for driving the adoption of AMD products and customer experience. Kumar is now the executive VP and chief financial officer. He is now responsible for the company’s financial profile. Naffziger is the senior VP, corporate fellow, and product technology architect with continued responsibility for maximizing the competitiveness, efficiency and cost of next-generation AMD solutions.
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.
