Intekhab Nazeer comes to WekaIO from Unifi Software (acquired by DELL Boomi), a provider of self-service data discovery and preparation platforms, where he was CFO. Prior to Unifi Software, his professional experience includes CFO and Chief Operations Officer (COO) appointments at Tribal Planet, a SaaS platform for social impact, HCL Group, Solix Group, Platfora (acquired by Workday), Greenplum (acquired by EMC), Appcelerator (acquired by Axway), and Pelikan Technologies.

Nazeer brings a strong background in high technology to his position at WekaIO, including deep experience in scalable operational efficiency and accounting and finance automation process improvements. He has gleaned his expertise from more than two decades in corporate finance and accounting leadership positions for companies in industries that include software and biotech.

He is a member of the American Institute of CPAs, a Chartered Accountant from India and holds a B.Com. degree in business administration, accounts and law, and business economics.

He sits on the board of Magical Bridge Foundation and the advisory boards of Solix Technologies and Tackle.io.

Dr. Omri Palmon, a technology veteran for more than 30 years, brings his extensive background in software development, research and product management to WekaIO. Previously he was VP of Marketing and Product for XIV, a storage start-up, until its acquisition by IBM in 2008. Later he served as part of the IBM/XIV team until it reached half a billion dollars in sales.

Before that Dr. Palmon held various technical and product-centric positions in telecommunications and embedded software development.

Dr. Palmon earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and MSc. and BSc. degrees in pure mathematics from Tel Aviv University

As a co-founder at WekaIO, Maor Ben-Dayan, brings a wide ranging skillset to the opportunities facing the company, skills won over nearly 20 years of deep technical experience in startup and large corporate environments.

As project lead for IBM’s XIV Storage System, Mr. Ben-Dayan led a team of engineers developing future capabilities for the IBM XIV Storage platform. Maor also led development of state-of-the-art collision avoidance technology at segment leader Mobileye and led a team developing Unix kernel code through all stages of development from requirements through research, development and intensive testing under severe schedule pressure and very high quality standards for the Israeli Defense Forces.

He holds Master’s degrees from Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a BSc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.

Ken Grohe is a technology veteran, bringing more than three decades of SaaS and storage leadership to his role as President and Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) for WekaIO. Prior to joining the company, he was CRO of Samsung’s Stellus Technologies, a leading data systems company that addresses the way companies capture, store, access, and process unstructured data.

Prior to Stellus, he served as President of SignNow, SVP and GM of Barracuda Networks, and CRO of Virident, a Western Digital Company. Grohe also had an impressive 25-year career at Dell EMC, finishing as VP and GM with a focus on the global flash business.

In addition to being an international best-selling author, Grohe holds a degree from Stanford University Graduate School of Business and a BS, cum laude, in Management from Boston College.

Nir Makovski joined WekaIO as a seasoned software executive with broad global experience and proven track record of inventing and developing complex high volume products. He has developed deep domain expertise in mobile devices, wireless communication systems and telecommunications.

This expertise was acquired in part over ten years as a senior member of the technical staff at Intel, where Makovski led complex projects adroitly across organizations and geographies where he developed a reputation as an execution-driven manager with a strong sense of urgency and strong leadership, mentoring and communication skills.

Prior to Intel, Nir served as a Group Manager with the rank of Major in the Israeli Defense Forces with responsibility for technology development in the areas of highly reliable systems, networking, security and operating system internals.

He holds an Executive MBA from Tel Aviv University and a BSc. Computer Engineering from the prestigious Technion-Machon Technologi Le’Israel.

George started his career in 1996 as an independent IT consultant. In 1999 through 2001 he worked for EMC Germany in several technical positions. These positions ranged from Regional Software Specialist to the NAS Specialist for the EMC Celerra product line in Germany.

He joined HDS in October 2001 and he has been in NAS product management positions in Germany and EMEA for over 5 years. George moved to the United States in 2005 and took over the worldwide product management role for core products and emerging products within Hitachi Data Systems and then moved over to Engineering as the Vice President of Technology in 2015.

In 2016 he joined Amazon AWS RDS Product Management. The Amazon RDS portfolio consists of MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MS SQL, Oracle, Aurora for MySQL and Aurora for PostgreSQL.

George joined the Teradata executive team in Jan 2018 as the Vice President for the Analytical Ecosystem Product Management division driving and owning the strategy and roadmap of the Analytical Ecosystem including 3rd party integrations and partnerships.

George earned his Bachelor of Science in IT technologies in Boeblingen, Germany. He also holds multiple technical certifications from Microsoft and other industry organizations. He speaks fluent German, Greek and English.

Fun fact… George became the national German champion in Foosball in single-player mode in 1998.

Barbara Murphy brings over 20 years of marketing leadership for storage systems to her role as Vice President of Cloud Strategy for WekaIO. Prior to joining the company, she was VP of Marketing for the Converged Infrastructure business unit at HGST where she led the marketing efforts for HGST’s emerging cloud infrastructure products.

Prior to that, she was the Chief Marketing Officer for Panasas, a leading provider of high-performance scale-out storage systems targeting media and entertainment, life sciences and computer-aided engineering. Ms. Murphy was part of the 3ware team who pioneered Serial ATA in enterprise storage. After the successful acquisition by AMCC, Ms. Murphy served as a Senior Vice President for its Storage Division.

Murphy holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University of Limerick, Ireland, an MBA from Santa Clara University and a Masters in International Relations from Victoria University, New Zealand.

Andrew Perry is the VP of Sales for WekaIO. Andrew has more than 25 years of experience leading global sales and business development teams. Prior to WekaIO, Andrew was the SVP of Sales at Maxta and has been part of the software storage industry going back to Springpath, where he was a key contributor in its acquisition by Cisco Systems.

He also spent the previous 15 years in various executive leadership roles and building the channel at Violin Memory, GridIron (acquired by Violin Memory), Pano Logic, Timestock (acquired by CA), and Peribit (acquired by Juniper Networks) and INS (acquired by Lucent Technologies).

Andrew holds a B.A. in Economics from Syracuse University.

Mr Shimon Ben-David actively engages with customers and partners to track emerging trends and to bring actionable feedback to Engineering and Product Management.

In his near 7 years at Weka, he has had leadership roles in both Support and Sales Engineering.

Prior to joining Weka he ran Support Services for Primary Data, XtremIO, and IBM. Shimon met the leadership team of WekaIO when he managed IT at XIV, acquired by IBM in 2007.

Mr. Ben-David studied Computer Science and Philosophy at Ramat Gan University.

As Co-Founder and CEO, Mr. Liran Zvibel guides long term vision and strategy at WekaIO. Prior to creating the opportunity at WekaIO, he ran engineering at social startup and Fortune 100 organizations including Fusic, where he managed product definition, design, and development for a portfolio of rich social media applications.

Liran also held principal architectural responsibilities for the hardware platform, clustering infrastructure and overall systems integration for XIV Storage System, acquired by IBM in 2007.

Mr. Zvibel holds a BSc.in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University

Shani Shoham brings 20 years of sales, marketing and operations experience to his role as Chief Operating Officer, North America for WekaIO. Prior to joining the company, he was the President and CRO of Testim.io, a Lightspeed venture backed company. Shani grew the company from the first 5 customers and 6 employees to over 100 customers and 40 employees and led two rounds of funding.

Shani is an alumnus of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He also holds a BS.C in Computer Engineering and an MBA from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology