Big Data Career Notes: April 2024 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!

Hamid Azzawe

Hamid Azzawe, who took over as the new CEO of parallel graph database developer TigerGraph in February, was formally announced today as the new chief executive. As a technology and database veteran, Azzawe had stints at IBM, Microsoft, AWS, Meta, and Bloomberg. He replaces Mingxi Wu, who was appointed as an interim CEO last year, and who returns to his position as head of engineering for the Redwood City, California company.

Hamid Azzawe 

“The reason I joined TigerGraph is because the technology was really appealing,” he told Datanami in an interview. “It was similar to the startup that I built from the ground up, but taking it to the next level in terms of graph databases.”

Azzawe has a three-part focus for TigerGraph. The first is around “customer obsession” and focusing on making sure the product is mature, stable, and easy to use. The second is exploiting the company’s advantages at the intersection of generative AI and knowledge graphs. The The third prong is offering AI-powered knowledge graph solutions.

Liz Warner

Liz Warner

Open source database developer Percona this month announced the appointment Liz Warner to the position of chief technology officer, where she will lead the development of the company’s offerings.

Warner comes to the Raleigh, North Carolina-based company from holding the CTO job at Weaveworks, a cloud-native container management company. She also previously served as CTO at Clim8 Invest, Nationwide for Business, Motion Picture Solutions, Mettle, LendInvest, and Toyota Connected.

“Liz brings a wealth of experience and plenty of success transforming organizations across a variety of industries,” said Percona CEO Ann Schlemmer in a press release. “Her experience and leadership will prove invaluable to the Percona team as we continue to scale and build world-class open source database solutions.”

Peter Brennan

Peter Brennan

Peter Brennan has been hired to be the CEO of the US operations of Scality, called Scality Inc. Brennan originally joined the San Francisco, California-based company in March 2023 as its chief revenue officer.

“It’s been exciting to help lead Scality through an exceptional year of global growth,” Brennan said in a press release. “Now, I look forward to guiding the U.S. operations as the chief executive to make a significant market impact as more organizations move to modernize their cyber-resilient and AI-ready infrastructures.

Ahmed Quadri

Ahmed Quadri

ThoughtSpot announced this month the promotion of Ahmed Quadri to the position of Chief Customer Officer. Quadri has more than 20 years of experience leading customer-focused teams. Before joining ThoughtSpot, Quadri served as chief customer officer at Heap. He also had roles at Reltio, Salesforce, Informatica, and Siperian.

“I’m excited about ThoughtSpot’s focus on helping its customers break free from legacy business intelligence and truly spark their own data renaissance with AI-powered analytics,” Quadri wrote in a LinkedIn post. “I’m honored to join [CRO] Jeff Depa, [co-founder and executive chairman] Ajeet Singh, [Chief Development Officer] Sumeet Arora, [CFO] Mohit Daswani, and the rest of the team I’ve been so impressed with. I look forward to working with our customers to deliver a world-class experience on your journey with us!

Eric Benson

Eric Benson

Cloud-based ETO provider Matillion announced that Eric Benson has been appointed chief revenue officer. Benson arrives at the English-American company having spent more than 10 years at AWS in multiple senior executive roles including enterprise sales, business development, and digital native strategy. He also spent time at VMware.

“I could not be more excited to join Matillion,” Benson said in a press release. “The role presents the perfect combination of technology, people and culture, making it an easy decision to join particularly as we move beyond the hype of artificial intelligence to real-world use cases. With the explosion of data in the enterprise and rise of AI, Matillion is well positioned to execute and innovate for the future.”

Mark Khavkin

Mark Khavkin

Object storage software provider MinIO this month announced the hiring of Mark Khavkin to be its new chief financial officer. Khavkin arrives at MinIO from Web application hosting provider Pantheon Systems, where he helped lead the company’s growth from $10 million to more than $100 million in annual recurring revenues.

“Object storage is foundational for AI infrastructure in the public and private clouds and MinIO is widely considered the standard on-prem or in the colocation for these workloads,” Khavkin said in a press release. “With product market fit firmly established, it is about scaling the company financially and operationally to meet the requirements of our enterprise customer base. I look forward to leading the company’s financial strategy as we grow and take advantage of the market opportunities presented by the revolution in large-scale AI data infrastructure.”

Todd Cione, Paul Duggan, and Madhu Ranganathan

(L to R) Todd Cione, Madhu Ranganathan, and Paul Duggan

OpenText this month announced the appointment of three executive positions, including Todd Cione as president of worldwide sales, Paul Duggan as president and chief customer officer, and Madhu Ranganathan as president, CFO, and corporate development.

Cione, who is new to the company, will lead a charter focused on spearheading the company’s global go-to-market strategy and revenue growth, according to OpenText, while Duggan will focus on customer success and customer transformations and Ranganathan will focus on the company’s finance, corporate operations, and corporate development.

“I am delighted to have Todd join the OpenText executive leadership team and to announce the expanded responsibilities for Paul and Madhu,” said Mark J. Barrenechea, the CEO and CTO, OpenText. “Todd is a results-oriented leader with a proven track record of delivering predictable and profitable growth.”

Jeff Reed

Jeff Reed

AI security company Vectra AI this month announced Jeff Reed as its new chief product officer, a newly created position. Reed joins the San Jose, California-based company from Google Cloud, where he most recently served as vice president of product for cloud security. He also held positions at Cisco and Symantec.

“I’m excited to work with a team that has built a truly differentiated approach to helping customers cut through the noise to detect hybrid cyber attacks quickly and at scale,” Reed said in a press release. “By creating the chief product officer role, Vectra AI is underscoring its commitment to delivering the best-in-class security solution on the market. I look forward to bringing my experience in cloud, networking, and identity to help ensure customers and their SOC teams are provided the most efficacious tools needed to drive efficiency and reduce cybersecurity risk.”

To read last month’s edition of Career Notes, click here.

Editor’s note: This article has been corrected. Peter Brennan was hired as the CEO of the US operations of Scality Inc., not the whole company. Jerome Lecat remains the global CEO of Scality. Datanami regrets the error.