Oded Nagel CEO, Ctera

Ctera Networks Ltd. announced the promotion of Oded Nagel to CEO, Michael Amselem to CRO and Saimon Michelson to VP of alliances.

All 3 executives are veterans of company’s management team. Former CEO and co-founder Liran Eshel will serve as executive COB, a role from which he will continue to work with the firm on key strategic initiatives.

Nagel Ctera Oded Nagel was among Ctera’s original first employees and over the past 5 years served as CSO responsible for product strategy and global partnerships.

Michael Amselem was most recently the VP of EMEA and before that was an executive at Check Point for more than 10 years where he held various sales management positions including responsibility over global strategic partners.

The promotions come on the heels of another record year for the company in which Ctera grew annual recurring revenue for its edge-to-cloud solutions by 38%, logging over 150PB of data and hundreds of billions of files managed by its customers. The company secured a record number of 7-digit deals in 2022, including major new customer wins with a top-5 US bank, top-5 global media group, top-5 global clothing retailer, top-5 global packing firm, as well as accelerating momentum with the US Federal government.

“According to a recent Gartner report, large enterprises will triple their unstructured data capacity across their on-premises, edge and public cloud locations by 2026, with 60% of them implementing hybrid cloud file solutions, compared to only 20% in 2023,” said Nagel. “This creates a massive opportunity where Ctera is perfectly aligned to capture with our market leading technology, and extensive experience in supporting Fortune-100 customers in their secure multi-cloud journey.”

“Ctera has built a strong reputation for having the best hybrid cloud file platform,” said Adam Fisher, Partner Bessemer Venture Partners. “I would like to thank Liran Eshel for his leadership over the past decade and look forward to continue working with him and Oded in their new roles.”

Comments

This news marks the end of an era and starts of another one in the history of Ctera with 2 key people who have played major role since the inception of the company.

Thus it will be interesting to see what Liran Eshel will do in the coming quarters and how Oded Nagel will impact and influence the trajectory of the firm. It also represents a strong recognition of the work made by Nagel and his team with partners in all directions as they contribute to the success of Ctera during the past few years. All these happen at a critical moment in the history of Israel.

During the recent IT Press Tour, Eshel delivered an interesting talk related to the evolution of the society, how data impacts our lives especially with recent public large scale AI tools, up to the data democracy need.

Ctera’s products and modules are recognized in the market by users of course, the revenue grows by 38% we should say again, by partners and analysts confirming that the choices made by the team several years ago were the right ones. The market footprint is with very large deals in terms of capacity but also in terms of number of edge filers. Today Ctera covers 150PB.

Supporting a large list of object storage, the team adds Hitachi Vantara object storage solution and also validates new security partners such Netwrix or Aparavi.

It turns out that the company promotes itself in a new way more global: Safeguarding Data Democracy for a Better Future. This new positioning covers a variety of use cases with branch storage, remote workforce, edge data processing, cyber resilient storage, private cloud and DataOps.

In addition to these few key points regarding the company, partners and use cases, the team continues its software updates with the recent 7.5 release introducing Cloud Storage Routing, a data placement approach to optimize cloud fees, data proximity for users and compliance. The product also confirms its integration with key collaboration and vertical suite. Two new product iterations should arrive before the summer: the Ctera Ransom Protect, an AI-based ransomware detection and protection, and the Ctera Unified File and Object with a S3 connector to exchange data directly with the Ctera Portal in addition to edge filers.

This new access method provides a new way to integrate central data with data pipelines and analytics tools and solutions.