AI Career Notes: September 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:
Nicolas Alberga
Itential, providers of network and cloud automation software solutions, appointed Nicolas Alberga as its chief financial officer. Alberga brings more than 20 years of experience as a financial and accounting professional, including serving as CFO at Northgate Arinso, Inc. and Top of Mind Networks.
“Itential is ripe for growth as the need for advanced – and more modern – networking solutions becomes more evident to companies of all sizes and industries,” said Alberga. “This is an exciting time to join the team and I look forward to contributing to the company’s ongoing success.”
Bruce Andrews and Christy Pambianchi
Intel Corp. welcomed Bruce H. Andrews as its corporate vice president and chief government affairs officer. Andrews will be responsible for overseeing Intel’s global government affairs group and the company’s government affairs and public policy functions and strategies.
Intel also welcomed Christy Pambianchi as its executive vice president and chief people officer. Pambianchi will head the human resources organization with the goal to attract, engage and retain the best talent. Before joining Intel, Pambianchi was executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Verizon.
John Coughlan
StorCentric, a provider of secure data management solutions, appointed John P. Coughlan as its chief financial officer. Before joining StorCentric, Coughlan held the CFO position at CoreBTS, a reseller of Cisco- and Microsoft-centric software, and Penthera Partners, an early-stage SaaS company.
“I am delighted to join StorCentric, a company that is redefining the data management and protection space,” said Coughlan. “I look forward to the opportunity to assist such an enviable world-class executive team in working across all areas of the company to generate ideas and implement strategies, create value and build revenue, and also importantly – ensure our partners enjoy unparalleled revenue opportunities, while our end customers enjoy dramatic and long-term ROI.”
Matt Demas and Eric Oberhofer
Matt Demas joined GigaIO, the creators of datacenter rack-scale architecture for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing solutions, as its chief technical officer of the company's global sales unit. Demas comes to GigaIO from Liqid, a storage and composable solutions provider, where he served as field CTO.
In addition, Eric Oberhofer joined GigaIO as its vice president of the company's North American sales division. Oberhofer comes to GigaIO with 15 years of sales and business development experience. Most recently, he held the role of VP of the public sector at Liqid.
Abhijit Dey and Gregg Machon
DataCore Software, a software-defined storage solutions provider for block, file and object storage, welcomed Abhijit Dey as its new chief product officer. Dey comes to Datacore from Agari, a cybersecurity solutions provider, where he held the role of senior vice president of its product management and research and development division.
In addition, DataCore Software welcomed Gregg Machon as its new vice president of its Americas sales division. Machon brings years of holding sales leadership positions at Qumulo, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Nimble Storage, SolidFire, NetApp, Isilon, and EMC.
Phil Hall, Asser ElShanawany, and Jodie Ruby
LXT, an artificial intelligence training data technology solutions provider, appointed Phil Hall as its chief growth officer, Asser ElShanawany as its chief financial officer, and Jodie Ruby as its vice president. Hall brings more than 20 years of experience working with technology companies and has a background in speech and linguistics, AI and machine learning data.
ElShanawany comes to LXT with a background in leading public organizations and transforming and scaling start-ups to large technology companies, particularly in the telecommunications sector. Ruby has more than 20 years of B2B technology marketing experience, including building and leading marketing teams from the ground up for high-growth organizations.
Jensen Huang
The Semiconductor Industry Association awarded Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia, the 2021 Robert N. Noyce Award. The Noyce Award is named in honor of semiconductor industry pioneer Robert N. Noyce, co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corp.
“I am honored to receive the 2021 Noyce Award and do so on behalf of my colleagues at Nvidia, whose body of work this award recognizes,” said Huang. “It has been the greatest joy and privilege to have grown up with the semiconductor and computer industries, two that so profoundly impact the world. As we enter the era of AI, robotics, digital biology, and the metaverse, we will see super-exponential technology advances. There’s never been a more exciting or important time to be in the semiconductor and computer industries.”
Raghib Hussain
Lightmatter appointed Raghib Hussain to its board of directors. Hussain currently serves as president of products and technologies at Marvell and brings to the board more than 20 years of experience driving innovative commercial strategy in communications, security, networking, computing and semiconductor technologies.
“Lightmatter is an innovator of energy-efficient AI compute using silicon photonics,” said Hussain. “I’m honored to join the board and be a part of Lightmatter’s journey towards wide-scale adoption of this new paradigm in photonic compute solutions.”
Lindsey Irvine
Benchling appointed Lindsey Irvine as its chief marketing officer. Most recently, Irvine served as CMO of MuleSoft, a Salesforce company, where she helped scale the company from $250 million to over $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.
“We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century shift in which biology has the potential to rewrite life as we know it, from the medicines we take, to the food we eat, and the clothes we wear. Benchling is building the software that will power the biotechnology revolution and help scientists tackle the world's toughest problems," said Irvine. "The company has been quietly disrupting the biotech space, with over 200,000 scientists from biopharmaceutical, agricultural, and industrial enterprises as well as academic labs around the world using the platform to create life-changing products. I could not be more excited to join this exceptional team and bring our story to the world.”
Daniel Katz
Daniel S. Katz was appointed as the inaugural steering committee chair of the Research Software Alliance. Currently, Katz is chief scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and a research associate professor in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering at the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“I’ve been working on increasing the recognition of research software and its dependence on the people who develop and maintain it for many years, as this is critical to improving research impacts,” said Katz. “I co-founded ReSA with Michelle Barker and Neil Chue Hong to enable the strategic coordination needed to maximize the achievement of community-wide goals, so I’m pleased to be able to expand my role in ReSA to help accomplish this, working with our fiscal sponsor, Code for Science & Society.”
Lee Leibig
Flex Logix Technologies, Inc., supplier of the artificial intelligence edge inference accelerator and eFPGA IP, appointed Lee Leibig as its vice president of the North America and Europe, Middle East, and Africa sales regions. Lee comes to Flex Logix after spending 22 years at Broadcom, where he most recently served as its VP of broadband sales in Europe and North America.
“With the edge AI inference market expecting rapid growth to billions of dollars by the mid-2020s, Flex Logix is well-positioned to capture significant market share with its high-performance low power solutions. The InferX products deliver the world’s best performance per watt ratio which is critical in edge inference applications,” said Leibig. “I look forward to being a part of the talented team they have assembled and being an integral part of the company’s next phase of growth.”
Mike Montez
Green Revolution Cooling appointed Mike Montez as its solutions architect for the company’s strategic alliances division. Montez comes to GRC from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where he spent more than 30 years as a solutions architect and systems engineer.
“I am excited to be joining GRC, and am looking forward to helping implement their solutions throughout data centers across the globe,” said Montez. “I have the skills needed to be able to connect with GRC’s Strategic Alliance Partners to continue solving the problem of energy consumption in data centers.”
Amit Pandey and Jonathan Martin
Amit Pandey joined WekaIO as its executive chairman. Pandey brings more than 30 years of executive leadership experience having worked at Avi Networks, Zenprise (acquired by Citrix), Terracotta (acquired by Software AG) and NetApp. He will be responsible for overseeing the administrative and operational functions at Weka.
In addition, Jonathan Martin joined WekaIO as its president and will oversee Weka’s marketing, customer success and global go-to-market initiatives. Martin has served as a global chief marketing officer at Hitachi Vantara, Pure Storage (through IPO), and EMC (acquired by Dell), and has held executive roles at HP Software, Veritas Software, and Salesforce.
Derek Schoettle
CloudTruth, a unified configuration management company, appointed Derek Schoettle, a growth partner at Great Hill Partners, to its board of directors. Schoettle specializes in strategic differentiation, go-to-market, marketing, portfolio management, product management, and M&A. Before joining Great Hill Partners, Schoettle served as CEO of ZoomInfo.
“CloudTruth is the go-to service for cloud configuration management for many fast-growing CloudOps teams to help manage configuration intricacies,” said Schoettle. “I’m inspired by the vision and growth achieved thus far and delighted to support CloudTruth in their mission to empower organizations to access and unify all infrastructure and application configuration data while eliminating the complexities and, in turn, making the digital world a much more secure place.”
Brian Sereda
Rigetti Computing appointed Brian Sereda as its chief financial officer. Sereda brings to Rigetti Computing more than 25 years of senior-level finance experience. Most recently, he served as CFO at Energous Corp.
“I am excited to join Rigetti and work alongside the team to help the company prosper,” Sereda said. “Quantum computing is such an innovative and increasingly critical technology that is pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Rigetti is a leader in the industry, and I look forward to being a part of the company’s next stage of growth.
Fermín Serna
Databricks, the data and artificial intelligence company, appointed Fermín Serna as its chief security officer. Serna brings more than 20 years of enterprise information security experience to Databricks and will oversee the expansion of the company’s mission-critical cybersecurity organization.
“Databricks is at the forefront of data and AI innovation as it pioneers the new lakehouse category and I am incredibly excited to join the leadership team during such a pivotal time,” said Serna. “I look forward to working with customers, partners and the world-class Databricks security team as we bring the company and product vision to new heights.”
Michael Swartz
Dotmatics Ltd, an Insightful Science company and provider of the cloud-first platform for scientific research, appointed Michael Swartz as its senior vice president of enterprise product. Swartz brings more than 20 years of experience in scientific software development. Before he joined Dotmatics, Swartz held the role of vice president of software solutions and strategy at PerkinElmer Informatics.
“The scientific community has waited a long time for an organization with the necessary scope and resources to provide easy-to-deploy, end-to-end software solutions for all critical R&D functions,” Swartz said. “The combination of Dotmatics’ scientific workflow capabilities with industry-leading bioinformatics products like SnapGene, Geneious Prime and biostatistical analysis products like GraphPad Prism provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform the scientific research and R&D market. Our industry is at a pivotal stage of evolution with scientists using a unified approach to data management to accelerate discovery. I am hugely excited to be working with fellow industry leaders at Dotmatics and Insightful Science to improve research and lab efficiency and ultimately help to make the world a healthier, cleaner, and better place to live.”
Ben Yerushalmi
Automation Anywhere, provider of robotic process automation solutions, appointed Ben Yerushalmi as its senior vice president of global alliances and channels. Yerushalmi comes to Automation Anywhere from Salesforce, where his most recent role was leading the company’s global digital 360 cloud alliances team.
"The partner ecosystem is critical to enabling our customers to adopt and scale intelligent automation, freeing up knowledge workers to focus on innovation and ultimately improving and transforming the way we work," Yerushalmi said. "Automation Anywhere is leading this journey with the world's only cloud-native, AI-powered RPA platform and I look forward to helping our partners and customers uncover the power of RPA to unleash human potential."
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.
