Big Data Career Notes: January 2022 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!

DeLisa Alexander 

Qlik appointed DeLisa Alexander to the company’s board of directors as its first outside director. Most recently, Alexander served as executive vice president and chief people officer at Red Hat, where she led the organization’s efforts to build an open and unique leadership culture. 

“I firmly believe a company’s success can be greatly fueled by an exceptional culture and employee experience,” said Alexander. “Beyond its emphasis on culture, what really attracted me to Qlik is the team’s genuine mission-driven approach to democratizing analytics, as evidenced by its focus on data literacy for all.”

Sanjay Dhawan 

SymphonyAI, a leader in high-value enterprise AI software solutions for strategic industries, announced Sanjay Dhawan has joined as chief executive officer. Dhawan will drive SymphonyAI’s growth as an integrated company pursuing a single strategy across retail, CPG, financial services, manufacturing, media, IT service management, and additional sectors.

“I am delighted and honored to lead SymphonyAI as its CEO. SymphonyAI’s scale, growth, customer base, and expertise combined with the EurekaAI platform is set to deliver sustained value,” said Dhawan. “Having had the experience of working with Romesh to build world-class, results-oriented teams and companies, I am pleased to have the opportunity to join him again. SymphonyAI’s relentless focus on delivering rapid, measurable value to customers is our recipe for success. SymphonyAI’s ability to catalyze the next generation of problem-solving for business, fueled by enterprise AI, will lead to exciting outcomes for both customers and investors.”

Steve Debenham 

Reltio appointed Steve Debenham as its chief legal officer. Debenham will be responsible for leading the company’s global legal organization. He brings more than 20 years of leadership experience to Reltio as a senior legal executive in the technology industry, including with SaaS, cloud-based and connected data platforms.

“I am thrilled to be joining Reltio and to have the opportunity to work alongside Chris and the entire leadership team during this exciting period of transformation and growth,” said Debenham. “Reltio is a truly innovative, industry-leading organization with a fantastic team, and I am looking forward to helping execute on its long-term strategic plans.” 

Sharan Foga

Instaclustr, which helps organizations deliver applications at scale by operating and supporting their open source data infrastructure, appointed Sharan Foga as its director of community and developer relations. Foga will support and encourage new participation and growth across the open source communities Instaclustr is active in, such as Apache Cassandra, Apache Kafka, and OpenSearch.

Foga is a current ASF board member and has more than five years of experience leading Apache community development. From 2017 until joining the board this year, Foga served as the vice president of Apache Community Development, where she was the primary liaison between the Apache board of directors and the Apache community development team.

Elissa Fink and Peter Campbell

Dataiku appointed Elissa Fink and Peter Campbell to its board of directors. Elissa Fink currently serves on several boards including Pantheon, Qumulo, and Intellimize. Prior to retiring at the end of 2018, Fink was Tableau Software’s chief marketing officer for over 11 years.

Peter Campbell currently serves on the board of Latch and Tufin Software Technologies. He brings a background in developing and executing growth strategies and building world-class, global finance organizations. Campbell joined Mimecast in 2006 and spent almost 13 years as its chief financial officer. 

Dustin Grosse 

Talend appointed Dustin Grosse as its chief marketing and strategy officer. Grosse brings over 25 years of marketing, strategy, and go-to-market general management experience to Talend. Most recently, he held the role of CMSO at Nintex, the digital transformation and low-code process automation solutions provider.

“Companies of all types must become more data-driven to effectively compete in modern markets and need complete data management platforms, like Talend Data Fabric, to quickly build, continually monitor, and easily optimize their operational data health,” said Grosse. “I look forward to working closely with Talend senior leadership and our staff around the globe to promote our world-class solutions and support our growing customer base and expanding partner ecosystem.”

Kaitlin Hartshorn and Terri McBride

Protegrity, a data security solutions provider, promoted Kaitlin Hartshorn to the role of vice president of legal affairs. Since joining Protegrity in 2017, Hartshorn has served as the company’s senior director of legal affairs. In her new role as VP, legal affairs, she will continue to handle all legal and corporate governance functions of the business globally. 

In addition, Terri McBride was promoted to the role of executive vice president of global people and human resources. McBride will oversee all HR and people management functions of Protegrity across its global workforce of over 400 employees. She brings more than 15 years of experience in human capital, transformational change, organization design, talent management, and performance management. 

Dev Ittycheria and Tracey Newell 

DataRobot appointed Dev Ittycheria and Tracey Newell to its board of directors. Ittycheria has over two decades of experience as an entrepreneur, investor, and leader specializing in high-growth software companies. He currently serves as the president chief executive officer of MongoDB. Prior to MongoDB, Ittycheria was the co-founder and CEO of BladeLogic and the president of BMC Software.

Tracey Newell brings over 20 years of driving go-to-market strategy at high-growth software companies to DataRobot. She currently serves on the boards of SailPoint, Sumo Logic and Highspot, and is an advisor for Blackrock’s Long Term Private Capital Group. Newell is the former president of Informatica, where she was responsible for global sales, marketing, sales operations and customer success. 

Ashutosh Kulkarni

Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack, promoted Ashutosh Kulkarni to the role of chief executive officer. He was also appointed to the company’s board of directors. He was promoted from his role as chief product officer. 

“I am honored and excited to follow in Shay’s footsteps as CEO and lead Elastic through our next chapter of growth,” said Kulkarni. “We have a tremendous opportunity ahead of us as the markets we operate in continue to grow, and as the volume and complexity of data continues to explode. From Observability and Security to Enterprise Search, Elastic is helping thousands of customers use the power of search to extract value from their data in more intuitive ways than ever before. And Elastic Cloud is helping them do this with greater scale, speed, and relevance than ever before.”

Adam Lurie

Torch.AI, a provider of artificial intelligence-powered ultra-high-speed data processing products, appointed Adam Lurie as its chief strategy officer. Lurie will be responsible for the expansion and reach of Torch.AI’s capabilities across customer segments, as well as oversee corporate development activity.

“I’m proud to join an organization known for being a trailblazer in AI and large-scale data enablement,” said Lurie. “Torch.AI holds a reputation for putting their clients first, while simultaneously advancing the use of AI to improve mission performance. I’m thrilled to help elevate this reputation and further the organization’s mission by leveraging my acquisition and leadership experience in my new role as CSO.”

Patrick McCarthy

Precisely appointed Patrick McCarthy as its chief revenue officer. McCarthy brings to Precisely more than 25 years in technology sales and operational leadership as the company continues its growth trajectory while helping clients achieve business results through trusted data.

“Data integrity is a business imperative for companies to successfully grow revenue, improve operational agility and manage risk,” said McCarthy. “Solving real-world problems is what drew me to Precisely. I’m excited to help our clients see the vision for the future grounded in accurate, consistent, and contextual data.”

Jacques Nadeau

Incorta appointed Jacques Nadeau, co-creator of Apache Arrow and co-founder of Dremio, to its board of advisors. Nadeau brings extensive knowledge and experience in open source software development and community relations and will help guide Incorta’s future plans for innovation and open source contributions.

“Data analytics technology is long overdue for a reality check. The traditional ways of enabling analytics on massive, highly normalized schemas — high-maintenance transformations and brittle ETL — just don’t cut it anymore,” said Nadeau. “Everyone is looking for faster time to value and Incorta’s unique approach completely redefines what people should expect.”

Elizabeth O’Callahan

NetApp, a cloud-led, data-centric software company, promoted Elizabeth O’Callahan to the role of chief legal officer and general counsel. O’Callahan previously served as senior vice president and general counsel. 

“I’m looking forward to expanding my leadership role at NetApp during a time of such explosive growth,” said O’Callahan. “As NetApp continues to expand its business, the dynamic regulatory and market conditions we must address, underscore the criticality of our legal department to NetApp’s success.”

Taylor Roberts 

Stardog, the enterprise knowledge graph platform provider, appointed Taylor Roberts as its chief financial officer. He brings almost 20 years of financial management experience and a strong background in revenue scaling and organizational growth to Stardog. Roberts will be responsible for overseeing the finance and accounting departments for Stardog.

“I am delighted to join the Stardog team and help them capitalize on their tremendous growth trajectory,” said Roberts. “I was immediately drawn to Stardog’s innovative technology, aggressive growth plans, and dedication to helping customers speed analytics insight and reduce cost.”

Rick Rosenthal and Tyler Jones

CLARA Analytics, a provider of artificial intelligence technology in the commercial insurance industry, appointed Rick Rosenthal as its chief financial officer. Rosenthal will be responsible for overseeing the company’s finance and accounting organizations, including its corporate development and investor relations functions.

In addition, Tyler Jones joined CLARA Analytics as its chief customer and marketing officer. Jones will be responsible for directing the company’s complete relationship with its customers and driving efforts to assess and elevate experiences at each touchpoint across the customer journey, ensuring that commercial insurers are achieving optimal value from CLARA’s AI platform.

Andy Sacks 

Ahana appointed Andy Sacks as its chief revenue officer. Sacks will be responsible for leading Ahana Cloud’s global revenue strategy. He brings over 20 years of enterprise experience in developing direct and indirect routes to market across both pre and post-sales organizations.

“I am excited to join Ahana, the only company that is simplifying open data lake analytics with the easiest SaaS for Presto, enabling data platform teams to provide high performance SQL analytics on their S3 data lakes and other data sources,” said Sacks. “I am looking forward to leveraging my experiences to help drive Ahana’s growth through innovative Presto use cases for customers without the complexities of managing cloud deployments.”

David Wallace 

Circonus, the full-stack monitoring and analytics platform built for the enterprise, appointed David Wallace as its chief technology officer. Wallace has held several leadership positions, including as chief technology officer of Greenphire, a provider of clinical trial financial solutions (acquired by Thoma Bravo) and as director of information technology at iPipeline, a provider of cloud-based software products for life insurance and financial services industry (acquired by Roper Technologies). 

“I am very pleased to be joining Circonus at this exciting time of the company’s growth,” said Wallace.  “In joining Circonus, I was impressed with the exceptional leadership team, the power and performance of the technology and the stunning list of well-known enterprise clients and use cases. The vision for the future is very compelling and I look forward to working with the team as we help our clients harness the power of telemetry at scale to deliver exceptional business insights and value.”

Naveen Zutshi

Databricks, the data and artificial intelligence company, appointed Naveen Zutshi as its chief information officer. Zutshi will be responsible for leading the global information technology functions at Databricks. He joined Databricks from Palo Alto Networks, where he most recently spent six years as CIO overseeing IT strategy and operations

“Databricks is trailblazing the future of data architecture with its lakehouse platform and I am thrilled to be part of the journey as CIO,” said Zutshi. “I look forward to collaborating with the exceptional team at Databricks to better support our customers and enable rapid scale of our business.”

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.