Eleven months into his role, Infinidat CEO Phil Bullinger is replenishing the ranks of his market-facing executive team to increase its presence and competitiveness. Richard Bradbury is the new EMEA and AJP sales head, and his appointment follows last month’s hiring of chief marketing officer Eric Herzog.
Bradbury is an interesting hire because Infinidat already had an EVP in charge of the two regions: Nir Simon.
Bullinger made an appointment statement: “The addition of Richard to our senior management team continues the strategic expansion of our go-to-market capabilities with high-impact industry leaders and broad investment in scaling our structure. Infinidat is extremely well positioned ahead as we build on our unprecedented growth in 2021.”
Bradbury’s equivalent statement was bullish: ”The growth potential across EMEA and APJ for Infinidat is enormous as we extend our reach and significantly expand our sales activity with partners and customers around the globe.”
We’re told Bradbury will be responsible for accelerating growth and scaling Infinidat’s enterprise business across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and emerging markets. He reports to CEO Bullinger, effective immediately.
That means there is no reporting line for Bradbury through Nir Simon, so Simon’s role must have changed. Simon was appointed to his EVP role in January this year — the same month that Bullinger became the CEO. We think that Infinidat’s executive chairman, Boaz Chalamish, had a hand in both appointments. Simon was in place in October when Eric Herzog came on board, so any change is a recent one.
In response to a question about this, the CEO told us: “Nir Simon has decided to pursue new opportunities, but will be working at Infinidat through the end of the year and assisting Richard Bradbury as he ramps into the role, ensuring a smooth leadership transition. We want to express our thanks and appreciation to Nir for his many years of leadership and dedicated contributions to the success and business continuity of Infinidat.”
Bradbury is an experienced enterprise storage sales person. He comes to Infinidat from being VP and GM of Northern EMEA at Hitachi Vantara, where he spent five years. Before that, he worked for three years at SAS, responsible for regional alliances and channels, and 11 years at EMC driving sales growth internationally, selling to service providers and large global enterprise customers.
We have been told by an Infinidat spokesperson that Bullinger is putting together quite a leadership team of storage industry veterans at Infinidat and draining the competition.
As an example of that, Gareth Beanland joined Infinidat as the UK and Ireland country manager in September. He’s an ex-regional sales director for Pure Storage and spent nearly 12 years at NetApp before that.
Another change at Infinidat has been the resignation of ex-Gartner Research VP Stanley Zaffos. He joined in April 2019 to head up Infinibox array product marketing, and quit to go freelance in March this year — two months after Bullinger became the CEO.
