# WekaIO Appoints Andy Watson as CTO

**Published:** October 2, 2018

**Location:** SAN JOSE, Calif.

![WEKA logo with abstract white shapes on a textured purple to orange gradient background](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ult5g8gw/production/4061da3e03532447a685d4d60928329ecf6bfba7-1200x675.png)

> WekaIO names storage veteran and former NetApp CTO Andy Watson as CTO to guide technology strategy, vertical market development and innovation as the company scales.

Former NetApp CTO brings deep expertise around customer experience of high-performance enterprise file storage

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/](/company/leadership)

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**About WEKA**  
WEKA is the AI data and memory infrastructure company transforming the economics of agentic AI. Its WEKA® NeuralMesh™ platform unifies high-performance data storage with extended GPU memory, giving enterprises, AI cloud providers, and AI builders a single foundation for training, inference, and agentic workloads. With Augmented Memory Grid™, NeuralMesh extends GPU memory capacity by 1000x, accelerates time to first token by up to 20x, and delivers 10x more concurrent users from the same GPU footprint, proven in production benchmarks. Trusted by 30% of the Fortune 50, WEKA enables organizations to scale AI faster, optimize GPU utilization, and reduce the cost of every token served. Learn more at [www.weka.io](https://www.weka.io/) or connect with us on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/weka-io/) and [X](https://x.com/weka).

_WEKA and the WEKA logo are registered trademarks, and WEKA NeuralMesh and Augmented Memory Grid are trademarks of WekaIO, Inc. Other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners._

**Media Contact:  
**WEKA Communications  
[pr@weka.io](mailto:pr@weka.io)

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