Andy Watson CTO, WekaIO

WekaIO, Inc. announced the appointment of Andy Watson as CTO.

He comes to WekaIO from Minio, a cloud-native open source object storage software company, where he served as CTO, confronting cloud versus on-premises decisions and the challenges of digital transformation.

Before that, he was best known as the second CTO of NetApp, as well as other storage industry roles going back to his work with early adopters of the first purpose-built NFS file servers, at Auspex Systems.

He holds a bachelor’s degree, majoring in physics, from Bard College.

He brings to his new position a strong background in data management, including experience gleaned in 27-plus years spent focusing on the customer experience of high-performance file storage in industries that include HPC, research, life sciences, manufacturing, semiconductors, media and entertainment, and energy exploration.

He will be responsible for maintaining and guiding WekaIO’s vertical market technology development, as well as monitoring emerging trends and communicating them to key business stakeholders. He will also be responsible for organizational leadership on technology issues and ensuring the alignment of the technology vision and business strategy and for driving technology innovation throughout the organization.

“Andy’s keen understanding of our business, technology expertise, and customer understanding make him well qualified to assume the role of CTO,” commented Liran Zvibel, co-founder and CEO. “We welcome him to the leadership team as we scale the company to deliver significant revenue growth.”