Hammerspace appoints new sales head

Jeff Giannetti, Hammerspace’s Chief Revenue Officer, has left the company, with Tony Asaro, Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer, taking over the role.

Giannetti joined Hammerspace in January last year, coming from the CRO slot at WEKA. As part of a global sales expansion initiative, he built two sales organizations at Hammerspace, one devoted to strategic partnerships, and the other focused on VAR channel sales and direct sales to enterprises. The two are now being combined under Tony Asaro’s leadership.

Following Giannetti’s appointment Hammerspace quickly recruited several sales execs to grow the overall sales organization’s capabilities:

• February – VP AI & Strategic Partnerships Jeff Echols from WEKA. (See Bootnote)
• February – Senior Director Americas Sales Engineering Greg Palinckx, now VP Global Sales Engineering, also from WEKA
• March – Global VP Channel Sales & Operations Gregg Machon from VAST Data
• March – Field CTO Raj Sharma from WEKA

These appointments were followed in April last year by Hammerspace raising $100 million in a strategic venture round to accelerate its global expansion. At the time CEO and founder David Flynn said: “AI isn’t waiting. The race isn’t just about raw throughput – it’s about how fast you can deploy, move data, and put your infrastructure to work. Every delay is unrealized potential and wasted investment.”

Hammerspace is partnering Oracle to set up an Oracle Could Infrastructure dedicated region. OCI Dedicated Region is a fully managed cloud region deployed in a customer’s data center and operated by Oracle. The idea is to provide a private and sovereign cloud foundation, with a unified, policy-driven data layer across sites and clouds. OCI Dedicated Region delivers OCI services with enterprise security and operational consistency, while Hammerspace presents a global namespace and orchestrates data placement by performance, cost, and compliance.

An Oracle blog explains: “OCI Dedicated Region places cloud services where your regulated data must remain. Hammerspace provides a consistent data plane across that region and your other environments, enforcing policies that keep data in place or allow tightly controlled mobility. The result is an operating model that can help address residency requirements, simplify hybrid operations, and let you run AI where your data lives – without proliferating unmanaged copies or rewriting workflows.”

Back at Hammerspace, Tony Asaro is going to run both alliances and sales, placing the entire sales organization under his leadership.

Asaro joined Hammerspace as Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer late in 2018. He had previously founded and run the INI Group, an industry analysis business. Prior to that he had a stunt at Virtual Iron following a period as an ESG analyst. Asaro has been involved at Hammerspace in alliances with OCI, Hitachi Vantara, Seagate and its Lyve Cloud, Supermicro, SourceCode and GigaIO. It looks like Asaro’s strategic alliances role possibly overlapped with Giannetti’s strategic partnerships sales function, led by Jeff Echols.

Bootnote

Hammerspace supplies its Global Data Platform software based on parallel NFS and uses it to orchestrate files and objects stored on other suppliers’ filers and object stores with the ability to support Nvidia’s GPU Direct and a GPU server’s tier zero storage (locally-attached SSDs) and ship file data fast to GPUs.

We’re told Tony Asaro actually recruited and hired Jeff Echols to run the Hammerspace AI business and AI strategic alliances originally. He has always worked for Asaro and is expanding his role with these recent changes. He will be taking on leadership of additional alliance partners, not just Hammerspace’s AI partnerships. Within Hammerspace, alliances strategy and alliance driven revenue have always reported to Asaro. He also has had all of the solution engineering teams to do technical integration and testing with partners such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Oracle, Hitachi, etc. Jeff Echols ran all of the AI related alliance work with these partners and Hammerspace is expanding his role.