Global data access software startup Hammerspace has set up an Executive Advisory Board to help ensure its products and messages respond to the right business problems – and so grow the firm’s business.
Hammerspace’s Global Data Environment (GDE) software provides user and application data access covering file, block and object storage on-premises and in public clouds, with policy-driven automated data movement and services providing protection, tiering and management.
The 7-person EAB is said to comprise “renowned leaders from across the government, technology, finance and investment communities.” They have been “instrumental in providing insights into the end-user, business and economic challenges created by limited and inefficient access to file data that is currently isolated in disconnected silos.”
Their presence on the EAB can be seen as both validating Hammerspace’s strategy and helps refining its tactics. Hammerspace founder and CEO David Flynn said: “The world needs a revolutionary approach to data access. Hammerspace is committed to making data globally accessible. We break data free from the constraints of the storage system and liberate IT teams from endless manual data management tasks.”
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Flynn’s earlier Primary Data startup had a fairly similar DataSphere concept but closed shop in 2018 without bring product to market. Hammerspace evolved from the ashes, so to speak, and now has a completed product fulfilling the DataSphere’s ambitions.
The data need today, as seen by Hammerspace, is that there is a vast amount of it and it needs distributing in manageable quantities to the IT end-points where it is needed but without causing data traffic jams through clogged up network links.
Hammerspace, conceptually, is using metadata to sort out data access supply chains and logistics to make a business’s data organisation – its metadata – available everywhere but the data itself is sent only where it is needed and in the amounts it is needed. This is done while using the existing storage silos as data depots from which to access and despatch precise data consignments around a customer’s hybrid and multi-cloud network.
Having completed its v1.0 GDE software, Hammerspace then set about recruiting a quartet of sales and marketing executives:
- Chris Bowen, SVP Global Sales – August 2021,
- Jim Choumas, VP Channel Sales – August 2021,
- Molly Presley, SVP Marketing – November 2021,
- Floyd Christofferson, VP Product Marketing, January 2022.
They are now revving up and accelerating Hammerspace’s sales and marketing activities.
The EAB members are:
- Bob Flores – Senior Partner with OODA consulting, founder and CTO of Applicology Inc, former Chief Technology Officer of the UA Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
- Roxane Googin – Chief Futurist of Group 11, over 20 years’ experience predicting macroeconomic technology trends as editor of The High Tech Observer,
- Brendon Howe – Technology thought leader, VP/General Manager of Blockchain at VMWare, and former NetApp exec managing cloud data services and emerging products,
- Kai Li – Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, prior founder and Chief Scientist at Data Domain (now part of Dell EMC),
- Greg McGowan – Senior Strategic Advisor at Franklin Templeton Investments, previous EVP, Director and General Counsel of Templeton International, Inc.,
- Eric Scollard – global sales exec and strategic sales advisor who has led sales organisations at Qumulo, ExtraHop, Bycast, Isilon Systems, IBM, and Veritas,
- Eyal Waldman – Chairman Waldo Holdings, former president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies, bought by NVIDIA.
Waldman provided an apposite quote: “The amount of data generated in the world has been increasing exponentially for years. Despite increases in networking and compute power, the inability of data storage and file system technologies to make an organisation’s entire dataset available to distributed environments has been holding back taking full advantage of advanced applications, network, and computing systems.
“Hammerspace is bringing to market the global file system technology needed to unlock the full potential of an organisation’s entire data set in edge, multi-datacenter and cloud environments.”
Kai Li brought out another angle: “At Data Domain, we focused on making the storage of massive quantities of data cost-effective while optimising moving that data across networks efficiently. I am excited to see Hammerspace expanding the focus beyond efficiency and cost savings to address the challenges of making data available to users and applications on a global scale.”
Now we wait and see if Hammerspace’s sales and marketing activities, guided by the EAB, resonate with pandemic-battered customers drowning under rising seas of data.
