New Adventures for Chris Gladwin And Paul Carpentier

It’s always interesting to follow leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs that have invented some technologies, had an impact in the industry and made finally famous exits. This is the case for two people that can belong in that category for objet storage: Paul Carpentier and Chris Gladwin.

I have to add a third one, Avinash Lakshman, CEO and founder of Hedvig, that already made a serious impact on the industry at Amazon with Dynamo and Facebook with Cassandra. But he didn’t yet make an exit. All other leaders from other companies from that market segment are just followers. I invite you to read my long article of the genesis and evolution of object storage and CAS published in July 2016 on The Register.

First, Paul Carpentier co-founded Caringo and was CTO for 10 years but before he was associated with FilePool and he’s considered as the pioneer of object storage with CAS (content addressable storage) platform later acquired in 2001 by EMC to become Centera now no more available.

After Caringo, he started Esoptra, started in Belgium in 2015 focused on iPaaS, developing an integration platform named Magic MiddleClouds! He co-founded Esoptra with Jan Van Riel who was also CTO at FilePool, stayed longer at EMC to finally spend seven years at Caringo as VP of advanced technology. The other executive is Jos Keulers who spent also a few years at Caringo to represent to lead the business effort in EMEA. He also worked at Veritas, PolyServe, Dell and Mangstor.

Second, Chris Gladwin became a business icon with the Cleversafe exit with IBM for $1.3 billion end of  2015. No surprise, Cleversafe, founded 10+ years before, was the reference and a model for competitors and definitely was the number one for this second wave of object storage following the CAS period.

He founded in Chicago in 2016 Ocient LLC and he’s also CEO of the company. He recently confirmed: “Our new software company, Ocient, is addressing an even larger market opportunity [than the one addressed and solved by Cleversafe]. If you are a bright C++ developer anywhere near Chicago and want to tackle some of the most complex software problems on the planet, you’ll want to be a part of this.”

We’ll follow the evolution of these three leaders in the future.