Douglas Gourlay CEO, Qumulo

Gourlay Qumulo, Inc. appointed Douglas Gourlay as president and CEO. He will also join the board of directors.

“Qumulo enables enterprises to fuel innovation and growth by unlocking the potential of their massive data stores. Doug helped scale Arista Networks from an early-stage start-up to an over $100 billion market cap company, making him the ideal person to guide Qumulo’s next phase of expansion,” said Matt McIlwain, MD at Madrona Venture Group and a Qumulo board member since 2014.

“I am delighted to join Qumulo. The combination of an outstanding culture and team, innovative on-premises and cloud software, opportunity in Applied AI, and the Scale Anywhere vision drew me here. I look forward to executing our unique vision and strategy for our customers, partners, and channels,” stated Gourlay. “To quote America’s first astronaut just before launch: ‘Let’s light this candle.'”

“We are thrilled to have Doug build on our recent successes and lead the expansion of the next growth phase for Qumulo. His accomplished career, vision, and passion for customer success make him ideal for leading Qumulo,” said Samir Menon, a director at BlackRock, a Qumulo investor and board of directors member.

A 25-year industry veteran, Gourlay previously served as VP and GM of software at Arista Networks. Joining Arista in 2009, he held various executive leadership roles across product, systems engineering, marketing, and sales, contributing to Arista’s transformation into the leader in cloud networking. Prior to that, he held executive leadership positions at Cisco Systems, where he developed several multi-billion-dollar product lines. Earlier in his career, he served as an infantry officer in the United States Army. He has filed or holds over seventy patents in systems and networking technologies.

Under the leadership of retiring CEO Bill Richter, Qumulo became the leader in Scale Anywhere data and storage management and grew to over a thousand customers. He will transition to the role of board and executive advisor.

Comments

Surprise or not? Qumulo has morphed since Bill Richter took the CEO role in November 2016 coming from a board position. They introduced a pure software model with the Scale Anywhere data platform adopting cloud as their new foundation with several new features or capabilities with a new attractive pricing. At the same time, the company missed a few waves and still has some difficulties to accelerate having seen other file storage solutions moved ahead of them. The company had also some employees and management shuffles in the last few years, we'll see where the company will go and land under this new CEO era.. For our audience, the company, founded in 2012, has already raised $347.3 million according to Crunchbase and still is private.