Big Data Career Notes: October 2021 Edition

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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!

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 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 than 30 U.S. patents.

Sigal Zarmi brings over 30 years of experience to DataRobot 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.

Paul Codding, Sudhir Menon, and Ram Venkatesh 

Cloudera, the enterprise data cloud company, announced the promotion of Paul Codding, Sudhir Menon, and Ram Venkatesh to senior leadership positions. Paul Codding was promoted to the executive vice president of product management at Cloudera. He 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

Tal Darom, Jonathan Laserson, Karine Regev, and Hadas Sheinfeld

Datagen, a developer of data-centric technology that delivers visual data with domain coverage and fully-controlled object variance, appointed Tal Darom as its vice president of research and development. Darom comes to Datagen from Amazon, where he managed the development of machine learning training and model evaluation infrastructure and was responsible for bringing deep learning algorithms to production.

Dr. Jonathan Laserson joined Datagen as its head of artificial intelligence of research. He will lead the company’s research in AI generating 3D simulations, synthesizing photorealistic images and videos for AI performance acceleration. 

In addition, Karine Regev joined Datagen as its VP of marketing. Regev brings a track record of growing brand and market share for market leaders including Alcide (acquired by Rapid7) and Aqua Security.

Lastly, Hadas Sheinfeld joined Datagen as its VP of product. He comes to Datagen from Google, where she was responsible for the infrastructure of massive scale, serving over 100 products and their respective engineering teams. 

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.”

Jo-ann de Pass Olsovsky, Rachel Mann, and Sandy Smith

Reltio, a provider of the cloud-native master data management SaaS platform, welcomed Jo-ann de Pass Olsovsky, executive vice president and chief information officer for Salesforce, to its board of directors. de Pass Olsovsky brings nearly 40 years of technology experience to help guide Reltio on its high-growth journey.

Reltio also appointed Rachel Mann as its chief communications officer. Mann will oversee all facets of corporate communications, serve as a strategic advisor to executive leadership, and set the overall communications strategy. 

Lastly, Reltio appointed Sandy Smith, the former chief financial officer of customer data platform company, Segment, to its board of directors as audit committee chairperson. Smith brings to Reltio her deep finance and technology experience, and a proven track record of helping companies through rapid growth, scale, and transformation.

Arwa Kaddoura, Carolyn Moore, and Brian Mullen

InfluxData, the creator of the time series platform InfluxDB, appointed Arwa Kaddoura as its chief revenue officer. Kaddoura will be responsible for leading the company’s sales activities, including sales enablement, customer success, and technical support and services.  Before joining InfluxData, Kaddoura was vice president of worldwide sales and go-to-market at HPE Greenlake Cloud Services and senior director at Microsoft. 

Carolyn Moore joined InfluxData as its chief people officer. Moore will be responsible for leading all aspects of talent strategy for InfluxData’s workforce, including global HR operations, people management, learning and development as well as diversity and inclusion. She previously held senior leadership roles at organizations including Auth0, Apple, Mercedes-Benz, and Samsung.

Lastly, Brian Mullen was promoted to chief marketing officer at InfluxData.  Mullen will be responsible for overseeing InfluxData’s global marketing strategy and lead the company’s go-to-market efforts, both for its InfluxDB self-managed offering as well as its InfluxDB Cloud solution. During the past four years at InfluxData, Mullen served as vice president and general manager of cloud, and before that as VP of business development and partnerships. 

Donald Kaye 

Exasol, the high-performance analytics database, appointed Donald Kaye as its chief commercial officer. Kaye will be responsible for aligning and optimizing all go-to-market operations to drive Exasol’s global growth strategy. He joined Exasol from Ground Labs, a provider in sensitive data discovery solutions. 

“There is no denying that data has become one of the most crucial assets in an organization’s arsenal. And yet, despite its importance, businesses are still struggling to derive valuable insights from their data. This challenge facing pretty much every organization in the world means Exasol is uniquely placed to help them solve it,” said Kaye. “It’s exactly for this reason that I am thrilled to be joining the Exasol team. Not only is the technology world-class, but I also admire what the senior leadership team has done so far to get the business to where it is today. I look forward to being a part of the next chapter for Exasol.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

Ann Thueland 

Crate.io, the enterprise data management company enabling data insights at scale, appointed Ann Thueland as head of global marketing. Thueland has held senior marketing positions at Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu, Dell, Actifio (acquired by Google), and Ververica (acquired by Alibaba).

“This is an incredible point in time to join the company and work with an ambitious team, and represent such a technically advanced product. As global enterprises look at ways to unlock the benefits of their data and turn it into business value, Crate.io is perfectly positioned to enable companies to reach their full data potential,” said Thueland. “I am humbled by the opportunity and look forward to the journey ahead, contributing to the next level of growth for the company. I am also excited to join the leadership team led by Eva Schönleitner, an accomplished leader whom I hugely respect.”

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.

Emily White

Quantum Corp. appointed Emily White, vice president of enterprise data and analytics at NIKE, to its board of Directors. Before NIKE, she served as VP of enterprise data engineering at Synchrony Financial and in General Electric Healthcare and General Electric Transportation. 

“In the last few years, Quantum has made a number of leading-edge strategic initiatives to redefine data management and storage solutions,” said White. “I’m excited to join and lend both my business and scientific expertise to the Board of Directors as the company continues its transition to focus on helping organizations gain more value from their growing volumes of unstructured data.”

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.”

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.