WekaIO (Weka) announced the appointment of Ken Grohe as President and
Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Ken will lead the company's global go-to-market
organization and report to CEO and Co-Founder Liran Zvibel.
Grohe comes to Weka from Samsung's
Stellus Technologies, a leading data systems company that addresses the way
companies capture, store, access, and process the unstructured data, where he
served as CRO and drove the company's overall go-to-market strategy. A highly
seasoned veteran of the industry, Grohe previously served as President of
SignNow, SVP and GM of Barracuda Networks, and CRO of Virident, a Western
Digital Company. Grohe also had an impressive 25-year career at Dell EMC,
finishing as VP and GM with a focus on the global flash business.
With over three decades in the SaaS and storage
industry, Grohe has deep experience and possesses a rare dedication and passion
for winning that is based on a customer-centric perspective. In addition to his
roles at major tech companies, Grohe is an advisor and board member of many
Silicon Valley fast-rising companies.
WekaIO saw 600% revenue growth in 2019 and
continues to accelerate its growth in 2020. This meteoric trajectory is fueled
by a unique ability to impact businesses by helping them to modernize AI
workflows with software-defined storage systems optimized for NVMe and the
hybrid cloud. Weka empowers companies to solve the most difficult IT
infrastructure problems so they can extract maximum value from their data and
expedite time-to-market. WekaFSTM, the world's fastest parallel file system and
Weka's flagship product, maximizes CPU and GPU performance and ROI by
eliminating I/O bottlenecks to accelerate the data-intensive applications
commonly found in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deep
learning, life sciences, and financial analytics.
"Ken's
expertise in this market and keen understanding of the customer journey will be
the catalyst that drives the next phase of growth for Weka," said Liran
Zvibel. "We welcome him to the leadership
team at a key time when we are realizing rapid customer adoption, significant
revenue growth, and major strategic partnerships. Ken's
role will be influential in executing the company's
vision to become the de-facto solution for enterprise storage on premises and
in the cloud."
"I have known Ken for
decades. He is a fantastic Go To Market executive with a proven successful
track record that will absolutely help move Weka to the next level," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at
Enterprise Strategy Group. "His leadership, customer centricity, energy, and
enthusiasm combined with Weka's killer technology can't help but be a winning
combination."
"We've
been a proud partner in the Weka Innovation Network (WIN) for some time now,
and we are excited to see the growth in the Weka leadership team," commented
Stan Wysocki, president at Mark III Systems, a WIN Leader partner. "We look
forward to working closely with Ken and the extended Weka team on our AI/ML,
HPC, and analytics solutions offerings for our joint clients."
"We
are delighted to see the Weka leadership team grow with strategic appointments
such as Ken's," said Mike Thompson, CEO of Groupware Technology, a WIN Leader
Partner. "Weka provides a modern storage infrastructure that accelerates
performance and solves big problems. With Ken's strength of industry experience
and sincere drive to steer the company forward, the future looks bright for
Weka."
"I have
watched Weka's incredible growth since its
launch from stealth in 2017, and I have a great appreciation for the work of
the team to date. Time and time again, Weka has proven they are delivering a
highly differentiated and disruptive storage technology-with epic performance
at any scale for customers with data-intensive workloads. Therefore, I am
grateful to join the leadership team and to have the opportunity to leverage my
experience and proven success in this industry to help Weka grow exponentially
and soar to new heights," added Grohe.
In addition to being an international
best-selling author, Grohe holds a degree from Stanford University Graduate
School of Business and a BS, *** laude, in Management from Boston College.
On the wave of this growth trajectory, Weka
also recently announced hires in other strategic positions including chief financial officer and head of AI and strategic alliances.