Alex Dunfey Promoted to CTO at OpenDrives

OpenDrives, Inc., a provider of SDS and data services, has promoted Alex Dunfey to CTO from his former position as SVP engineering. Trevor Morgan, COO, made the announcement from the company’s Los Angeles-based HQs.

The promotion coincides with the soft launch of Astraeus, OpenDrives’ new cloud-native data services platform that represents a significant expansion of the company’s capabilities, which was announced in September 2025. Astraeus is designed to configure, store, orchestrate, manage, secure, and deploy mission-critical applications across dynamic environments, whether on-premises, cloud, or hybrid. The platform extends OpenDrives’ reach beyond its traditional M&E base to include IT departments across enterprise organizations in a wide range of industries.

Before joining OpenDrives in 2023 as VP engineering, Dunfey served as an engineer and technical lead at EMC, VMware, and Simplivity, later sharpening his skills at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he built scalable, customer-focused solutions. At OpenDrives, Dunfey has guided the company’s transition from a traditional hardware-based storage model to a software-defined organization, aligning strategies to match an evolving landscape and consistently delivering projects on time and within budget.

“Since joining OpenDrives, Alex has made a significant impact on how quickly and reliably we produce and release software,” Morgan said. “He is a consummate engineering leader who knows how to organize and encourage development teams to outperform. More importantly, Alex is an experienced technologist who understands current market trends and how to drive our company and products to take advantage of them. With Alex bringing his broad experience and strategic mind to our C-suite, and with the other organizational adjustments he’s making within the engineering team, we’re nicely poised for our planned growth just ahead.”

As CTO, Dunfey will be responsible for driving the company’s entire technology and software development strategy, which now encompasses a broader range of next-gen data services and infrastructure solutions. To accomplish these long-range goals, he will also lead a restructured engineering team- located across the US-to support OpenDrives’ future vision and address vital new functions emerging from its evolving product roadmap.

“The launch of Astraeus is just the beginning, both for our product and our team,” Dunfey added. “Future updates to Astraeus will add new data services, simplify workflow management, and leverage AI for insights and automation, which means we have to evolve the way we operate to do that. We will need dedicated resources who can focus on researching and prototyping new technologies, ensuring we have the underlying architecture required to fulfill the vision for Astraeus. Fortunately, we already have a great team of engineering and product leaders to forge the path ahead, and I’m excited to continue this journey with them.”

In conjunction with Dunfey’s promotion, several members of the engineering team have been promoted to new leadership roles:

• Christian Kuntz is moving from director of Software Engineering to Director, Advanced Development, focusing on research, prototyping, and exploring new technology areas.
• Heather Lapointe will take on the role of Chief Architect, Software Engineering and Infrastructure, leading a new architecture team, ensuring software, infrastructure, and engineering operations evolve to meet new product challenges.
• Sandy Luppino has been elevated to Manager, Quality Engineering, and Joshua Marx will join the management team as Manager, Software Engineering. Both will assume increased responsibilities in the day-to-day engineering development, testing, and bringing new products to market.

“All of our engineering leaders and team members are absolutely extraordinary,” observed Morgan. “In the last 18 months, we’ve been able to design, develop, and then release Astraeus to our early adopters while staying the course with our flagship storage software product, Atlas. Most companies shy away from the risk of pivoting the company in response to emerging market trends, but OpenDrives embraced the challenge and learned how to thrive. This team has just begun to showcase what they’re capable of, and that’s good news for our customers and investment community.”