Big Data Career Notes: July 2021 Edition

In this monthly feature, we’ll keep you up-to-date on the latest career developments for individuals in the big data community. Whether it’s a promotion, new company hire, or even an accolade, we’ve got the details. Check in each month for an updated list and you may even come across someone you know, or better yet, yourself!

Tom Bogan

Reltio, a cloud-native master data management SaaS platform provider, appointed Tom Bogan to its board of directors. Bogan currently serves as vice chairman of Workday, Inc., a leader in enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources.

 “My executive leadership positions have given me a front-row seat to the challenges of consolidating and providing a common view of data,” Bogan said. “Reltio uniquely unifies data and makes it trustworthy and available in real-time at the speed of the cloud. The master data management market opportunity is tremendous, and the use cases are many. Seizing that opportunity requires an executive leadership team that thinks big, has a clear plan and moves quickly. I have worked with Chris Hylen and have every confidence that he and his team, working closely with the board, will capitalize on that opportunity.”

Amy Cappellanti-Wolf

Cohesity welcomed Amy Cappellanti-Wolf as its chief human resources officer. Cappellanti-Wolf will be responsible for leading Cohesity’s workforce strategies. Before joining the company, she held HR leadership roles at Symantec Corp., Silver Spring Networks Inc, Cisco Systems Inc., Sun Microsystems, The Walt Disney Company, and PepsiCo.

“I am thrilled to join Cohesity as it’s not only disrupting the data management market, but it also has a tremendous focus on values, diversity, and culture – all traits that come straight from the top,” said Cappellanti-Wolf. “Cohesity is making it easier than ever for customers around the world to manage, protect, and derive value from data. As the company enters its next phase of growth, I’m eager to bring my experience to the table, building on the strong platform of talent and performance at Cohesity.”

Elise Cole, Michael Schmidt, and Nick King

DataRobot, an augmented intelligence products vendor, appointed Elise Leung Cole, Michael Schmidt, and Nick King to its executive leadership team. Cole joined DataRobot from Cisco as its chief people officer. She will oversee all people functions for DataRobot’s global workforce.

Schmidt and King were promoted to chief technology officer and chief marketing officer, respectively. Schmidt joined DataRobot in 2017 following the company’s acquisition of Nutonian, a machine learning company he founded. King started working at DataRobot in April 2021 as its senior vice president of marketing.

Ross Fujii

Quantum Corp. appointed software veteran Ross Fujii as its general manager of emerging markets and product marketing. Fujii brings an extensive background in data management and analytics and in creating and implementing modern software distribution models. He will focus on growing Quantum’s reach into emerging markets, primarily video surveillance and advanced driver-assistance systems.

“I’m excited to take on this challenge and utilize my experience in software, data management and data analysis to guide my new team in providing the data solutions and buying models today’s companies critically need to be competitive,” said Fujii. “Quantum is already on a great trajectory; our demonstrated proficiency in orchestrating massive amounts of data for the media and entertainment industry is a unique differentiator as we apply our expertise to industries with similar data challenges.”

Jan-Dirk Henrich 

Exasol, the high-performance analytics database, welcomed Jan-Dirk Henrich to its leadership team and executive board as its chief financial officer and chief operating officer. Jan-Dirk will be based out of Exasol’s headquarters in Nuremberg, Germany. He joined Exasol from New Work SE, a provider of HR-Tech and professional networking services in the DACH region

“I am very excited to be part of the Exasol family and to be in a position to shape its growth path going forward as part of a great team,” said Jan-Dirk. “Over the last three years, I had the privilege to experience the strength of Exasol’s database first hand as a customer. I look forward to helping bring this strength to other Exasol customers worldwide.”

Berit Hoffman

Sisu Data promoted Berit Hoffman to the role of chief product officer. The former head of product of Google’s hire and cloud talent solution division. Hoffman joined Sisu in January 2020 to guide the startup’s product vision, roadmap, and execution. 

“I’m looking forward to spending even more time on the long term vision of Sisu and partnering closely with the Go-To-Market team to determine how Sisu needs to evolve to support those strategies,” Hoffman said in a Sisu blog post. 

Amy Love

SambaNova Systems, a provider of software, hardware and services that run artificial intelligence applications, appointed Amy Love as its chief marketing officer. Love comes to the company from Pavilion Data Systems, where she served as CMO. 

Love is a board member of the Girl Scouts of Northern California and a member of the board of advisors in the department of marketing at the University of San Francisco School of Management. She comes to SambaNova Systems having served multiple leadership roles for public and private for-profit and not-for-profit companies, including TriNet, Violin Memory, and NetApp.

Gil Sasson

Lightbits Labs, provider of NVMe over TCP cloud-native storage products, welcomed Gil Sasson as its chief research and development officer. Sasson brings to Lightbits Labs a background in both R&D and cloud-native applications. He will be responsible for leading all the product development engineering efforts and directing the design and deployment efforts for the company’s private and edge cloud solutions offerings.

Prior to joining Lightbits, Sasson served as vice president of R&D at N2WS, a former Veeam company, and managed R&D and customer support teams in the US and Israel. In that role, he decreased N2WS’ release cycles from 6 months to 2.5 months while growing its R&D productivity by more than 25 percent.

Min Shao

Arity, a mobility data and analytics company, appointed Min Shao as its vice president of analytics. Min brings more than 30 years of analytics experience, including serving as the director of engineering, trust and safety at YouTube; the VP of engineering and data science at Yahoo; and an analytics and engineering executive at both PayPal and FICO.

I was ready to take on a new challenge, and I love learning new things,” said Shao in an Arity Q&A. “Arity’s unique mobility data set, telematics, marketing, and insurance opportunities are exactly the types of new challenges I am excited to take on.

Jill Ward

Informatica, an enterprise cloud data management products provider, appointed Jill Ward to its board of directors. Ward currently chairs the board of directors of Dynatrace and is a member of the board of directors of Hubspot. Previously, she served on the boards of Carbon Black, prior to its acquisition by VMWare in 2019, and Adaptive Insights, prior to its acquisition by Workday.

“Informatica is well-positioned to lead and help its customers succeed with data-led digital transformations,” said Ward. “I am excited to join the company at a critical inflection point when we are experiencing an unprecedented acceleration to the cloud. Informatica’s big shift to a cloud-first, cloud-native approach to data management is a testament to its customer-centric innovation and I look forward to being a part of the next chapter in the company’s growth.”

Rebecca Weekly

Rebecca Weekly, vice president, general manager and senior principal engineer of hyperscale strategy and execution at Intel, has been announced as the new chair and president of the board of directors of the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP). Rebecca replaces Mark Roenigk, head of hardware engineering at Facebook, who served as chair for the past two years.

“Rebecca brings a wealth of technical expertise, leadership, and perspective to this role that will positively impact the Foundation as we kick off the next decade of OCP,” said Roenigk.

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.