Derek Burke UK Senior Sales Manager, WekaIO

WekaIO, Inc. appointed Derek Burke as sales manager for the UK.

He will be responsible for identifying new business opportunities in the region, managing channel relationships and growing sales.

He will report to Richard Dyke, VP of global sales.

As part of the EMEA expansion, Burke will join the WekaIO team as the company looks to grow its presence within HPC, life sciences and AI workloads.

He comes to WekaIO from Pure Storage, where he had primary responsibility for FlashBlade storage system sales in EMEA. He has also held senior sales and channel positions at Seagate Cloud Systems, DataDirect Networks and Panasas where he also oversaw business development and marketing.

He has a background in driving EMEA sales and strategic alliances and brings to this new position over 18 years of experience in HPC storage, scale-out NAS, parallel file systems, cloud and object storage solutions. He has also participated as a board member of the European Technology Platform for HPC (ETP4HPC), a public/private partnership advising the European Commission on its HPC strategy.

This appointment comes on the heels of several events for WekaIO, including global partnership announcements with HPE, AWS and Cirrascale.

This new role is key to the company as it looks to continue its momentum in EMEA by making its NVMe-native, shared parallel file system more accessible to organizations that utilize GPU- and CPU-based clusters for HPC, deep learning, research, and analytics workloads.

“We have been seeing an increased interest in EMEA for a modern, scalable file system that is optimized for Flash and which can support deep learning and analytics at scale. WekaIO has a great solution with Matrix – one that delivers the needed performance, scalability, and ease of use that organizations are seeking. I am looking forward to helping WekaIO grow its presence across EMEA,” commented Burke.

Dyke added: “Derek has a wealth of experience in HPC storage and file systems and we are delighted that he is joining the team. His appointment aligns with our strategy for market expansion and he’ll play an integral role in helping shape our business in EMEA, both for customers and partners.“