Incoming CEO Sam King is reshaping Nasuni, bringing in new sales, marketing, and customer success chiefs as President David Grant exits.
The company supplies cloud file services and has a focus on edge AI and also SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response) with a CrowdStrike deal. It received private equity investment in July last year, when it was valued at $1.2 billion. CEO Paul Flanagan retired in April and King was appointed as his successor. She quickly appointed a new Chief People Officer (Alison Bayiates), CIO (Dalan Winbush), and CISO (Elyse Gunn), and has now turned her attention to sales, marketing, and customer success.
The new CRO, replacing Pete Agresta, is David Castignola. Anthony Miller is the new CMO, replacing Asim Zaheer. James Lemonias is the SVP for customer success with Barrie Kuza being VP Customer Experience up to November last year, when she became VP of Strategic Programs.
King stated: “I am thrilled to welcome Dave, Anthony, and James to our talented team at Nasuni. They join us at a pivotal moment in our journey where hybrid cloud storage and unstructured data management platforms are becoming a critical foundation upon which to build successful long-term AI strategies for enterprises. As Nasuni reaches its next stage of growth, we have been deliberate in choosing leaders whose vast experience and expertise align perfectly with the opportunities ahead. Each will play an essential role in helping us lead the market and ensure success for our customers and partners while continuing our strong growth trajectory.”
David Grant has resigned as Nasuni’s president, and that position is now empty. He is taking some downtime before thinking about a new role.
David Castignola was previously CRO at access management company Delinea with stints at Bugcrowd and Backberry Cylance before that. We’re told that, at Delinea, he successfully integrated and scaled the worldwide sales organization following its merger. He will now be focused on “expanding go-to-market functions, strengthening the channel partner program, and ensuring customers have the support and reach needed to execute their AI strategies with confidence.”
Anthony Miller joins Nasuni after a three-year career break. Previously, he was CMO at K–12 educational tech company PowerSchool, where he “led the team that earned the 2019 CODiE Marketing Team of the Year award,” and SaaS meeting management and travel company Lanyon before that.
Lemonias was previously SVP Customer Success at fintech business Bottomline and Director of Customer Success at cloud storage company Carbonite before that.
Chris Addis, VP for sales in the EMEA region, left in May, the month after King joined.
Nasuni tells us that it “has gained significant momentum this year, adding organizations such as Blue Bird, KUKA, and Fette Compacting to its growing customer community. These enterprises, along with household names like Mattel, TBWA, Perkins + Will, Barnes & Noble, and Hybrid Apparel, rely on Nasuni not just to modernise file storage, but to prepare their unstructured data for AI-driven innovation.”
In just five months, Nasuni has hired a new CEO, who then hired new CPO, CIO, CISO, CRO, CMO, and SVP Customer Success execs. It’s a pretty full-on leadership makeover with new people rather than internal promotions, and intended to position Nasuni better as enterprises adopt AI. The scale and speed of these exec changes indicates a CEO in a hurry to optimize an organization to meet new market conditions.
A Nasuni blog about enterprise IT and AI says: “We make it easy to plug AI into operational workflows by delivering fast, reliable access to high-quality data, no matter where it’s stored. With built-in tools for curating and analyzing unstructured data, and seamless integration with AI applications, Nasuni helps organizations turn raw information into real intelligence.”
Comment
We think a large Nasuni AI opportunity is hooking up its edge site caches, fed from the public cloud, with edge AI inference servers. Competing unstructured data storage system suppliers are seeing the same market opening and will hope to spread out to edge sites from their datacenter strongholds. Nasuni will need to resist that spreading out with its edge-to-cloud play.
