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It’s that time of month again–time for Big Data Career Notes, a monthly feature where we 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!
Jeff Giannetti
Jeff Giannetti
Jeff Giannetti has joined distributed file system developer Hammerspace as its chief revenue officer. Giannetti brings more than 30 years of experience to the role, including positions at WEKA, Cleversafe, Deep Instinct, Veeam, Sun Microsystems, and NetApp, where he worked for more than a decade. Giannetti will lead the global sales team for Hammerspace, which is developing its Global Data Platform to accelerate data movement to better serve data workloads.
“AI is trending to be the biggest technical development in our lifetime, but the challenge for organizations is creating a data infrastructure that can provide high-performance access to unstructured data anywhere,” Giannetti said in a press release. “Hammerspace solves these challenges using a standards-based approach, at a massive scale, while providing orchestration and global namespace capabilities that are wholly unique. I’m thrilled to be a part of Hammerspace, a world-class team enabling organizations to experience the full value of their investments in their AI infrastructure and ecosystem.”
Mark Lockareff
GridGain, which develops a real-time data processing platform, has named IT industry veteran Mark Lockareff as its new president and CEO. Lackareff brings more than 25 years of industry experience to GridGain, helping to grow, lead, and invest in big data, storage, and cloud companies, including Nexenta, Paraccel, Agiliance and Apptera.
Mark Lockareff
Lockareff was first introduced to GridGain 12 years ago through his relationship with Almaz Capital Partners, an early investor in GridGain. The company selected GridGain following a year marked by a 29% increase in annual recurring revenue per customer and annualized per-customer bookings growth of 20%.
“The data infrastructure and data analytics markets are experiencing explosive growth, driven by the increasing demand for real-time insights, as well as the rise of AI and cloud computing,” said Lockareff. “GridGain’s continued strong growth reflects the value and inherent innovation of its platform, as well as its ability to consistently execute in all areas of operations. I am extremely excited to step into the CEO role during this critical moment in the industry and work closely with this talented team to accelerate growth, solidify our position as the dominant real-time data platform technology provider, and continue innovating our market.”
Pat Gelsinger
Pat Gelsinger
It didn’t take former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger to find a new gig. A month after reporting his departure from Intel, we’re happy to report that Gelsinger has emerged as an investor in the UK-based AI chip startup Fractile.ai.
I’m very excited to now be a seed investor in @fractile_ai,” Gelsinger posted on X. “Having looked at many approaches to AI acceleration, the increasing and what will be dominance of low-cost inferencing is… aiming ahead of where AI is today. We need orders of magnitude cost and power reductions to make AI useful at scale. No approach has me more enthused than @fractile_ai, which is tackling in memory compute and leveraging semiconductors circuits in powerful ways. In fact, some of my ideas I was exploring in my graduate work of four decades ago might finally come to mainstream AI computing!”
Fractile.ai is developing chips that leverage in-memory technology. Processing transactions directly in RAM can help boost performance while lowering power consumption. The fledgling company, which has attracted $15 million in seed funding, is seeking to develop chips that will excel in running inference workloads.
Nancy Hensley
Nancy Hensley
Open source database developer EDB announced that it has hired former Nancy Hensley to be its new chief product officer. Hensley has 20 years of experience in the enterprise data analytics and AI space at IBM and Stats Perform, and will be tasked with unifying product management, marketing, and go-to-market initiatives at EDB, the enterprise PostgreSQL database company.
“What attracted me to EDB was the convergence of three things: the vision for the business, a hyper-focus on building and delivering a sovereign data and AI platform, and the company’s deep commitment to the long-term success of Postgres and customers,” Hensely said. “Given the culture and the customers, there is a remarkable opportunity here.”
Eric Willcox
Eric Willcox
Precisely this month announced it has promoted senior vice president of sales Eric Willcox to the position of Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Willcox, who previously worked at IBM and SAP, will now oversee the company’s go-to-market strategy, sales performance, client satisfaction, and overall operations of the global sales, channel partner, and customer success organizations.
“Trusted data has never been more critical to fueling business success and enabling timely, confident decisions–it’s the foundation for transformative initiatives like AI, automation, and advanced analytics,” Willcox said in a press release. “Data integrity is where the journey to trusted data begins, and Precisely is the undisputed leader in this space with decades of expertise spanning software, data, and strategy services. I’m thrilled to lead a world-class revenue organization and deepen our partnership with customers, contributing to their ongoing success.”
Manesh Tailor and Thomas Lloyd
Manesh Tailor
Observability firm New Relic announced it made two executive promotions recently. Manesh Tailor was promoted to the position of field chief technology officer for EMEA, while Thomas Lloyd was appointed chief business and operations officer.
Formerly the director of field engineering, Tailor will use his decade of experience at New Relic to work alongside customers and solve their complex observability challenges. Prior to New Relic, Tailor was a software developer at Agena and head of product strategy at International Trading Room Software.
“We want to create a value-based feedback loop,” Tailor said in a press release. “By building strong bi-directional relationships between us and our customers, we can not only provide our customers more value out of New Relic, but we can also use their insights and feedback to shape our products and services to better meet their business needs.”
Thomas Lloyd
Lloyd, meanwhile, will be responsible for leading the expansion of the company’s partnership ecosystem as the company’s chief business and operations officer. In addition to those positions, Lloyd, a graduate of UC Berkeley’s School of Law, also holds the position of chief legal officer and general counsel for New Relic.
“Our ecosystem-first mindset begins with understanding the needs of our customers. By integrating into their daily tools with our curated partnerships and agentic orchestration capabilities, our customers can access essential observability data and actionable insights in real time, and in a rapidly growing and expansive set of use cases and toolset,” Lloyd said in a press release.
Maeve Culloty
HPE announced it has appointed Maeve Culloty to lead HPE Financial Services. She will replace Gerri Gold, who is retiring after 23 years with HPE, including time at Compaq, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2002 for $25 billion.
Maeve Culloty
Culloty has held several positions at HPE over the years, including as managing director of HPE Ireland. Most recently served as chief of staff to HPE President and CEO Antonio Neri. She will continue to report to Neri as she heads up the unit of HPE that handles customer financing and asset management. Culloty is a qualified CPA and holds a bachelor’s degree in business from University of Limerick and a diploma in Applied Financial Law from the Law Society of Ireland.
“HPE Financial Services is a crown jewel of HPE, sustainably transforming customers’ and partners’ digital strategies through its smart IT lifecycle and financing options,” Neri said in a press release. “Leading this business requires deep understanding of the capital markets as well as the IT industry. Having worked closely with Maeve over the last two years, I know she will bring this expertise, as well as strong leadership and vision, to the role.”
Wissam Jabre
NetApp has appointed Wissam Jabre to be its executive vice president and chief financial officer, effective March 10. Jabre, who is currently the CFO for Western Digital according to his LinkedIn account, brings more than 20 years of experience to NetApp. He will be taking the position currently held by Mike Berry, who is retiring.
Wissam Jabre
In addition to Wetern Digital, Jabre also held finance positions at Advanced Micro Devices, Freescale Semiconductor, and Motorola. He began his career with Schlumberger, where he held engineering and finance role, after graduating from Columbia Business School.
“I’m excited to join this incredible team as NetApp builds on its momentum and captures market share with its leading intelligent data infrastructure platform,” Jabre said in a press release. “There is tremendous opportunity ahead to enhance value for our shareholders. I look forward to partnering with the leadership team and leading the finance organization as we build on the Company’s efforts to drive growth and profitability, as well as deliver results for our stakeholders.”
To read last month’s edition of Career Notes, click here.
