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November 14, 2022

Big Data Career Notes: November 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!


Sharyl Givens

Splunk Inc. appointed Sharyl Givens as its chief people officer. Givens joined Splunk after 11 years at Proofpoint serving in human resources leadership roles, including the past eight years as chief human resources officer.

“The workplace has evolved tremendously over the last two years, putting a spotlight on how companies support employees and invest in their professional and personal goals,” said Givens. “Splunk has always stood out to me for its culture of transparency and its recognition that Splunkers are key to the company’s current and future success. I couldn’t be more excited to join this passionate and hard-working team, and look forward to building on our already strong programs with the goal of unlocking greater levels of growth, performance and connectivity across our workplace.”

Jen Grant 

Pecan AI, the solutions provider in AI-based predictive analytics for business teams and the BI analysts who support them, appointed Jen Grant to its board of directors. Grant brings 15 years of experience to the role. She is a current board member of Dialpad and Kyndi and advises Appify, Stych, Waitlist.me, and Postal.io.

“I’m honored to be appointed to Pecan’s board of directors,” said Grant. “When I was at Looker, we put analytics and data exploration into the hands of business teams, and now Pecan puts the power of predictive analytics through AI-based modeling into the hands of business teams. With Pecan, companies can literally anticipate the future actions of users, buyers, or customers, and then can put those predictions into immediate action within their product, website, or buying cycle. It’s not just about dashboards anymore. I am thrilled to be working with the talented team at Pecan to bring this incredible capability to every business everywhere.”

Daniel Lender and Stephen Welles 

Denodo appointed Daniel Lender as its chief financial officer. Lender brings more than 30 years of enterprise software and financial markets experience to the role. He joined Denodo after a long tenure with QAD Inc., a provider of next generation manufacturing and supply chain management solutions in the cloud, where he served as executive vice president and chief financial officer.

In addition, Stephen Welles joined Denodo as its chief legal officer. Welles brings more than 25 years of experience to the position. He joined Denodo from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where served as a senior counsel. Before that, he was the senior vice president and general counsel at Oplink Communications.

Nancy Louisnord

MANTA, the data lineage platform, appointed Nancy Louisnord as its chief marketing officer. Louisnord will be responsible for driving the company’s product marketing strategy and global marketing initiatives as it looks to increase product and brand awareness.

“I am delighted to join MANTA at such a pivotal moment in its business journey as more companies strive to be truly data-driven organizations,” said Louisnord. “I look forward to working with such a talented team and am deeply committed to building on its mission to transform complex data environments by driving the global marketing strategy and strengthening its market positioning.”

Ramsey Masri 

Ceres Imaging, the data analytics company that provides risk insights for sustainable agriculture, appointed Ramsey Masri as its chief executive officer. Masri will focus on operational needs, fundraising and corporate governance. He will also lead internal teams to drive company growth and expansion into new industries.

“I am passionate about Ceres’ mission and its focus on growers and helping them create healthier, more sustainable food sources for an ever-growing world,” said Masri. “As a father, I care greatly about the world my kids will inherit. I’ve had the opportunity to be a California grape grower for the better part of 20 years, and I also grew up on farms focused on corn, cotton and potatoes. So I have great empathy for farmers and the farming ecosystem.”

Gunnar Morling

Gunnar Morling joined Decodable, a serverless real-time data platform, as a software engineer. Morling comes to Decodable from Red Hat, where he served as a software engineer leading the Debezium project, a platform for change data capture.

“Living the stream — I am thrilled to share that I’ve joined Decodable as a software engineer!” said Morling in a Twitter post. “The world is real-time, and so should be your data. Beyond excited to help build the real-time data platform for everyone!” In response to the Twitter post, Morling expanded on his reasoning behind his move to Decodable in a blog post.

Craig Nelson and John Mracek

Alluxio, the open source data orchestration platform developer for data driven workloads such as large-scale analytics and AI/ML, appointed Craig Nelson as its senior vice president of global sales. Nelson brings to Alluxio more than 20 years of executive management experience having held positions in software and technology companies around the globe.

In addition, Alluxio promoted John Mracek to the role of senior vice president of business development and strategic alliances. He joined Alluxio in July of 2022 as its SVP of sales and marketing. Mracek currently serves as the strategic advisor of rENIAC, Inc and is an official member of the Forbes Technology Council.

Colin Parris

GE announced its GE Senior Vice President and GE Digital Chief Technology Officer Dr. Colin Parris will be named the 2023 Black Engineer of the Year by US Black Engineer & Information Technology magazine at the 37th annual Black Engineer of the Year Award STEM Conference. Parris was recognized for this award for his significant contributions to the fields of science and engineering and his work in digital transformation.

“I am honored and humbled to have been named this year’s Black Engineer of the Year.” Parris said. “Over the course of my career, I have been fortunate to belong to diverse and talented teams that have helped make my achievements possible. This award is just as much theirs as it is mine.”

Rey Perez

Confluent, Inc., the data streaming pioneer, appointed Rey Perez as its chief customer officer. Rey will be responsible for leading the customer success, sales engineering services, training and support teams. Rey joined Confluent from New Relic, where he served as CCO.

“One of the things that attracted me most to Confluent is the leadership team’s unwavering focus on customer success,” said Rey. “I am also excited about the opportunity Confluent’s current hyper-growth stage presents to refine programs and work closely with the team. I could not be more excited to build on the team’s customer-first approach to drive growth and enable customers to set their data in motion with data streaming.”

David Tunnell and Richard Wallace 

Splunk Inc. appointed David Tunnell and Richard Wallace to its board of directors. Wallace previously served on the board of directors of Proofpoint, Inc., a cybersecurity and compliance company, from 2017 to 2021, and NetApp, Inc., a storage and data management company, from 2011 to 2019.

Tunnell is a partner at Hellman & Friedman,  a private investment firm. He is also a member of the H&F Investment Committee, leads the Firm’s San Francisco office, and oversees its investing activities in the Software & Tech and Insurance & Insurance Services sectors.

Ravi Vedantam

Unravel Data, the first DataOps observability platform built to meet the needs of modern data teams, appointed Ravi Vedantam as its vice president of global partnerships. Vedantam brings more than 20 years of experience in channel sales. Before joining Unravel, Vedantam served as global VP and worldwide partner for Lacework. He has also served as VP of global partnerships for MongoDB.

“As data teams today manage thousands of data pipelines in their environment, they require automation, full-stack visibility, and actionable intelligence that meet their cost, performance, and quality needs,” said Vedantam. “I’m excited to be part of the Unravel team as we continue to see high demand for DataOps observability solutions. Partners can leverage Unravel’s Platform to help their end customers migrate to the cloud on time, on budget, and tackle data quality issues at scale and speed.”


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.

 

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