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

AI Career Notes: October 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:


Beena Ammanath

Beena Ammanath, executive director of the Deloitte AI Institute, joined the board of trustees at AnitaB.org, the global nonprofit company focused on intersectional gender and pay parity in tech. Ammanath has held leadership positions at HPE, GE, Thomson Reuters, British Telecom and Bank of America and is the founder of the nonprofit organization Humans For AI. 

“I’m honored to join the distinguished executives and leaders on the AnitaB.org Board of Trustees,” said Ammanath. “Throughout my career, I have been passionate about supporting the development of women leaders in the field of technology and I look forward to working with my fellow board members to advance the important work of AnitaB.org.”

Danial Beer

StorMagic, a  storage and security products provider, appointed Danial Beer as its chief executive officer. Beer brings more than 25 years of senior management experience in the global software industry. Beer previously held positions as CEO of GFI Software, COO of YOUI Labs Inc., and executive director of both the performance management and M&A divisions of IBM.

“StorMagic solves a growing market problem for edge environments, with unique, purpose-built solutions validated by an established customer base,” said Beer. “My goal as CEO is to take these existing ingredients and work with the talented StorMagic team to apply new go-to-market strategies and operational efficiencies to enable the company to accelerate growth. I’m excited to join the StorMagic family and help the team find new ways to solve customer problems at the edge and beyond.”

James Cash, Mark Hawkins, Amit Sinha, and Sigal Zarmi

DataRobot appointed James Cash, Mark Hawkins, Amit Sinha, and Sigal Zarmi to its board of directors. James Cash has served on the boards at Wal-Mart, General Electric, Chubb and Microsoft. Cash also served as an advisory council member of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and as a trustee for Massachusetts General Hospital and Partners Healthcare. 

Mark Hawkins, president and chief financial officer of Emeritus Advisor for Salesforce, brings more than 35 years of experience in finance to DataRobot, having worked at global software and technology companies including Salesforce, Autodesk, Logitech, Dell and Hewlett-Packard. 

Dr. Amit Sinha, president, chief technology officer and board member at Zscaler, has more than 20 years of technology, strategy and entrepreneurial experience at other businesses including Motorola, AirDefense and Engim. Sinha has a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the inventor of more then 30 U.S. patents.

Sigal Zarmi brings over 30 years of experience in large-scale digital transformation, strategic planning, technology operations, leadership and talent development. She currently serves as a senior advisor at Morgan Stanley and as a non-executive board member at ADT Inc. and Hashicorp.

Dave Casillo

Congruity360, a SaaS data governance provider, appointed Dave Casillo as its chief revenue officer. Casillo brings more than 35 years of experience with a strong focus on SaaS sales. Most recently, he served as the chief revenue officer of Erwin (acquired by Quest Software), a solutions provider in the data governance space.

Casillo also served on management teams for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dolby Laboratories, Adobe Systems, Insight Enterprises, Arrow Electronics and United Technologies. 

Robert Cisar and Marwan Ajam Oghli

Robert Cisar and Marwan Ajam Oghli joined universal processor chip vendor Tachyum as business development managers for the EMEA region. Cisar and Oghli will be responsible for developing international business strategies and helping the company meet the production timeline goals of its universal processor chips.

Cisar has more than 20 years of managerial experience, leading EMEA departments, projects, and businesses with financial responsibility in global corporations. Oghli comes to Tachyum from IBM, where he served multiple managerial positions, including alliances and business development for Lenovo and Cisco.

Paul Codding, Sudhir Menon, and Ram Venkatesh 

Paul Codding was promoted to the executive vice president of product management at Cloudera, the enterprise data cloud company. Codding joined Cloudera from AWS a year ago and has previously held product management roles at Hortonworks. 

Sudhir Menon was promoted to chief product officer of Cloudera. Menon joined Cloudera in 2020 and has held the roles of vice president of engineering and platforms and as corporate VP of hybrid cloud. Before joining Cloudera, he was the founder and president of SnappyData.

Lastly, Ram Venkatesh was promoted to chief technology officer of Cloudera. Venkatesh joined Cloudera three years ago after its merger with Hortonworks. He served as vice president of engineering and then as corporate VP, managing the Cloudera data platform team. 

Lynn Comp

AMD appointed Lynn Comp as corporate vice president of the chip company’s cloud business group. Comp is a 22-year veteran of Intel, most recently having served as the vice president of the data platforms group and general manager of the visual infrastructure division and NPG strategy office.

Comp has held multiple leadership roles at Intel, including serving as senior director of industry and sales enabling for the datacenter communications unit, director of solutions and technologies for product marketing, and as director of strategic software planning for the IoT and communications unit. 

Kevin Delane 

Cohesity, a data management solutions provider, appointed Kevin Delane as its chief revenue officer. Prior to joining Cohesity, Delane was vice president of worldwide sales at Pure Storage, where he was responsible for the company’s global go-to-market strategy. 

“This was an opportunity I simply could not pass up,” said Delane. “The company has amazing leaders, culture, a partner-first mentality, a great international team and a focus on innovation that’s helping customers win the war against ransomware. It’s no wonder the company has recently announced the record-breaking fiscal year 2021 results. I look forward to working with customers and partners globally to help them advance their business and do more with data.”

Cliff Grossner

The Open Compute Project Foundation appointed Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., as its vice president of market intelligence. Grossner has more than 25 years of telecommunications industry experience, including scientific research, market analysis, corporate and product strategy, product management and marketing. 

Grossner will lead its market intelligence function and will be responsible for driving awareness of OCP, training and certification programs and guiding inventors presenting their early-stage company ideas to potential investors. He is also a member of the OCP Future Symposium Program Committee and is active in the OCP Future Technologies Initiative.

David Grain

Dell Technologies appointed David Grain as an independent member of the board of directors. Grain is the founder and chief executive officer of Grain Management, a private equity firm focused on global investments in the media and communications sectors. 

“Dell Technologies is a market leader and innovator with tremendous growth opportunities ahead in areas including edge and telecom,” said Grain. “It’s an honor to be appointed as the company’s next independent board member and I look forward to helping steer the company’s strategy during this exciting time for technology in our lives.”

Thomas Hardjono

iComply Investor Services, a global compliance software provider, appointed Thomas Hardjono to its advisory board. Hardjono is the chief technology officer of Connection Science at MIT and technical director of the MIT Trust::Data Consortium. He previously served as executive director of the MIT Kerberos Consortium. 

“iComply’s degree of implementation is quite extensive, and the dashboard that they have built is terrific," said Hardjono. "iComply has a strong and very clear vision. This is one of these linchpin technologies that the industry desperately needs. The traditional banks, private organizations, and governments need to step up their game and move in this direction. On the horizon, we have central bank digital currencies, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and decentralized finance that need to manage all of the things that iComply can manage.”

Steve Love

Heap, the digital insights platform provider, appointed Steve Love as its chief financial officer. Love brings almost 30 years of financial experience to Heap, including leading the growth strategy at Juniper Square, Dialpad, Mblox, Informatica and E&Y.

“I’m honored to be joining such a stellar executive team, and to help contribute to an organization that’s developing such industry-leading technology,” said Love. “Having had deep experience with other tools in the space, I’ve experienced the pain of code-in tools that capture data only at single, defined event points. Heap’s low-code, user-based platform eliminates these difficulties and Heap’s Illuminate features automatically surface critical customer interactions that teams may not even know about. This combination of automatic data capture and data science that’s built to analyze undefined events is unprecedented in the industry, and gives businesses the power to understand every customer interaction and directly impact their bottom line.”

Angel Lange, Anne McNulty, and Dan Mosera 

Angel Lange joined Agiloft, an agile contract lifecycle management software provider, as its vice president of finance. Lange brings to the company over 20 years of experience in accounting, management, and financial planning and analysis. Most recently, Lange was executive VP of finance at Protegrity USA.

Anne McNulty joined Agiloft as its senior director of artificial intelligence success. McNulty will be responsible for maximizing customers’ return on investment through adopting Agiloft AI. Most recently, she spent five years at Kira Systems, where she built and led the team that trained AI to analyze contracts.

Lastly, Dan Mosera joined Agiloft as its senior vice president of strategic accounts. Most recently, Mosera managed the top 20 strategic accounts for TIBCO Software with revenue in excess of $40 million.

John Markovich

D-Wave Systems Inc., provider of quantum computing systems, software and services, appointed John Markovich as its chief financial officer. Markovich will be responsible for the company’s financial operations and positioning the company for its next phase of growth.

“I’ve worked for decades helping companies with cutting-edge technologies build successful business models and immediately recognized the magnitude of the opportunity at D-Wave, given their leading-edge technology and focus on solving their customers’ highly complex problems,” said Markovich. “As more and more large-scale enterprises invest in quantum computing to solve mission-critical problems and drive bottom-line results, I look forward to playing a role in the next chapter of D-Wave’s growth.”

Barbara Morgan

AHEAD, a provider of digital platform solutions, appointed Barbara Morgan to its board of directors. She recently served as chairman of the board for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of North Florida and currently serves on the Ponte Vedra YMCA board.

“Client centricity is at the core of AHEAD’s business,” said Morgan. “It’s what drew me to this role and it’s what will inspire me as we continue bringing the best solutions and services to the industry.”

Elissa Murphy 

GlobalFoundries appointed Elissa Murphy, vice president of engineering at Google, to its board of directors as an independent director. Before Google, Murphy served as the chief technology officer and executive vice president of the cloud platforms unit at GoDaddy.

Murphy brings more than 25 years of technology leadership experience to GlobalFoundries. Before GoDaddy, she was vice president of engineering at Yahoo!, where she oversaw the Hadoop cluster, a technology essential to the massive-scale computing that forms the basis of big data.

Fidelma Russo

Hewlett Packard Enterprise appointed Fidelma Russo as its chief technology officer. Russo will lead the innovation agenda and technology roadmap for HPE. She will also manage the design and development of the HPE Greenlake edge-to-cloud platform.

“I am thrilled to be joining Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a company with a deep heritage of innovation that is now at another transformational moment in the industry,” said Russo. “I look forward to working with our leadership, engineers, developers, customers, and partners as we focus on delivering solutions that provide a unified as a service experience, from edge to cloud.”

Adam Schader

CoolIT Systems, a provider of scalable liquid cooling technology for desktop and data centers systems, appointed Adam Schader as its chief financial officer. Before joining CoolIT Systems, Schader held the role of CFO at AC Photonics and brings over 20 years of experience managing technology companies, implementing effective financial policies, and developing go-to-market strategies.

“Joining CoolIT during this phase of development is a nice fit with my experience and I’m thrilled to add to the company’s momentum,” said Schader. “Ensuring our growth is sustainable as we scale is a challenge all of our staff are ready for.”

Fleur Sohtz

Noogata, a solutions provider of no-code artificial intelligence data analytics for enterprises, appointed Fleur Sohtz to the newly created role of chief revenue officer. Sohtz will be responsible for global marketing, sales and business development activities, and for the expansion of the business in the United States. 

“Sales and marketing roles today need to take a more strategic approach, focused on demand generation and revenue,” said Sohtz. “The opportunity for Noogata to transform organizations and leverage data by providing solutions to problems that simply haven’t been addressed previously is tremendous. For people like me and the teams I manage, this type of data analytics was previously unthinkable but incredibly useful and I’m looking forward to being part of Noogata’s growth.”

Ashley Stirrup 

Shoreline.io, the incident automation company, appointed Ashley Stirrup as its chief operating officer. He was also appointed to the company’s board of directors. Stirrup will be responsible for driving growth initiatives and scaling business operations to support Shoreline’s rapid customer adoption. 

“I’ve personally seen service downtime reduce customer trust despite operations teams working day and night to keep systems up,” said Stirrup. “I was blown away by how Shoreline makes debugging 10,000 instances as easy as debugging one and how incident automation can be done with a few dozen lines of code, not thousands. Shoreline fundamentally changes how on-call teams will handle production incidents.”

Gustavo Stolovitzky

Sema4, an AI-driven genomic and clinical data intelligence platform company, appointed Gustavo Stolovitzky to its newly created leadership position of chief science officer. Stolovitzky spent 23 years at IBM Research, where he was appointed IBM Fellow. His most recent role was the founding chair of the exploratory life sciences program at IBM Research. 

“I am elated to join Sema4,” said Stolovitzky.  “Sema4 has a research division composed of top-notch experts developing algorithms and models for precision medicine that I am truly excited to join. With them, and in close collaboration with other parts of the company, we will work tirelessly to make the promise of AI-powered data-driven precision medicine come true.”

David Stokey

Blue Hexagon appointed David Stokey as its new chief revenue officer. Stokey brings almost 20 years of leadership experience in sales. As CRO of Blue Hexagon, he will oversee the company’s sales operations worldwide. 

“Blue Hexagon is one of the most recognized cybersecurity companies that leverage AI deep learning to help organizations with advanced real-time threat defenses to protect their critical data and brand reputation against malicious attacks,” said Stokey. “Blue Hexagon is helping companies move forward from a traditional and legacy mindset of late detection and post-breach fix to AI-powered innovation, solving complex challenges facing security organizations today. It is about empowering security teams with the ability to be proactive and prevent attacks from metastasizing. I am very excited about bringing in strong customer-first sales talent, implementing operational excellence, and look forward to the path ahead with Blue Hexagon.”

Matt Taylor and Poonacha Kongetira 

Matt Taylor joined SambaNova Systems, a company building advanced software, hardware, and services to run AI applications, as its vice president of strategic sales and partnerships. Taylor previously worked for Ampere, where he led worldwide sales and business development. He previously served as VP of sales and business development at Qualcomm and held several sales positions at Intel.

SambaNova Systems also appointed Poonacha Kongetira as its vice president of hardware. Kongetira joined the existing hardware development team bringing more than 25 years of experience in developing and applying microprocessor technologies, including working at Google. 

Che Min Tu 

Lenovo promoted Che Min (Jammi) Tu to senior vice president and group operations officer. Most recently, Tu served as chief operations officer of Lenovo’s intelligent devices group. In this new role, he will drive the company’s operational performance and work across the services and solutions group, infrastructure solutions group and intelligent devices group, while also leading the company's overall digital transformation.

Tu joined Lenovo in 2012 as the chief financial officer of the EMEA region. He has amassed almost 25 years of financial and operational experience, including serving multiple leadership roles at Lenovo. 

Jeff Whitaker

Excelero, a provider of solutions for public and private cloud workloads, welcomed Jeff Whitaker as its vice president of product.  Whitaker brings to Excelero more than 20 years of experience in developing storage, semiconductor and networking solutions. He comes to Excelero from NetApp, where he was a founding member of the NetApp cloud team. 

Whitaker also served as a product manager at NetApp helping to develop the company’s virtual storage appliance technology. He also held senior roles in sales engineering and product marketing at Tzero Technologies, National Semiconductor and Mellanox.

Bernie Wu

MemVerge appointed Bernie Wu as its vice president of business development. Wu brings more than 30 years of business development experience to the company in enterprise software, storage and cloud technologies. He will be in charge of MemVerge’s global alliance, software partnerships and industry ecosystem efforts.

“Memory is the last critical infrastructure component that needs to become virtualized and composable to better enable the data-intensive processing demands of modern applications,” said Wu. “MemVerge is at the epicenter of this exciting infrastructure shift, and I look forward to helping drive the adoption of this new virtualized memory abstraction layer. Big memory is a game-changing, disruptive technology which not only delivers immediate value to data-intensive applications but will become a key part of the new fabric for tomorrow’s high performing data center solutions.” 

Mallun Yen

Pure Storage, a storage-as-a-service provider, appointed Mallun Yen to its board of directors as a member of the board and to its nominating and corporate governance committee. Yen currently serves as the founder and chief executive officer of Operator Collective.

“From its founding, Pure has been recognized as an industry leader because it has focused its innovation on what’s right for customers," said Yen. "I have always believed in disrupting industry conventions and I know this is part of Pure’s ethos. I look forward to working with Pure’s talented team as the company continues its growth trajectory.”

Al Zollar

The IBM board of directors elected Al Zollar as its latest member. Zollar is a former director of Red Hat, who since 2014 has applied his expertise as a technology investor working with cloud-based technology providers, leading providers of enterprise security solutions and other technology and software-as-a-service companies. 

Prior to his investment activities, Zollar worked for 34 years in leadership positions in IBM’s software and systems groups. Zollar is also a member of the board of directors of Nasdaq, Bank of New York Mellon and Public Service Enterprise Group.


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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