Jim Liddle Chief Innovation Officer, Nasuni

Nasuni Corporation promoted its VP of product, Jim Liddle, to the role of chief innovation officer.

This new focus area will lead the development and implementation of the company’s data intelligence and AI strategies.

The appointment recognizes Liddle’s contributions over the last 12 months in evolving the Nasuni File Data Platform by providing data intelligence for customers, ranging from search to intelligent ransomware detection. Liddle brings expert knowledge and a track record of success in driving product innovation to his new role, where he will work closely with Nasuni’s cross-functional teams to harness the company’s technical expertise and culture of innovation. Prior to joining Nasuni, he was founder and CEO at Storage Made Easy (SME).

Nasuni acquired the company in 2022 to strategically leverage its technology to build upon and develop new data management offerings that prioritize the full lifecycle of file data from creation and storage, to classification, search, and interrogation. Innovations in the Nasuni File Data Platform following the SME acquisition – primarily Nasuni Access Anywhere, which delivers high-performance file access for remote and hybrid (distributed) users – provide the foundation to deliver future AI and data intelligence features.

“I’m excited for the opportunity that this role presents in helping Nasuni deliver on its commitment to further enhance its dynamic data management capabilities with emerging technologies,” stated Liddle. “By empowering businesses to leverage the potential of multiple and often disparate unstructured data sets, they are able to deliver more informed decision-making.”

The firm understands that AI and data intelligence help global customers unlock deeper and more actionable business insights to better respond to profound market shifts. As enterprise IT moves into the cloud, distributed file shares, better support for hybrid workforces, and safeguarding vs. ransomware are becoming mission-critical requirements. After all, leading industry analyst firm Gartner has predicted that 65% of application workloads will be ready for cloud delivery by 2027. Organizations are also seeking to harness AI and ML tools to better leverage their data intelligence and boost innovation; the natural language processing market alone is set to grow from $11.6 billion in 2020 to $35.1 billion by 2026.

Paul Flanagan, CEO, explained: “Data intelligence solutions are missing the largest dataset – unstructured data because it is spread across silos of NAS infrastructure. Nasuni enables customers to consolidate these silos into an object store, providing the foundation to support the seamless integration of data intelligence and AI. Our acquisition of Jim’s former company, SME, reflected our determination to act quickly on this insight. Jim is the perfect person to help us fulfill our vision.”

Nasuni has been knocking down the silos of unstructured storage for enterprises worldwide, as well as building in security and data intelligence. Planned additions to the Nasuni File Data Platform include enhanced file data analytics, enterprise content search, real-time PII (Personally Identifiable Information) content detection, and integrations with cloud-based AI services, which formed part of the SME acquisition.

Many customers are already taking advantage of Nasuni’s offerings to accelerate their own innovations in AI. Perkins+Will, one of the world’s leading architecture and design firms, has moved its file data to the cloud with Nasuni. Using the new on-demand file infrastructure and global high performance file access, its teams can now move data from place to place while accelerating business cycles and collaborations across its 28 WW locations. Perkins+Will can now harness AI and ML tools to reimagine its data analytics processes and further capitalize on these innovations as more advanced tools come online.