WekaIO Expands AI Storage Solutions in EMEA

WekaIO, Inc. opens an office in EMEA, along with the appointment of Ryan Taylor as senior sales director.

Ryan Taylor, a seasoned storage veteran, is tasked with expanding Weka’s business across the region to further international growth within the ecosystem and targeted markets. He has had a successful 20-year career in the storage industry building teams, channels, and direct sales in various senior-level positions. He comes to Weka from Quantum, where he served as the EMEA sales lead specialist for the continuation of the ActiveScale business after its acquisition from Western Digital, driving hundreds of petabytes of business and supporting customers and partners. He was a key contributor to organizations such as Virident and BlueArc prior to their acquisitions. He will be heading Weka’s existing personnel plus an expanded EMEA team that includes systems engineer Mark Lucas and regional sales manager Adrian Burch.

“The only way to build a world-class organization is behind world-class people, and we believe that we have found some great people to help us expand our reach throughout the EMEA,” said Andrew Perry, WW VP sales,. “Ryan, Mark, and Adrian are tasked with elevating our efforts and expanding on our previous success in the region. We look forward to their contributions as we deliver the simplicity, speed and scale  that today’s businesses need to achieve positive results from a modern storage architecture.“

Weka delivers modern storage architecture solutions to a variety of multimillion-dollar customers throughout Europe. Among the companies having deployed its solutions are Genomics England (GEL), Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), Scania, and Untold Studios.

Weka’s Limitless Data Platform is built on the shareable, scalable, and distributed file storage system WekaFS. Designed to help future-ready clients’ data centers and enable digital transformation, the WekaFS solution was architected to leverage the performance benefits of flash, high-speed networking, and compute-acceleration technologies (like GPUs) whether the data resides on-premises, in the public cloud, or as a hybrid model. It gives clients the leverage to get more value out of their compute resources, providing an enterprise-grade solution with security and cloud integration.

“As workloads change and needs evolve, companies are constantly searching for solutions that will help them accomplish their business objectives without adding complexity and inefficiencies,” said Chris Powers, VP and GM, collaborative platforms and big data, HPE. “The HPE Complete Program provides customers purpose-built HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen10 and DL325 Gen10 Plus All-NVMe servers combined with Weka to deliver highly accelerated file storage capabilities to support extreme-performance data analytics environments, including for ML, financial services, and life sciences. We look forward to increased opportunities to enable customer success as Weka expands its presence throughout the EMEA region.“

“Having a vendor with local resources provides a tight partnership and enables interaction from Weka with the customer,” Lee Biggenden, co-founder and director of Nephos Technologies Ltd.  “Weka has the technology that is needed by organizations throughout the world. Expanding their staff throughout EMEA to help regional resellers like us makes all the difference.  We are eager to begin working with Weka’s new leadership team to expand opportunities and increase sales.“

“The digital age has generated mountains of unstructured data, with the ability to extract value from that data becoming increasingly difficult. Hitachi Vantara’s new Hitachi Content Software for File in partnership with the WekaIO OEM agreement will help customers translate data into business insights faster and increase application performance to drive a better digital experience for customers,” said Sasan Moaveni, global data intelligence business lead, Hitachi Vantara LLC. “Tightly integrated with Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), we support new use cases that require HPC, real-time analytics, AI-ML workloads, whilst reducing the TCO. WekaIO’s expansion in EMEA is testimony to the value and benefits our solutions bring to data-intensive customers in this market.“

Resources:
Case study: Genomics England
Partner case study: Facilitating Medical Breakthroughs