OpenDrives has announced Alex Dunfey has been promoted to chief technical officer (CTO).
Coinciding with the launch of the its Astraeus data services platform, OpenDrives has promoted Dunfey from his former role as senior vice president of engineering at the company, in which he guided the organisation’s transition from its traditional hardware base to a software-defined storage model.
Prior to joining OpenDrives in 2023, Dunfey held engineering and technical lead positions at EMC, VMWare and Simplivity. In his role at Amazon Web Services (AWS), he built scalable, customer-focused solutions.
Announcing the appointment, Trevor Morgan, COO at OpenDrives, said,“Since joining OpenDrives, Alex has made a significant impact on how quickly and reliably we produce and release software. He is a consummate engineering leader who knows how to organise 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 organisational adjustments he’s making within the engineering team, we’re nicely poised for our planned growth just ahead.”
In his new role, Dunfey will have responsibility for the company’s entire technology and software development strategy, encompassing a wider range of next-generation data services and infrastructure solutions. He will also lead a US-based engineering team to support OpenDrives’ future vision and product development.
Commenting, Dunfey said, “The launch of Astraeus is just the beginning, both for our product and our team. 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 fulfil 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.”
Additionally, several members of the engineering team have received promotions.
- 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,” saidd 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 data 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.”
