Big Data Career Notes: December 2022 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!

Grant Brigden

Cinchy appointed Grant Brigden to the role of vice president of marketing. As VP of marketing, Brigden will help drive Cinchy’s growth as it expands throughout markets in North America and Europe, and help oversee the addition of tech solutions.

“It’s exciting to join a company that really is disruptive—it’s not a cliché or empty hype,” Brigden said. “We have so much data now, and it’s so hard to access, that we need to transform the way data is managed and made available to the people and applications that need it most, and Cinchy does exactly that. The Cinchy Dataware Platform liberates enterprise data into a network, an approach that fundamentally eliminates data integration and enables the zero-copy integration framework to enhance collaboration without compromising security or compliance. I look forward to taking this dramatic technology advance to many new target markets.”

Stewart Bryson, John Gontarz, and Wade Tibke

Coalesce.io, the data transformation company, appointed Stewart Bryson as its head of customer experience. Bryson brings more than 20 years of experience building data-driven solutions for customers, including his role as founder and CEO of Red Pill Analytics.

Coalesce also welcomed John Gontarz as its head of solutions architecture. Gontarz brings more than 20 years of experience to Coalesce, most recently as the principal data platform architect of the field CTO office at Snowflake.

Lastly, Wade Tibke joined Coalesce as its senior vice president of marketing. Tibke brings more than 20 years of experience in technology marketing, most recently as SVP at Saviynt. He also held senior leadership positions at Tableau, Sigma, and DroneDeploy.

Niv Dayan

Speedb, the company behind the Speedb data engine, a drop-in replacement for RocksDB, appointed Niv Dayan to its advisory board. Dayan designs and optimizes the data structures used in modern database systems.

Dayan’s research examines new ways to scale storage engines for 100x big data by revisiting a classic challenge in computer science: how to scale core dictionary data structures such that their performance deteriorates as slowly as possible with respect to massive increases in data size.

Casey George

Talend, a global leader in data integration and data management, appointed Casey George as its chief revenue officer. George most recently served as senior vice president and general manager at Verint and spent over 20 years at IBM in multiple executive roles.

“In today’s uncertain and rapidly evolving world, it’s imperative for companies to trust and understand how to use their data to gain a competitive edge,” said George. “Talend’s unique ability to turn data into a multiplier has never been more relevant. I look forward to working with the rest of the leadership team to help our customers thrive in a rapidly changing business environment.”

Marlo Green and Wendy Lurrie

Sinequa appointed Marlo Green as its global head of human resources. In her role, Green will focus on empowering a global workforce while ensuring the organization is best positioned to support the rapidly expanding demand for intelligent search. Prior to joining Sinequa, she held the role of executive director of talent and resource management at Brown University.

In addition, Sinequa appointed Wendy Lurrie as the company’s chief marketing officer. In this new role, Lurrie will manage Sinequa’s global marketing and brand strategy. Before joining Sinequa, Lurrie served as senior vice president of global marketing at Medidata, a Dassault Systèmes company.

Katariina Korhonen, Amy Krishnamohan, Ian Massingham, Jonah Kowall

Aiven, the open source cloud data platform company, appointed Katariina Korhonen as its vice president of strategy and operations. Prior to her new role, Korhonen spent the last six years in various executive roles at Smartly.

Amy Krishnamohan joined Aiven as its VP of product marketing. Krishnamohan will be responsible for Aiven’s product marketing direction and strategy, as well as engaging with key stakeholders.

In addition, Aiven appointed Ian Massingham as the company’s VP of developer relations and community. Prior to joining Aiven, Massingham led the developer relations and community team at MongoDB.

Lastly, Jonah Kowall joined Aiven as its VP of product management. In his role, Kowall will lead and execute the product strategy and head the product team responsible for platform enhancements to support ongoing growth in Aiven’s customer base.

Hayley Munro

Pyramid Analytics, a decision intelligence platform provider, appointed Hayley Munro as its vice president of global customer success, a newly created role. Munro held leadership roles at FICO, an analytics software company, where she was managing director and vice president of global customer success.

“I knew straight away that Pyramid was the right company for me,” Munro said. “Having been in the analytics market, the Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform caught my attention because of what it uniquely does, who it does it for, and the transformational potential it delivers. The Pyramid Decision Intelligence Platform delivers data-driven insights for anyone to make faster, more intelligent decisions, from data scientists to non-technical business users. I am excited to help our customers see how the Pyramid Platform can open new opportunities that had been visible before.”

Jessica Reeves

Anaconda Inc. promoted Jessica Reeves to the role of chief operating officer. Reeves joined Anaconda in 2017 as vice president of global HR and became the senior vice president of operations in 2020. As COO, she will focus on growing the company’s globally dispersed workforce, spearheading new initiatives, and scaling operational efficiencies.

“A company is a collection of human beings, each unique in their own ways and my goal is to find balance, focus, scale, and efficiency to support each employee’s growth,” Reeves said. “As we move into a new era of business defined by data, Anaconda is well-positioned to lead the market as the world’s largest platform for data science. I’m excited to take this next step in my career with Anaconda and play an even more involved role in making this company thrive.”

Izhar Sharon

OpenDrives, Inc., the provider of enterprise-scale, software-defined data storage and management solutions, appointed Izhar Sharon as its chief executive officer. Sharon brings 25 years of enterprise data storage expertise leading revenue growth and company scale for companies such as Infinidat, IBM and Dell EMC.

“OpenDrives’ open and agnostic approach to data management goes beyond impressive throughput rates and fast deployment,” said Sharon. “The company has created a culture where performance means more than numbers or latency, it’s the collective success of its customers, partners and team. This culture, along with clearly differentiated open technology, is one of many reasons I am incredibly excited to guide OpenDrives in its next phase of company growth.”

Kristin Supancich

AHEAD, a provider of enterprise cloud solutions, appointed Kristin Supancich as its chief people officer. Supancich will partner with the rest of the executive team to support and steward a work environment that nurtures excellence and fuels growth.

“This is an exciting time for AHEAD as the company continues to pursue an aggressive growth strategy,” said Suspancich. “A company’s most valuable asset has always been its people and AHEAD is known for its innovative workforce. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with talented individuals across the country and provide them with the right environment to bring out their best work.”

Ben Taylor

Dataiku, the platform for everyday AI, appointed Ben Taylor as its first chief AI strategist. Taylor joined Dataiku from DataRobot, where he held the role of chief AI evangelist. Before DataRobot, he co-founded deep learning startup Zeff.ai, which was acquired by DataRobot.

“A simple truth we face is that AI will be part of every business, whether you like it or not. The only question is whether you want to be a leader or a laggard,” said Taylor. “However, the technology itself is nothing without people asking the right questions and bringing what makes us intrinsically human to AI. This is what makes Dataiku truly special – the company is not just about the technical aspects of its solid AI platform but is centered around collaboration and the people who create the types of jaw-dropping projects I hope to be a part of. It has soul, but it also has the fundamentals right. That combination is truly something unique in the industry and something I want to invest my life force into.”

Joerg Tewes

Exasol, the high-performance analytics database provider, Joerg Tewes as its chief executive officer. Tewes has held senior leadership roles at Amazon, driving the development and commercialization of its tablet, e-reader, and video communication technologies. Tewes is a member of Band of Angels, serving as an angel investor and mentor to technology start-ups.

“Data is the lifeline of every organization – but yet, so many businesses fail to gain valuable insights from the overabundance of data at their disposal. Exasol is in a unique position to solve this critical challenge, helping organizations get ahead of the competition,” Tewes said. “There’s a lot of opportunity for Exasol in the market, which is what excites me most about joining this company. I’m ready to work closely with our talented team to continue innovating and delivering for our customers.”

Rowan Trollope 

Redis appointed Rowan Trollope as its chief executive officer. Trollope joins Redis from Five9, Inc., where he served as CEO for over four years. Before Five9, he was senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Applications Group and an executive leadership team member.

“People are fed up with slow and unresponsive apps and businesses realize they need to redesign their products or else lose their customers. At the same time AI is revolutionizing how software is built and is being embedded in virtually every app,” saidTrollope. “In response, entrepreneurs have been hard at work inventing the next generation tech stack, from AI tool-chains to front-end frameworks to the database layer, to make it easy for developers to build fast, scalable apps with AI at the core. I’m excited to join Redis because Ofer, Yiftach, and their team alongside the incredible open-source community, have been creating an insanely great platform that is loved by developers like me. Redis is well positioned to continue disrupting the database market and taking data layer performance to the next level.”

Vishal Venkatram

The Modern Data Company appointed Vishal Venkatram as its field chief technology officer of customer solutions. Venkatram has a strong background in technology leadership, having most recently served with GE Power and GE Energy. While at GE, he helped transform global delivery and sales operations.

“Data, decision insights, AI, and machine learning will fuel innovation over the next decade,” Venkatram said. “While we have point solutions that enable and activate data, its sheer proliferation has caused startups and enterprises alike to miss out on opportunities to monetize and create sustainable DataOps. Modern is making a big promise — unifying data organization-wide and simplifying its operationalization. But having seen DataOS in action, I know we will deliver where others have fallen short.”

Jisheng Wang

Traceable, an API security and observability company, appointed Dr. Jisheng Wang as head of artificial intelligence and machine learning and vice president of engineering. Wang most recently served as the senior director of engineering at Juniper Networks. Before that, he was senior director of data science in the CTO Office at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

“The depths of Traceable’s 360-degree data collection and its world-class team were why I joined the company,” said Wang. “With the fast adoption of cloud-native and microservice-based software development architecture, APIs, which are often referred to as the glue that holds the software, applications and services together, are unsurprisingly becoming the new attack surface of some business-threatening attacks including OWASP threats, abuse and fraud, and data exfiltration. With Traceable’s uniquely designed out-of-band and in-app data collection approaches and the advanced AI/ML technologies, we can build the most comprehensive API security solution enabling customers to monitor, detect, investigate and remediate different kinds of API attacks in a single platform.”

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.