Diamanti, led by CEO Chris Hickey who was appointed seven months ago, has hired 36 sales and engineering people since he took up the post.
The firm originally supplied hyper-converged system software and pivoted to selling software on which to manage and run Kubernetes-orchestrated software, in which it claims a performance advantage. We noted eight exec departures after Hickey joined and he has been busy replenishing the exec head count as well as building up the customer-facing and engineering ranks.
According to Hickey, “Diamanti is recruiting the top sales and development talent in cloud infrastructure to power our expansion and accelerated product roadmap. … with the most experienced sales and engineering leaders in the industry, we are well positioned to innovate and make the case for the most powerful Kubernetes management platform available.”
Relatively recent exec joiners include:
- Jaganathan “JJ” Jeyapaul, CTO/EVP of engineering, ex-Oracle;
- Mark Glasgow, SVP of worldwide sales, Oct 2021, ex-Hammerspace and Micron;
- Arnaldo Perez, CFO, June 2021.
We also know of:
- Amandeep S, SVP global operations. India base, June 2021, ex-Quark like Hickey;
- Vivek Gupta, VP engineering, Nov 2021;
- Taha Hasan, channel sales manager, Nov 2021, ex-SUSE, Rancher Labs;
- Fahem Z, sales director, Nov 2021, ex-SUSE and Rancher Labs;
- Foster Nichols, sales director, Aug 2021, ex-Palo Alto Networks;
- Paul (Ho) Bae, sales director, Oct 2021, ex-VMware;
- Erikjan Franssen, promoted to VP international sales, Nov 2021;
- Roger Laing, Kubernetes UK&I exec, Sep 2021;
- Gareth Holland, business development rep, Jan 2022;
- Halee Enderle, business development rep, Jan 2022.
You can see from the last two that recruitment is ongoing. Diamanti has no exec publicly identified as responsible specifically for marketing but it does have an active Twitter posting account — @Diamanticom — which posts details of new joiners and spreads good cheer. Perhaps a marketing exec hire is on the cards.
LinkedIn says Diamanti has 99 employees it knows about, meaning almost a third are new to the company in the last seven months.
The company has also opened an office at the campus of Stony Brook University, in the Charles B. Wang Center, where it says it “will recruit untapped talent and focus on mentoring the next generation of cloud leaders”.
Glassdoor has some vicious Diamanti reviews from severely disenchanted leavers, but you might expect some of that from departed employees when a new CEO comes on board to turn a troubled company around and makes waves. Then again, they may have a point. We shall have to wait and seee how the company progresses.
Funding-wise Diamanti has taken in a total of $78 million since being founded in 2014. The last round was a $35 million C-round in 2019. Presumably it is burning cash. It may be that Hickey will be able to demonstrate significant sales growth and product development this year and so persuade VCs to stump up more funding to enable accelerated growth in 2023/2024.
