It wasn’t a basket case, Quantum, far from it, but it was certainly struggling on the edge, and had been for a few years when a boardroom shake-up toppled chairman, president, and CEO Jamie Lerner and installed board director Hugues Meyrath in his place as CEO.
Meyrath’s CV has a lot of entries:
- Jul 1994 to Jul 1999 – Western Digital, Product Marketing Manager
- Jul 1999 to Feb 2001 – Deutsche Banc Alex Brown, Research Associate
- Feb 2001 to Nov 2001 – Credit Suisse First Boston, Research Associate
- Nov 2001 to Dec 2002 – Sanrise, Director Business Development
- Jan 2002 to Sep 2003 – Quantum, Senior Manager, Business Development
- Sep 2003 to Mar 2009 – Brocade, Director Marketing & Product Manager, President of SBS subsidiary, GM & VP
- Mar 2009 to Feb 2012 – Juniper Networks, VP Services then VP SW Division
- Feb 2012 to Jan 2017 – EMC then Dell, VP Product Management & Business Development, EMC BRS div, VP/MD Dell Technologies Capital
- Jan 2017 to Aug 2022 – ServiceChannel, Chief Product Officer, Advisor
- Sep 2022 to present – Quantum, Board member
- Dec 2022 to present – Startup advisor
- Feb 2025 to present – NASCAR Racing Experience, part time
- Jun 2025 – Quantum, president and CEO
He moved across to the USA from Belgium in 1994 to join Western Digital after graduating from the University of Louvain, Belgium, with a BS degree in Engineering and Business. He was one of the hundreds if not thousands of English-speaking tech graduates from all around the world who then saw the US as the door to a thrilling and solid future, free from the constraints holding back career development in their home countries.
While at WD, he studied for and achieved an MBA at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. This led to his next two stops in the finance area, and then he returned to tech, as a Business Development Director at Sanrise in 2001, joining Quantum just over a year later as Senior Director for Business Development. He subsequently joined Brocade, then Juniper, followed by Dell, where his finance knowledge became relevant in a Dell Technologies Capital position, and then ServiceChannel as a Chief Product Officer in 2017.
Fortive bought ServiceChannel for $1.2 billion in mid-2021. Meyrath stayed on as an advisor, but left the following year and took on positions we might think befitting to a semi-retired and wealthy exec, including joining Quantum’s board, when Lerner was its chairman, president, and CEO. But then this year, he jumped back into full-time tech exec life to head up Quantum when Lerner left. We talked about his background and how he thinks about Quantum.
B&F: How did the Quantum board position come about?
Hugues Meyrath: I had phone calls from people that were invested in Quantum a long time ago. And they said: “Hey, I was referred by someone, and I had this long history with Quantum, right?” So in the ’90s, mid-’90s for five or six years, I was program manager in building heads for Quantum disk drives and heads for the Quantum DLT type drives.
[Meyrath left Quantum for Brocade in the fall of 2003 when the head of the tape automation business where he worked quit.]
Brocade was great for me. I went from a product manager all the way to being part of the exec staff, run all the product for a while, global services, then went to Juniper. And Juniper was where I learned that culture fit when you get into a job is important. It was just a culture [thing], it just didn’t work for me. So I couldn’t wait to get out of there. But I did my three years at Juniper and got recruited by EMC to be the product guy for the backup and recovery division, which they called BRS.
I took the job that Brian Biles had at the time. So I was Brian’s successor at EMC for four or five years. And then what happened is, I sit there at EMC and we are cranking out the next Data Domain, the yearly release of Networker, a yearly release of Avamar. And I started looking at all the holes that we had in the portfolio and started working with EMC venture teams on making investments in some cloud areas where we had massive gaps.
And then at some point my boss, the GM of BRS, and Scott from EMC Ventures called me and said, you should really spend your time on the venture side of things and making investments. I spent three years working with Greg Adkin who was [the] investor in storage, and I was sitting on seven, eight boards as an observer as EMC started making investments. And then, when Dell decided to purchase EMC, I worked on the integration for a year because I was a product guy.
It is just hard at some point to see people with great ideas come and present them to you and then, if you’re a product person, you just want to go do something. So I decided I was going to back away from ventures and join a company. A friend of mine had bought this weird company, ServiceChannel, that does facility management SaaS, that had about $8 million in ARR, and I decided to go help him. And we grew from $8 million to about $100 million dollars in ARR and then sold it to Fortive for $1.2 billion. It was a non-linear ride.
We went through three CTOs, three VPs of engineering, three sales guys, three CMOs. It was a hell of a ride. But then we sold it for $1.2 billion and I’m like, OK, I need a break. And that’s when I retired.
And so when I got the reference call on Quantum, I started talking to them about the different parts of the business. And then a couple of weeks later, Ben [Perl] from Neuberger Berman calls me and says, I’m in 150 companies. I can’t be on the board of every one of them. I’d like to recommend you to the board to Jamie Lerner, who was CEO. So I went and met Jamie… and we hit it off and he asked me to join the board and that’s how I ended up on the board.
B&F: Jamie’s a very nice, smart, and energetic guy, and I got the impression he relished the fight, he relished struggles, and he struggled and struggled and struggled to get Quantum growing again. But things just kept on popping out of the woodwork and biting him in the ass, like the hyperscalers and the tape libraries, the ongoing financial reporting problems that came up again and again and again. And I guess in the end, it was time for a fresh hand.
Hugues Meyrath: That’s one of the things we struggled with at the board. Jamie’s a great person, he’s a great sales guy. But I think, fundamentally, we felt that we needed a change in direction, because the plan was not working, right? At some point, things are just not working, and I’m going to have my time too. Everybody has. It’s kind of the philosophy of American tech. At some point a plan runs its course. I think an average tech company is like 11 years old, right? Quantum’s 45. So a plan runs its course and we felt as a board we just needed a new plan, and new people with new energy, and do a massive turnaround. And it had to be different. We felt like the playbook had to be different, and the people had to be different, and the investor’s different, right?
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Part 2 of this interview will look at Quantum’s products and Meyrath’s view of their prospects.
Bootnote
Jamie Lerner is now the co-founder and managing director of Helikai, which develops and operates AI agents in vertical markets. We understand this is an AI agents-as-a-service operation.
