Industry Veterans Amit Pandey and Jonathan Martin Join WekaIO

By AIT News Desk On Aug 9, 2021

Leveraging experience from Avi Networks, Zenprise, Terracota, NetApp, Pure Storage, EMC, Hitachi and HP, Pandey and Martin will further accelerate WEKA’s global market adoption

WekaIO (Weka), the leading data platform for modern applications, announced the addition of two new Silicon Valley veterans to its rapidly expanding executive team.

“The beauty of WekaFS is that it offers the simplicity of NAS, the performance of SAN or DAS, and the scale of object storage”

Leading Weka through the next phase of growth, the company has recruited Amit Pandey to serve as its Executive Chairman. Pandey is a seasoned industry executive who will oversee administrative and operational functions at Weka. Pandey has 30 years of executive leadership experience at Avi Networks, Zenprise (acquired by Citrix), Terracotta (acquired by Software AG), and NetApp.

In addition, Weka has hired storage industry veteran Jonathan Martin as President, who will oversee Weka’s marketing, customer success, and global go-to-market initiatives. Reporting to Weka CEO, Liran Zvibel, Martin brings significant global product, marketing, GTM, and general management experience to Weka. Martin previously served as Global CMO at Hitachi Vantara, Pure Storage (through IPO), and EMC (acquired by Dell), and has held executive roles at HP Software, Veritas Software, and Salesforce.

“The opportunity to attract top talent like Amit and Jonathan to Weka is reflective of our category-defining software data platform for modern workloads and our unique business model, which is already enabling hundreds of AI/ML, Life Science, Financial Services, and HPC customers across the globe,” said CEO and Co-Founder Liran Zvibel. “Amit’s proven track record of leading highly innovative organizations through hypergrowth is perfect for our next stage, and Jonathan’s intimate understanding of customer needs at the most successful companies in this space are the perfect combination to ready us for Weka’s next phase of growth. I welcome Jonathan to the presidency and look forward to working with him and Amit to accelerate Weka’s future endeavors.”

Martin and Pandey provide additional leadership to an organization tasked with helping customers maximize the value of their data. WekaFS was built to address the storage challenges posed by modern applications that leverage Cloud and GPU compute through innovations in how flash is used.

“Having worked at pre-IPO startups to Fortune 100 companies, the chance to maximize and expedite an organization’s potential for growth is an exciting opportunity for me, and I look forward to doing just that at WekaIO,” said Martin. “The company has enjoyed tremendous success over the years with plenty of avenues still left to explore. WekaIO has a data platform that delivers the simplicity, speed, and scale that modern enterprises need to achieve positive business outcomes. The combination of this leading technology with a successful partner infrastructure in place makes for an ideal situation for further success.”

“The beauty of WekaFS is that it offers the simplicity of NAS, the performance of SAN or DAS, and the scale of object storage,” said Pandey. “Organizations no longer have to make compromises between simplicity, speed, or scale. With its unique software-defined architecture, customers can run on-premises, natively in the cloud, or orchestrate their data effortlessly between the two. The ability to mix and match flash and disk offers customers the best economics.”

Organizations are experiencing unheard-of dataset growth as they deploy modern applications, including AI/ML, Life Sciences, Financial Services in cloud, and core and edge datasets as they chase competitive advantage through digitalization. Traditional hardware and cloud storage cannot meet rapidly escalating requirements for performance and scale generated by these applications, so companies have turned to WekaIO to address these challenges.

Weka saw significant market momentum in 2020 and has achieved significant growth fueled by its new customer adoption in the US and across Europe and Asia as customers embrace Weka’s technology advancements for modern storage workloads.