John Spiers Chief Strategy Officer, Liqid

Liqid, Inc. announced that data center infrastructure industry veteran John Spiers has joined as chief strategy officer (CSO).

He has worked in an advisory capacity with Liqid since 2014. In this new role, he will work closely with Liqid’s engineering, business, sales, and executive teams to develop and implement product and go-to-market strategies for the company’s composable infrastructure solutions. He will also work with internal employees, partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders to ensure understanding of Liqid’s strategic plan and how that plan executes on the company’s overall goals.

“We have been lucky to work with John as an advisor for several years now, and we are pleased to welcome him to the company in this official capacity as CSO,” said Sumit Puri, CEO and co-founder. “John is a well-known leader in the data center space, and his strategic guidance, product understanding, industry connections, and overall business acumen are crucial to Liqid at this stage of our growth, and we look forward to working with him as we evolve from a recognized technology innovator to a global provider of composable infrastructure solutions for the data center.”

Spiers has been pioneering storage system innovations for over 30 years. He co-founded venture-backed LeftHand Networks, in virtualized, scale-out storage, and served as CTO. The firm was acquired by Hewlett Packard in November of 2008. In 2010 he co-founded NexGen Storage, developing hybrid SAN architected with PCIe flash storage technology, and served as CEO. NexGen Storage was acquired by Fusion-io in April of 2013, and he has since held leadership positions at storage provider Sandisk and as CSO at hyperconverged infrastructure provider Pivot3.

“There is enormous demand in the marketplace for adaptive data center technologies like Liqid’s composable infrastructure solutions that enable IT users to realize the potential of AI and ML, 5G edge computing, dynamic cloud and other high-value applications,” Spiers said. “I am excited to join Liqid at this critical moment in the company’s history and to help guide the company as it expands its footprint of composable infrastructure solutions and services and becomes a fundamental, fully-integrated intelligent layer in the topology of the data center.”

Liqid provides a software-defined composable infrastructure platform. The platform empowers users to manage, scale, and configure physical, bare-metal server systems ins and then reallocate core data center devices on-demand as workflows and business needs evolve. Liqid Command Center software enables users to dynamically right size their IT resources on the fly.