Anthony Lye, cloud business general manager at NetApp, has quit to take a role at big data analytics company Palantir.
Palantir’s silo-linking products are used by the US intelligence community and Department of Defense in sensitive applications. Its Foundry business software is in use at Airbus, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Merck, NHS England, and other business customers.
Lye joined NetApp in March 2017 and basically built the company’s public cloud business with NetApp software being ported to the public clouds or its arrays running in them. He also built an automated cloud operations business, buying several startups with CloudOps technologies, starting with Spot, which found the lowest cost cloud instances for applications.
Lye posted a LinkedIn message saying he was joining Palantir as Global Head of its Apollo business unit.
He notes that at Palantir: “We are iterating on a new digital, bottoms up, consumption-based motion for Commercial and the Public Sector with Foundry, sometimes with zero commit, free trials, small pilots, departmental deployments, all conducted on Palantir.com, the public cloud marketplaces and through channel partners.”
Lye CV
Lye was a product marketing manager at Tivolil from 1989 to 1994. Then he joined Remedy Corp, and drove sales and marketing in EMEA for its customer service and help desk application. He moved to the US HQ to run the major accounts and channel business, and was hired by ePeople as president and CEO in 1999. The company supplied a multi-tenant SaaS system for customer relationship management.
In 2005 he became Group VP and GM at customer relationship management company Siebel Systems, which was bought by Oracle. At Oracle he led a 3,000-person business unit and acquired 10 companies for more than $2.5 billion. He moved on at the end of 2012 to be chief product officer at HotSchedules, a restaurant workforce management software company, now known as Fourth. There, he said, revenues doubled and he rose to become president and CEO. Then he joined NetApp.
A NetApp statement about Lye’s departure said: “Anthony and his team of cloud business leaders and technical experts have made significant contributions to NetApp, enabling our Cloud business to grow from less than $1 million ARR… to more than $500 million… and driven several scalable and successful M&As to create the CloudOps category where we are positioned as the market leader… Anthony and the cloud team were instrumental in the breakthrough technical and business model innovation we have accomplished with the hyperscale cloud providers, building unique solutions.”
