Former NetApp CTO brings deep expertise around customer experience of high-performance enterprise file storage
SAN JOSE, Calif. – Oct. 2, 2018 – WekaIO, the innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data intensive applications, today announced the appointment of Andy Watson as Chief Technical Officer (CTO).
Watson comes to WekaIO from Minio, a cloud-native open source object storage software company, where he served as CTO; confronting cloud versus on-premises decisions and the challenges of digital transformation. Before that, he was best known as the second CTO of NetApp, as well as other storage industry roles going back to his work with early adopters of the first purpose-built NFS file servers, at Auspex Systems. He holds a bachelor’s degree, majoring in physics, from Bard College.
Watson brings to his new position a strong background in data management, including deep experience gleaned in 27-plus years spent focusing on the customer experience of high-performance file storage in industries that include high-performance computing (HPC), research, life sciences, manufacturing, semiconductors, media and entertainment, and energy exploration. Andy will be responsible for maintaining and guiding WekaIO’s vertical market technology development, as well as monitoring emerging trends and communicating them to key business stakeholders. Andy will also be responsible for organizational leadership on technology issues and ensuring the alignment of the technology vision and business strategy and for driving technology innovation throughout the entire organization.
“Andy’s keen understanding of our business, technology expertise, and customer understanding make him well qualified to assume the role of CTO,” commented Liran Zvibel, Co-Founder and CEO at WekaIO. “We welcome him to the leadership team as we scale the company to deliver significant revenue growth.”
Learn more about Andy Watson and the complete WekaIO leadership team at: https://www.weka.io/company/leadership/
About WekaIO
WekaIO helps companies manage, scale and futureproof their data center so they can solve real problems that impact the world. WekaIO Matrix™, the world’s fastest shared parallel file system and WekaIO’s flagship product, leapfrogs legacy storage infrastructures by delivering simplicity, scale, and faster performance for a fraction of the cost. In the cloud or on-premises, WekaIO’s NVMe-native high-performance software-defined storage solution removes the barriers between the data and the compute layer, thus accelerating artificial intelligence, machine learning, genomics, research, and analytics workloads.
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