Dave Garnett VP Product Management, Gluster

Gluster has expanded its executive management team and hired Dave Garnett as the company’s new VP of Product Management and Lori Budin as VP of Channels and Partnerships.

As an industry veteran in product management, Garnett brings more than 15 years of experience and will be responsible for ensuring that Gluster’s products continue to stay at the leading edge of the scale-out storage industry.

 Budin, a channel expert, will be responsible for providing the vision and direction for all channel activities at the company.

"Gluster is in a high-growth phase as we continue to grow our customer and partner base to capitalize on the dramatically increasing market need for cloud storage solutions," said Ben Golub, president and CEO of Gluster. "We are extremely pleased with the new additions to our management team. Both Dave and Lori will be instrumental in achieving Gluster’s next level of growth and success."

Garnett has a broad background in both technology startups and large, public companies. Most recently, he led Hewlett-Packard‘s cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) strategy, successfully transitioning legacy on-premise software to the cloud. Prior to HP, he was co-founder and VP of Product Management at Axcient, a data protection provider, where he architected the world’s first hybrid SaaS for data protection, application continuity and disaster recovery. Garnett began his career at Digital Data Storage and has held several executive positions with successful startups.

"Gluster has been extremely successful in driving products to market quickly and efficiently, and I look forward to continuing this trend," said Garnett. "With the emergence of public and private cloud, it is an incredibly exciting time to be in the storage industry. I am glad to be joining a company like Gluster that provides its customers with highly scalable, easy-to-manage storage and whose products are at the forefront of innovation."

Budin brings deep channel expertise, having held leadership positions at VeriSign, Proofpoint and IBM. Prior to joining Gluster, she was the CEO of Channel Fundamentals, a company she founded and led for six years, that helped organizations develop and implement channel strategies, build channel programs and drive channel sales results for companies ranging from pre-IPO startups to market-leading corporations. Budin received her bachelor’s degree in English from Pennsylvania State University.

"Gluster has a rich history of tremendous adoption from customers and the community, and it’s a natural extension to bring these solutions to the channel," said Budin. "I am excited to be leading this initiative, and to have the opportunity to help our channel partners differentiate themselves in their respective markets and grow this segment of the business."