Sergio Soto Director of Latin America Sales and Solution Engineering, OpenDrives

OpenDrives, Inc. announced several senior hires to its sales and product divisions as it continues to accelerate innovation and market growth across verticals within M&E, and enterprise IT. 

These hires include: Sergio Soto (formerly Quantum) as director of Latin America sales and solution engineering, Rodney Williams (formerly DreamWorks Studios) as technical account manager, Vernon Leung (formerly Velasea) as director of product integrations and partnerships, Christopher Burgau (formerly Kyndryl) as regional territory manager, Jacqueline Gerhardt (formerly Unisys) as senior product manager, Colin Auxier (formerly SCCS, Inc.) as senior professional services engineer and Christopher Imes (formerly BeyondTrust) as senior systems engineer.  
 
This announcement comes amid a period of growth for the company as it executes on storage solutions for the most demanding enterprise-scale workflows, from live editing to post-production and backup and recovery. Its open and agnostic software-led approach to architecting solutions that match the individual performances needs of its customers, including Fox Sports, HBO, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Spotify, Epic Games, LA Kings, Vox and hundreds more, is reinforced by its ecosystem of technology and channel partners, such as EVS, Western Digital, Signiant, Creative Mobile Solutions (CMSI), InterVision and CHESA.

“OpenDrives’ continued leadership momentum in providing flexible, scalable solutions for the entire data lifecycle I attribute to the excellence of our team-individuals who collectively share the same ethos that is cornerstone to our company: open-mindness,” said Sean Lee, chief strategy and operations officer. “We’re thrilled to broaden our team expertise that spans continents, categories and verticals, alongside our ever-evolving open ecosystem of partners, to deliver on the data demands that are evolving just as fast across live broadcast, post production and enterprise IT.” 

Earlier this year, OpenDrives debuted enterprise-scale software solutions, including a managed public cloud, S3 compatibility with public clouds such as AWS and Wasabi, inline caching, intelligent pre-fetching and data protection. These capabilities earned OpenDrives the 2022 NAB Show Product of the Year Award. Most recently, the company unveiled its container-native enterprise scale backup and recovery. A continued trajectory in leading innovations has helped the firm achieve over 90% 3-year Y/Y revenue growth while doubling headcount in the same period. 

The company is set to soon power Fox Sports’ live broadcast of Qatar 2022, which follows the success Fox Sports experienced using OpenDrives for NASCAR, the United States Football League reboot and many events in 2021 and 2022. It delivered 3x the throughput rate compared to Fox Sports’ previous workflows while cutting setup times setup time from days to hours. 

“OpenDrives creates solutions that drive real-world business outcomes backed by a team that can uniquely intercept customer needs-something I’ve experienced the value of both as an end-user and as a competitor,” said Soto. “Right now, the Latin American market is dominated by players who rely on single-vendor ‘lock-in’ models-this has created a massive opportunity for OpenDrives to deliver vendor-agnostic solutions that are optimized to meet the unique needs of individual customers.“

Prior to joining OpenDrives, Sergio Soto was area director of technical sales and solutions engineering for the Americas at Quantum Corp., where he was responsible for leading the pre-sales organization and expanding the verticals and use cases the company served in M&E boosting revenue by tenfold in his first year.

Additional hires include: 
 
Christopher Burgau as regional territory manager in USA, hailing previously from Kyndryl and Cytrix 

Rodney Williams as technical account manager. He previously led IT infrastructure and operations at DreamWorks Studios. 

Vernon Leung as director of product integrations and partnerships. Most recently he was product engineer manager at Velasea and has served as solutions architect at NetApp.

Jacqueline Gerhard as senior product manager. Most recently she was senior engineering manager and senior product manager at Unisys. 

Colin Auxier as senior professional services engineer. Most recently he was information technology manager at SCCS, Inc. 

Christopher Imes as senior systems engineer. He was an implementation engineer at BeyondTrust.