Charla Bunton-Johnson VP Global Alliances and Channel, Lightbits

Lightbits Labs, Ltd. appointed Charla Bunton-Johnson as VP of global alliances and channel.

Her role will be to drive growth velocity through the channel, forming and strengthening alliances that better enable partner success, and manage the firm’s global GoPurple program.  

She was channel chief at WekaIO and built the 5-star award-winning WIN global partner program there, and is a channel veteran with more than 2 decades of experience with channels, alliances, and OEMs. She has worked across AI/ML, enterprise storage, security, networking, graphics, and software industries. Before joining Lightbits, she worked at Telos, NVIDIA, Symantec, and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. In addition, she is a member of Chief, a private network designed for senior women leaders to strengthen their leadership journey, cross-pollinate ideas across industries, and affect change from the top-down.

“This key appointment combined with our technical expertise in private, public, and edge cloud storage provide the backbone that partners can leverage to serve the market more effectively. Charla has a wealth of experience in the channel and building programs for partners to deliver value through technology-driven leadership. We have exciting opportunities ahead of us, and we are looking forward to Charla’s influence in increasing the footprint of Lightbits as the partner of choice for a high-performance cloud data platform,” said Kam Eshghi, chief strategy officer.

A key focus for Bunton-Johnson will be the collaboration with Intel. Lightbits SDS when combined with Intel high-performance hardware-Xeon Scalable processors, Intel Optane Persistent memory (PMem), and Intel Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapters, delivers performance, resilience, and scalability while lowering cost.  

The company provides a unified, consistent, high-performance data platform for any cloud that delivers efficiency, simplicity, and agility for container-based applications in a Kubernetes environment, as well as virtualized applications in a VMware environment. The Lightbits Cloud Data Platform is architected to leverage the performance and latency benefits of NVMe/TCP and Intelligent Flash Management (IFM), solving the complexity and high-cost problems of high-performance storage for any cloud. Having a comprehensive partner network to deliver complete cloud solutions to the marketplace is crucial and one which Bunton-Johnson will help drive.

“Lightbits is a technology leader and channel-focused company that affords enormous opportunity for partners to upgrade their customer’s existing primary storage environment to disaggregated and NVMe/TCP storage,” she added. “I am looking forward to building a world-class program to help partners maximize value for their clients and to further strengthen and extend our important and strategic alliance relationships.”