Nasuni has hired a CMO to to push its cloud file services offering deeper into the market.
The company hired Pete Agresta from Pure to be CRO in January and Jim Liddle, the ex-CEO of acquired Storage Made Easy, and data intelligence technology promotor, was appointed to the Chief Innovation Officer role in August. Now Asim Zaheer is the new CMO, a role previously held by Nasuni president David Grant from June 2019 to April 2021.
Zaheer was CMO of Glassbox before coming to Nasuni, and has a 10-plus year stint as CMO of storage system supplier Hitachi Vantara prior to that. Two other execs have been appointed at the same time as Zaheer; Matthew Grantham is head of Worldwide Partners and Curt Douglas becomes VP Sales Western Region, coming from Nutanix, and periods at NetApp, IBM and EMC.
Grant said in a statement: “Asim’s wealth of experience and the expertise Matthew and Curt bring to their roles will help propel Nasuni forward as we bring much-needed disruption to traditional file infrastructure and strategically grow our market share in the US and Europe.”
In his view: “Legacy file systems simply aren’t enough for the demands of today’s enterprises, which require cloud migration, advanced ransomware protection, and hybrid workforce support.”
A Zaheer quote said: “In my conversations with customers it is clear that enterprises need to replace traditional hardware-based file storage and data protection systems with a scalable cloud-native solution.” They are both expressing the traditional Nasuni view that on-premises filers, exemplified by NetApp, need replacing by its cloud-based file data services product.
Matthew Grantham previously served as Global VP for channel sales for Hyperscience and had exec channel leadership roles at TenFold, Fuze, and others before that.
Nasuni is growing fast, with more than 800 customers in 70+ countries. It went past the $100 million annual recurring revenue mark last year, raising $60 million in an I-round funding exercise that year too. It may be a coincidence but NetApp product sales have been declining. They were $730 million in its first fiscal 2022 quarter, rising to $894 million in the fourth fiscal 2022 quarter, but were reported to be $590 million in NetApp’s first fiscal 2024 quarter in August.
Perhaps the efforts of Nasuni and its relative peers CTERA, Egnyte and Panzura, are having an effect.
With Liddle having an AI aspect to his position we can expect Nasuni to be making generative AI enhancements to its File Data Platform offering shortly. The $60 million funding round means Nasuni can afford to spend money on engineering, and no supplier of storage and data products and services can afford to be left behind in the current wave of AI hype. Egnyte’s AI activities will encourage Nasuni to move faster.
