AI Career Notes: December 2020 Edition
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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:
Shahar Bar-Or
Infinidat, a provider of enterprise-class storage solutions, appointed Shahar Bar-Or as its chief product officer and general manager of its Israeli operations. Bar-Or will be lead research and development, quality assurance/validation, product innovations, operations and IT.
“I admire Infinidat’s focus on addressing enterprises’ pain points by developing scalable and reliable products, such as InfiniBox, which has the lowest TCO and offers flexible elastic pricing to democratize data,” Bar-Or said. “I’m looking forward to applying my experience and drive and accelerating this journey. Infinidat, with its industry-leading architecture and scalability, truly has a transformative vision for the market.”
Peter Braam
Dr. Peter Braam joined ThinkParQ, provider of the parallel file system BeeGFS, as its chief technical officer. Braam will be responsible for managing the research and development team. He will also lead the product development and product roadmap strategies of BeeGFS. Braam held several executive roles at public companies and has founded or co-founded six-start-up companies.
“It’s very exciting to join the excellent ThinkParQ team right when it is gaining market share,” Braam said. “My first mission is to strengthen that further by leading the architecture and guiding the development. New computation, storage hardware, and requirements from machine learning will be making unprecedented demands on our software, and fortunately, new engineering practices are now available to us to converge to the best-distributed systems without endless experimentation. This will also help us to introduce innovation in strategic areas. I’m delighted to work in such an interesting technical area.”
David Brimley, Gregg Holzrichter, and Dave Salverson
Hazelcast, an open source in-memory computing platform provider, appointed David Brimley, Gregg Holzrichter, and Dave Salverson as its chief product officer, chief marketing officer, and chief financial officer, respectively. Brimley has transitioned from his former role as a Hazelcast consultant, where he advised the company's product management function for three years prior to his hiring and promotion to CPO.
Salverson has held leadership roles at Ruckus Networks, Brocade, and Adobe. He comes from Shape Security, a company acquired by F5 Networks for $1 billion. Holzrichter has held leadership positions at VMware, Virsto, Big Switch Networks, and Aporeto.
John DesJardins and Chris Wilson
Hazelcast also promoted John DesJardins and Chris Wilson to chief technology officer and chief revenue officer, respectively. DesJardins was promoted from his role as field CTO and vice president of solution architecture.
DesJardins has worked for over 20 years with companies including Cloudera and Software AG. Wilson was responsible for leading Hazelcast’s sales organization for the past five years and is credited with delivering growth in sales for the past 16 consecutive quarters. Prior to joining Hazelcast, Wilson served in sales leadership roles at Oracle, Skytree, and Magnet Systems.
Ed Chessman
Synthesized, specialists in automating all stages of data provisioning and data preparation with artificial intelligence, appointed Ed Chessman as its sales director. Chessman comes from Peltarion, where he held the role of regional sales director. Over the last 25 years, he worked at companies including SAS DataFlux, GigaSpaces, and GridGain Systems.
“I’ve joined Synthesized at a very important and exciting time,” said Chessman. “AI adoption is clearly growing exponentially, presenting a significant sales opportunity for the company to capitalize on, especially as its product is a recognized market leader in this space.”
Uyen Dinh
BlackSky, a monitoring services and geospatial insights provider, appointed Uyen Dinh as its vice president for the company’s government relations and strategy business division. Before BlackSky, Dinh held the role of security assistant secretary for the Office of Legislative Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security.
“I’m excited about my new role with BlackSky,” said Dinh. “It’s a dynamic and innovative company with strong leadership and a talented workforce. BlackSky has a clear mission to deliver timely and accurate geospatial intelligence to better inform critical decision making. I’m looking forward to advancing this mission by bringing awareness to how predictive analytics give decision makers exactly the info they need, when they need it. This is game changing.”
Chris Ferrie
Quantum computing specialist Q-CTRL appointed quantum physics instructor and children’s book author Chris Ferrie as its quantum education advisor. Ferrie, who will remain as the associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney and Centre for Quantum Software and Information, will be responsible for managing the content development for the company’s educational software package that aims to help amateurs with the use of quantum computing.
“I am looking forward to bringing my passion for teaching quantum computing to develop interactive content with the world-class team of quantum scientists and software developers at Q-CTRL,” said Ferrie. “There is a growing appetite for learning more about quantum computing across a broad spectrum of people. If we can make quantum physics and computing interesting and understandable to young children, we can definitely make it so for adults as well.”
Matt Gentile
Deloitte tapped Matt Gentile to lead the company’s Government & Public Services Advisory practice. He was promoted from the role of principal of Deloitte’s Risk & Financial Advisory division within Deloitte Transactions and Business Analytics LLP. He will be responsible for managing the company’s work in cybersecurity, risk management, financial modernization, and digital transformation with government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels and with institutions of higher education.
“In the last decade at Deloitte, I’ve had the pleasure of serving dozens of dynamic clients with world-class talent in our government practice,” said Gentile. “As our clients tackle the hard challenges in establishing and restoring trust, securing mission-critical systems and building crisis response and resilience into operations, we will help set the pace on human-centered, AI-assisted solutions as governmental entities enhance how they serve citizens everywhere.”
R. Scott Herren
Cisco appointed R. Scott Herren as its executive vice president and chief financial officer. Herren comes from software technology vendor Autodesk, where he held the roles of chief financial officer and senior vice president of the company. Before Autodesk, Herren was senior vice president of finance at Citrix Systems, where he built a 14-year career managing the company’s finance, accounting, tax, treasury, investor relations, real estate, and facilities teams.
“I’m honored to join the team at Cisco during such an important time in the company’s evolution,” said Herren. “The opportunity to contribute to the business-model transformation work already underway is exciting, and the possibilities of what Cisco can achieve are truly inspiring. I look forward to partnering with not only the leadership team, but the entire company, on their journey of transformation.”
Jinnah Hosein
The Boeing Company appointed Jinnah Hosein to the newly created role of vice president of the company’s software engineering division. Under the new role, Hosein will be responsible for strengthening Boeing's focus on software engineering across the enterprise. He will oversee a team of engineers who currently support the development and delivery of software embedded in Boeing's products and services.
Hosein comes from Aurora, a self-driving vehicle company, where he held the role of vice president of the company’s Software Engineering division. He has held leadership roles at SpaceX, where he led software development for Falcon, Falcon Heavy, Dragon, and Crew Dragon. He has also worked at Tesla, where he helped develop autopilot software.
Ayan Kar and Christy Wilson
BlackSwan Technologies, the artificial intelligence company developing the next generation of enterprise software, announced Ayan Kar as senior vice president of product and Christy Wilson as its senior vice president of data and analytics and financial services. Kar held the role of global head for digital product data and analytics at HSBC before joining BlackSwan technologies.
Kar will be responsible for the company's go-to-market strategy of AI and machine learning technologies for risk, compliance and financial intelligence applications. Wilson comes from Splunk, where she served as VP of product operations. Wilson will team up with the BlackSwan's research and development department to head the company’s roadmap.
Julia Liuson
Cadence Design Systems, Inc., a provider of software, hardware, services, and reusable integrated circuit design blocks, appointed Julia Liuson to its board of directors. Currently, Liuson holds the role of corporate vice president in the developer division at Microsoft Corp. In 1992, Liuson joined Microsoft serving various technical and executive roles over the years.
As corporate VP, she develops the technology and business strategy and leads product development, including Visual Studio, .NET Framework and developer platform services for Microsoft Azure. Liuson was inducted to the Women in Technology Hall of Fame in 2019 by the Women in Technology International organization.
Sherry Lowe
Security analytics and automation company, Exabeam, announced the addition of former Splunk marketing leader Sherry Lowe as its next chief marketing officer. Lowe will be responsible for managing the worldwide marketing strategy of Exabeam. Lowe built a 20-year career in the technology industry and developed strategic marketing programs for companies such as Expanse, Druva, and Splunk.
“As the cyberthreat landscape becomes more complex in our digital, highly remote world, I look forward to leading marketing in an organization that provides strategic clarity for struggling security teams,” said Lowe. “Exabeam is truly focusing on the customer, and I could not be more excited to join CEO Nir Polak and the rest of the team in broadening the reach of these important messages. With the tenacity that made me one of the first female sportscasters allowed in an NFL locker room and drove my former employers to IPO and acquisition, I am excited to be a key member of the executive team to help accelerate Exabeam’s already impressive success.”
WekaIO, a provider of high-performance and NVMe-optimized file storage solutions, appointed George Pamboris as its vice president of product management. Pamboris will be responsible for accelerating the company's parallel file system to solve their customer’s technology challenges. He brings over 20 years of experience in the IT industry and has served in executive leadership roles at EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Amazon Web Services, and Teradata.
“I’m excited for the opportunity to help WekaIO continue to revolutionize the storage industry by developing a product that not only provides superior speed and capacity metrics but that truly improves customers’ ability to leverage the value of their data by reducing TCO and increasing ROI through business outcomes,” said Pamboris. “I’ve been fortunate to have had the opportunity to improve product lines at many top companies and recognize that WekaIO is well-positioned for its own success and to revolutionize the storage industry.”
Brian Peterson
Panasas, a high-performance computing data storage solutions provider, appointed Brian Peterson as its chief operating officer. Peterson brings over 25 years of experience in sales, business, marketing and corporate development positions. He currently serves as a strategic adviser at Tack22, a marketing and advertising firm. Before Panasas, he held the role of strategic advisor at Synoptek, a systems integrator and managed IT services provider.
“Joining the Panasas team to chart the next stage of the company’s growth is an exciting step in my career,” Peterson said. “I will lean on my background and relationships established in the technology industry, working with customers, partners, and alliances, to help deliver breakthroughs in research and innovation, and ultimately, transformational outcomes.”
Henri Richard
Robin.io, a provider of Kubernetes storage and data management solutions, appointed Henri Richard to its board of advisors. Richard was the executive vice president of NetApp’s field and customer operations.
Before NetApp, he held the role of senior VP of worldwide sales and support at SanDisk. He recently joined Gartner as an executive partner in its Global CSO practice. Richard has built a 40-year career in sales, holding various executive sales positions at companies such as AMD, IBM, Seagate, and Connor.
Mikael Ronström
Swedish company Logical Clocks announced the addition of Mikael Ronström as the company’s head of data, a newly created role aimed at expanding the company’s mission to provide machine learning services. Ronström is the inventor and lead developer of NDB Cluster, an open-source distributed database underlying the MySQL Cluster platform.
“Logical Clocks is poised for tremendous growth and I am thrilled to join the team that has already built a strong platform with NDB as its core foundation,” said Ronström. “I look forward to working closely with customers and continuing to drive inspired solutions at Logical Clocks that will help enterprises solve some of the most challenging problems of today that require integration of large datasets, real time data processing, and machine learning.”
Eyal Waldman
Pliops, a storage hardware acceleration vendor, appointed Eyal Waldman to its board of directors. Waldman is the founder and former CEO of Mellanox Technologies, which was acquired earlier this year by Nvidia for $7 billion. As a Pliops board member, Waldman will help guide the company’s strategy and scale its technology into new use cases.
“Pliops is tackling the most challenging issues that are vexing data center architects – namely, the colliding trends of explosive data growth stored on fast flash media, ultimately limited by constrained compute resources,” noted Waldman. “I look forward to working with the Pliops team as they bring their technology to customers and partners.”
Andy Young
Immersion cooling vendor Asperitas appointed Andy Young as director of the research & development unit at the company. Young brings a background in mechanical engineering, having worked at Ansys and Iceotope. He is an active member of the OCP community as part of the Advanced Cooling sub-project.
“I’m excited to start at Asperitas and feel my experience in thermal design will add value to the team,” said Young. “Asperitas Immersed Computing technology captures more of the heat generated by IT equipment, reducing the load on HVAC systems without focusing on discrete components. With low energy overheads, Asperitas leads the immersion cooling market alongside Shell and OEMs as strong, strategic partners. The integrated, sustainable solutions are able to meet the industry's increasing demands for cooling and energy efficiency.”
Richard Zahner
Retired Army Lieutenant General Richard Zahner joined the advisory board of the Tachyum Government Corp., a newly created subsidiary of Tachyum. Zahner has built a 36-year military career focusing on airborne, special operations, special mission, and heavy ground forces.
Zahner held the roles of director of signals intelligence at the National Security Agency and deputy undersecretary of defense. He has served on a number of the NSA Advisory Board panels and DARPA-sponsored initiatives. He also supported the development of hybrid airship technology.
Michael Zimmerman
DeepCube, the provider of a software-based deep learning platform that improves performance on existing hardware, appointed Michael Zimmerman as its chief executive officer. Zimmerman will team up with DeepCube’s leadership team and be responsible for the company's growth. He brings over 20 years of experience working with machine learning and AI start-ups to accelerate product and go-to-market strategy in global markets.
“I’m thrilled to join DeepCube and help the team capitalize on the momentum it has achieved since its launch earlier this year,” said Zimmerman. “Undoubtedly, AI is a rapidly evolving and crowded space. But DeepCube stands out for its unmatched expertise, powerful technology, and overarching understanding of how to scale efficient and lightweight deep learning deployments at the edge. That is exactly where the industry as a whole is moving, and DeepCube is leading the charge. I’m excited to be working with one of the best deep learning teams in the world, led by an industry leader like DeepCube’s co-founder and CTO, Dr Eli David. Together we will bring deep learning to the next level.”
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.
