Bill Richter CEO, Qumulo

  Qumulo, Inc. announced the appointment of EMC Isilon veteran Bill Richter as CEO.

The announcement extends a leadership team, which includes storage and business experts from Amazon Web Services, CA, Dell, EMC, Google and Microsoft, and follows last month’s appointment of Eric Scollard as VP of WW sales.  

Early on, Qumulo’s founding team recognized an opportunity to disrupt legacy storage by taking a software centric approach to solving customers’ significant challenges in storing and managing large scale unstructured data environments. Since the company’s inception, customers and bookings have doubled year over year, proving the model.

As Qumulo enters its next stage of growth, founding CEO Peter Godman will transition to the role of CTO to focus on product innovation and customer engagement. He will remain on the board of directors.

“From day one, Qumulo has been about helping customers not only store, but also manage and understand massive quantities of data, filling a significant void left by legacy vendors. We are deeply committed to changing the industry landscape forever and that starts with the right combination of vision and leadership,” said Godman. “By adding Bill’s experience to this accomplished team, we are positioned to build on our exceptional growth, and I could not be more excited to welcome him aboard.”

Bill Richter has 20 years of leadership experience in the technology industry. Prior to joining Qumulo, he served as a partner at Madrona Venture Group, where he helped identify new investments and provided strategic and operational advice to portfolio companies. Prior to that, he was president of the Isilon Storage Division of EMC, where he grew the business to $1.5 billion in annual sales in 2014. He also served as COO of EMC’s $4 billion midrange storage business. He was Isilon‘s public company CFO from 2007 through the $2.5 billion sale to EMC in 2010.  Earlier in his career, he held management and leadership roles at Amazon and PwC.  

“Qumulo is a special company, and the team has done a tremendous job building world-class products,” said Richter. “Customers have been begging for a new approach in a market dominated by legacy vendors and a scarcity of innovation for many years. Delivering what customers want for the modern era of software-centric, cloud extensible enterprise storage and management, Qumulo was quickly recognized for its disruption. With the team in place, there is no limit to Qumulo’s opportunity ahead.“

“We invest in people. And we noticed from the start that Qumulo worked day in and day out to assemble the industry’s A-team,” said Wen Hsieh, general partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “With the new additions to the executive suite, the company now possesses a superior level of talent, experience and technology that will help Qumulo shape the future of enterprise storage.”

Last week, Qumulo introduced Qumulo Core 2.5 and announced the availability of Qumulo Core on Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Apollo servers, providing enterprises in media and entertainment, life and earth sciences, telecommunications, cable, automotive and R&D organizations unprecedented choice and flexibility for storing and managing billions of files and objects. The company also showcased continued company momentum, with year over year growth, customer traction and product innovation. Today, more than 100 enterprise customers trust Qumulo with their mission-critical workflows.