# WekaIO Strengthens Oil & Gas Industry Presence with New Houston Office

**Published:** March 14, 2019

**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 opens a Houston office and hires oil, gas and storage veterans to expand its geospatial and energy presence with high-performance storage for GPU-driven workflows.

_Company positions itself in the epicenter of geospatial research and oil & gas exploration_

WekaIO, the innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data-intensive applications, today announced the opening of a new office in Houston, Texas, along with the appointments of Darrin St. Amant as Regional Sales Manager, and Jon Lavallee as Senior Systems Engineer. This new presence and key appointments in Houston are integral to the growth of the company’s geospatial research and oil and gas exploration industry presence.  
  
“Houston is the center of the US oil and gas industry and therefore a critical territory for us as we execute our strategy to increase our dominance in this key market,” said Richard Dyke, VP of sales at WekaIO. “Our sales team in Houston come to us as seasoned players in the data storage and oil and gas fields. Their expertise is a valuable addition to our operations and will help fuel our growth for this region and industry.”  
  
The team of St. Amant and Lavallee brings especially deep oil and gas and storage expertise to the company. Between them they have spent years in this market with such companies as HPE, Avere Systems, Isilon EMC, and most recently Quantum Corporation and Commvault.  
  
The oil and gas industry is awash with hundreds of petabytes each year in sensor and equipment data and many terabytes per day for seismic and discovery simulations. There is an increasing investment in GPU-based appliances to support the new wave of software products for oil and gas based on deep learning, but legacy storage systems used to support traditional HPC and analytics-based workflows doesn’t offer enough bandwidth to keep data thirsty GPUs saturated. WekaIO’s Matrix™ parallel file system is the only storage solution that can keep a GPU saturated with data, and as such is a favorite for deep learning use cases and is lauded as the premier file system for pioneers in geospatial research. WekaIO was recently recognized with an Alconic Award from AI Business for Best Innovation in Deep Learning.  
  
Click here to learn why geospatial research leader, TRE ALTAMIRA chose the WekaIO Matrix high-performance storage system to provide flash-based parallel file storage capabilities to accelerate its geospatial workflows.

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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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