Exec Hires at Pliops

Pliops has enlisted leadership for its sales, marketing, operations and technology teams by making several new hires: Angela Restani, Marius Tudor, Ofer Bustin and Edward Bortnikov.

Focused on tackling challenging storage issues – namely, the colliding trends of explosive data growth stored on fast flash media, ultimately limited by constrained compute resources – the company is ramping up its resources in preparation for the commercial availability of its product offering. Its Storage Processor has been tested and evaluated by more than 20 tier-one cloud and enterprise companies, and the company is currently in an expansion phase that encompasses both its team and industry reach.

Storage and channel veteran Angela Restani has joined as VP marketing. In this role, she will lead demand-gen teams and leverage her expertise in creating and executing go-to-market strategies. Prior to joining Plios, she served as EVP marketing for Hedvig, where she was instrumental in growing the company and leading the marketing efforts for its acquisition by Commvault. Her career spans more than 20 years of holding multiple executive leadership roles for tech companies including Nutanix, DataEndure and Cancom US.

Marius Tudor, a 20-year veteran and evangelist of business-critical, data center storage and infrastructure solutions, has been tapped by for the role of VP sales and business development. In his new position, he will focus on extending global reach by managing the existing sales pipeline and developing new business opportunities and relationships. He has held multiple sales management, business development, and marketing roles in technology and the storage industry. Previously, he served at leaders Liqid, SanDisk, Fusion-io, and BitMICRO Networks.

As the new COO, Ofer Bustin brings 20 years of experience in operations, engineering, infrastructure building, methodologies, and execution. Before coming on board at Pliops, he served as COO for DustPhotonics, where he established the operations and engineering organizations – taking the company’s highly complex optical systems to high-volume availability. Prior to that, he served as VP of silicon and optics operations at Mellanox Technologies, where he was part of the team that established operations and process systems – taking it from a start-up to a company valued at $7 billion.

VP of technology, Edward Bortnikov, comes to the company from Yahoo! (Verizon Media), where he served as senior director of research. He will oversee research and architecture of next-gen products. He has a 20-year track record in software engineering, distributed computing, databases, ML, search, storage, and networking systems. He has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Technion and holds 25+ US patents, has authored 40 scientific papers and contributed to multiple open source software projects in the area of large-scale data management.

“At Pliops, we are building a company with truly innovative, differentiated technology and a collaborative, supportive culture,” noted Steve Fingerhut, president and chief business officer. “By strengthening our executive team, we are more ready than ever for what is the most exciting time in our company’s history thus far – mass production of our storage processor. We look forward to working together as we continue to break technology barriers and usher in the next gen of accelerated data centers.”