Leadership

Charlie Giancarlo

CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Charlie Giancarlo is Chairman and CEO of Pure Storage.  He has a three-decade track record of driving growth and innovation at leading global technology companies.  Before joining Pure, Charlie served as Managing Director, Head of Value Creation and later Senior Advisor at Silver Lake Partners from 2007 to 2015, where he focused on business improvement and investment opportunities across strategic and operational initiatives for Silver Lake’s portfolio companies.

Prior to Silver Lake, for over a decade Charlie served in senior executive roles at Cisco Systems, including Chief Technology Officer and Chief Development Officer.  At Cisco, Charlie led Cisco’s multi-product growth, and was at the forefront of the Company’s R&D efforts for all product lines, with entry into new markets, including IP Telephony, WiFi, VPNs, TelePresence, and the SMB market.

Charlie received a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Brown University, a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.

David Hatfield

PRESIDENT

David Hatfield (a.k.a. “Hat”) has been in an executive management role at Pure since joining as President in January 2013. Dave is responsible for leading all go-to-market strategy and execution globally, including sales, solutions engineering, customer and partner success, channels and alliances, and the marketing and business development functions within Pure. Dave has been instrumental to Pure’s growth – as the company has scaled revenues from single digit millions and looks to target $1 billion in FY18, and the employee base has grown from less than 100 to the now thousands of Puritans worldwide -- faster than any other storage systems company in history.

With over 25 years of experience building high performance teams at innovative software and cloud infrastructure companies including Akamai Technologies, VERITAS Software, Symantec, Limelight Networks and others, Dave has a wealth of experience in successfully navigating hyper-growth and profitability. He has participated in 3 successful IPO’s (all remain independent companies to this day) and one of the largest enterprise software mergers in history.

Dave is an investor in many next generation technology companies and is a member of the PureGood Foundation Board of Directors.

Tim Riitters

CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER

Tim Riitters serves as CFO for Pure Storage, and leads the company’s financial and accounting operations worldwide. Tim joins Pure Storage from Google, where he spent 10 years in finance and was responsible for overseeing the company’s annual planning and budgeting processes. Additionally, he led the finance team responsible for predicting revenue trends and increasing revenue opportunities. Earlier in his career at Google, Tim was based in Dublin, Ireland and oversaw the company’s European financial operations, and served as CFO of its European payments business.

Prior to Google, Tim served as a product manager in Siebel Systems' business intelligence applications group and helped this team drive triple digit year over year growth in revenue. Tim began his career at Deloitte where he served both as a consulting manager and auditor and specialized in business intelligence application development, financial systems selection and implementation, business process redesign and M&A auditing and accounting.

Tim holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management (with Honors), and a Bachelor of Science in business from the University of Minnesota (with Honors).

Joe FitzGerald

VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL COUNSEL

Joe FitzGerald serves as VP, and General Counsel for Pure Storage and is responsible for overseeing and managing legal matters for Pure. With over 20 years of high technology related legal experience, Joe joins Pure after almost 12 years at Symantec (via the VERITAS Software acquisition), where he served as Senior Vice President, Legal & Public Affairs. During his time at Symantec, Joe successfully built a world-class IP program, growing Symantec’s patent portfolio from a literal handful of patents to almost 2000 today. In addition to active involvement in every major strategic transaction, Joe managed the technology licensing, product support, litigation, IP, and brand protection legal teams as well as the Global Government Affairs team that works with governments around the world on cyber security and other regulatory issues. In addition, Joe handled the strategic antitrust and competition related legal issues for this Fortune 500 software company.

Prior to Symantec, Joe worked in-house at a number of Silicon Valley companies including New Focus, Sun Microsystems and Nikon Research Corporation of America. Prior to Nikon, Joe was in private practice at Graham and James in Los Angeles. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University, and a JD from Catholic University of America.

Johanna Jackman

CHIEF HUMAN RESOURCE OFFICER

Johanna Jackman is a globetrotting, results-oriented leader with an unrelenting passion for enhancing team and business performance. Johanna believes achievable scale is made by leaders who elevate company culture, include employees in the journey, and never stray from their vision.  That is why she joined Pure.

Prior to becoming a Puritan, Johanna was Vice President, HR at LinkedIn.  Joining post-IPO, she was responsible for scaling and managing various HR functions from hyper-growth to a mature business. During her tenure, she helped create a talent platform that saw a 10x employee base grow to 10,000.  A core focus also included an external pivot, in partnership with sales, to deliver innovative HR products and solutions to customers.

Johanna’s experience also includes time at Microsoft where she specialized in talent management and business partnership for several years holding key roles in Seattle, EMEA and Australia. Johanna earned her bachelor’s degree in Business at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. 

John "Coz" Colgrove

FOUNDER AND CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER

John "Coz" Colgrove was one of the founding engineers at VERITAS Software (merged with Symantec in 2005), where his 20-year career culminated as Fellow and Chief Technology Officer for the company's Data Center Management Group. Coz was the primary architect for the hugely successful VERITAS Volume Manager (VxVM) and VERITAS File System (VxFS), and later served in various other engineering, management, and consultative roles. During his time at VERITAS, Coz became one of the industry's foremost experts on optimizing I/O streams and data structures for the unique idiosyncrasies of rotational hard drives, a challenge he's now re-solving for solid-state Flash memory. Prior to VERITAS, Coz was with Amdahl Corporation, where he was a key contributor to the development of the UTS mainframe UNIX operating system kernel.

After leaving Symantec in 2008 to pursue personal interests, he joined Sutter Hill Ventures in the role of Entrepreneur in Residence. It was there he observed the growing acceptance of solid-state storage by enterprises that led him to co-found Pure Storage with John Hayes, with the goal of fully exploiting the advantages of the new technology. Coz is a graduate of Rutgers University, and holds over 70 patents in the areas of computer system and reliable data storage design.

Todd Engle

VICE PRESIDENT, OPERATIONS

Todd Engle serves as VP, Operations for Pure Storage, and is responsible for the company's overall strategic business operations, overseeing product forecasting, manufacturing and supply chain vendor relations. Todd joins Pure Storage after 12 years at Xiotech, where he served as VP of manufacturing. Under Todd's direction, Xiotech successfully expanded its global manufacturing operations, implemented an improved supply chain management system and streamlined its order fulfillment processes, achieving 99-percent on-time delivery and 95-percent production forecast accuracy rates.

Prior to Xiotech, Todd served as director of business operations at Computer Network Technologies, where he successfully automated the company's sales, revenue and production forecasting systems. He holds a BA in accounting from Metropolitan State University.

Colin Mead

VICE PRESIDENT, GLOBAL SUPPORT

Colin Mead has more than two decades of international support and services leadership experience in the high tech industry, supporting global enterprise, government and managed services IT environments. He joins Pure Storage from Riverbed Technology where he was the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Support. Colin was responsible for all aspects of its $450M post sales support business including technical support, logistics, renewals, support partner program and system operations. While in this role, he was awarded the Technology Services Industry Association's (TSIA) highest award for customer service excellence four years running, in addition to being recognised by JD Power for providing an "outstanding customer service experience."

Colin is a graduate of Thames Valley University in the UK and St Mary's in Moraga, CA. He also held executive positions at Mirapoint and N.E.T.

Kevin Delane

VICE PRESIDENT, WORLDWIDE SALES

Kevin Delane serves as Pure Storage’s Vice President of Worldwide Sales where he oversees the company’s global go-to-market strategy and ensures customer success. He is also responsible for international expansion and growth. Kevin was previously the Vice President of Global Accounts, Service Providers and International Sales for Pure.

Kevin is a technology sales veteran with 30 years of experience. He came to Pure Storage from IO, where he was the Senior Vice President of Sales. Prior to IO, Kevin spent more than 18 years at EMC in sales leadership roles including Senior Vice President of Business Operations, Isilon.

He holds a Bachelor of Science from Providence College.

Liza Adams

VICE PRESIDENT, PRODUCT AND SOLUTION MARKETING

Liza Adams is a transformative leader with a passion for innovating to enable business growth and to change the way we work and live, as well as developing the next generation of leaders. As the VP of Product and Solutions Marketing at Pure Storage, Liza’s mission is to develop integrated solutions, building demand and market awareness across the company’s technology portfolio.

Prior to joining Pure Storage, Liza was VP of Solutions and Segment Marketing at Brocade and Head of Service Provider Strategic Marketing at Juniper Networks where she and her teams drove business growth with customer-centric go-to-market strategies and marketing approaches.

Liza and her teams are recognized for developing and launching some of the world’s first cloud-based and managed network, security, and mobility services; establishing companies in leadership positions in key categories; and driving demand during her stints as VP of Marketing at Virtela (now NTT Communications) and Level 3 Communications. Prior to that, she held leadership roles in marketing, product management, sales engineering, and operations at WilTel/LDDS Worldcom. Liza was also an industry analyst covering leading-edge networking technologies, products, and services.

Liza has a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, Missouri.

Matt Kixmoeller

VICE PRESIDENT, STRATEGY

Matt Kixmoeller is a storage veteran who saw first-hand the last major storage technology media upgrade: the move from tape to disk in the backup market. Matt was Vice President of enterprise product management for Symantec's Information Management products, including the NetBackup and Enterprise Vault. Matt oversaw product strategy and vision, engineering direction, and go-to-market activities for this $1B+ global product line. During his tenure, Matt also held similar roles managing other Symantec products such as the Storage Foundation and CommandCentral Storage.

Matt joined Symantec in 2005 as part of the merger with VERITAS Software Corporation. Prior to joining VERITAS Software, he was co-founder of Centrata, a leading provider of IT service management software. He has also held positions with Adaptec and Gemini Consulting (now Cap Gemini, Ernst & Young). Matt holds a degree in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dan FitzSimons

VICE PRESIDENT, AMERICAS SALES

Dan serves as Pure’s Vice President of Americas Sales. Prior to this role, he was responsible for Pure’s West and Central sales teams. Dan is a 20+ year veteran executive with experience in successfully leading global and regional teams varying from start-ups to large technology organizations. With a track record of growing markets both domestically and internationally, Dan excels at developing passionate, high performance sales teams.

Prior to joining Pure, Dan held several executive sales leadership roles, most recently serving as SVP, Global Sales at SOASTA, where he led the team from inception to operating in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC and ultimately to a successful M&A exit. Additional leadership roles include VP of North America at Limelight Networks through an IPO, West leader at Symantec, and VP of Sales at Gartner.   

Michael Sotnick

VICE PRESIDENT PARTNERS, SERVICES AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

Michael Sotnick is a channel veteran and was most recently Executive Vice President and Channel Chief at Moovweb. Prior to Moovweb, Michael was Vice President of Worldwide Channels and Alliances at Quest Software (acquired by Dell). He also served as Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations at ActivIdentity, where he was responsible for all customer-facing operations including management of the direct sales and channel team.

Before joining ActivIdentity, Michael was the Senior Vice President of Small and Midsize Enterprise for SAP America, Inc. and was responsible for defining and executing SAP’s channel and partner strategy. Additionally, he was the architect and execution leader of SAP America’s multi-dimensional coverage model for this customer segment. This includes oversight of the SAP reseller channel and related operations.

Prior to SAP, Michael served as Vice President of Partner Sales for VERITAS Software

Corporation (acquired by Symantec in 2005). At VERITAS, Michael established the global multi-tier channel strategy and managed North American Partner Sales. He is a graduate of the University of Hartford in Connecticut.

Arthur P. Johnson, Jr.

VICE PRESIDENT, CORPORATE DEVELOPMENT AND STRATEGIC PLANNING

Arthur Johnson is Vice President of Corporate Development & Strategic Planning at Pure Storage with a charter to drive the company’s corporate strategy and M&A activities to accelerate the company’s rapid growth and transformation.

Arthur’s tenured 20+ years of experience has included expertise in Strategy, Operations, M&A, Business Development, and Finance spanning many areas of technology including APIs, Developers, SaaS, AI/ML, Collaboration, Big Data, Mobile and Security.

Arthur was most recently at Twillo, serving as the Vice President of Strategy, Corporate Development and Global Partnerships. Previously, Arthur was an Operating Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and Chief Operating Officer for Cisco WebEx. Arthur’s other roles have included Vice President, Corporate Development at Intuit and leading Hewlett Packard’s Software Division's Strategic Planning group. Arthur began his career in investment banking at Goldman Sachs.

Arthur holds a B.S. degree in Finance from California State University, Los Angeles and an M.B.A. degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

James Petter

VICE PRESIDENT, EUROPE MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

James Petter joined Pure after 16 highly successful years as a sales leader in EMEA, with specific focus on the UK and Ireland on global account programs for companies including EMC, Cisco, Telstra and Coca Cola. James brings strong operational discipline to Pure Storage, with a proven ability to implement and execute sales strategies that support high growth and high margins. Throughout his tenure James has built a business based on 100% channel in the Commercial marketplace, has created a highly successful business in Public Sector in the UK, and personally has served as an Advisor to the central government.

A graduate of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, James served as an officer in the 2nd Royal Green Jackets for six years. He also holds a BSc from the University of Surrey and a Postgraduate Diploma in Management Studies from Bristol University.

Michael Alp

VICE PRESIDENT, ASIA PACIFIC AND JAPAN

Alp joins Pure Storage from Polycom, where he served as the president of Polycom Asia Pacific and Japan, running all sales and marketing, service and support operations across the region. Previously he was the vice president of the EMC Backup and Recovery Solution and Data Computing Division in EMC APJ, after the Data Domain acquisition where he led the team across the region. Before this, Alp ran the Channels business at EMC and was well known as the architect and driver behind EMC’s aggressive move into emerging and commercial markets through the channel from 2006 to 2009. His 25 years of industry experience also includes positions at Teradata, Oracle Corporation Australia and NCR Corporation.

Wilson Grava

VICE PRESIDENT, LATIN AMERICA

Wilson joined Pure Storage in 2014 and is the VP of Latin America. Prior to Pure, Grava was responsible for Sales, Pre-Sales, Sales Ops, Marketing and Channel for Latin America & the Caribbean at NetApp. Before joining NetApp in 2011, Grava was the VP for Latin America at Symantec, a leader in security and systems management solutions. Previously, Grava was responsible for McAfee’s operations in LatAm. His career began at CA Technologies, where he held technical, Marketing, Acquisitions, Education and International Channel management positions. Grava holds an Executive MBA from ESPM and a BSc in Data Processing from the Universidade Mackenzie, both in Brazil.

Matt Burr

VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER FlashBlade

Matt Burr is Vice President and General Manager of FlashBlade at Pure Storage. With more than 15 years of experience in the technology industry, Matt excels at building teams and strategies that grow revenue at both early stage companies and large complex organizations. He has held leadership roles within Symantec (via the VERITAS Software acquisition). In addition, Matt previously led growth strategy for the Western Region at Limelight Networks.

Prakash Darji

VICE PRESIDENT AND GENERAL MANAGER FlashArray

Prakash Darji joined Pure Storage in June 2018 as the General Manager of the FlashArray Business Unit, responsible for the overall strategy, GTM, growth, and advancement of the company’s flagship product.

Prior to Pure Storage, Darji spent several years at SAP in numerous leadership roles and most recently the SVP & General Manager of the Platform as a Service cloud business. During his tenure at SAP, he built a new software business in the Database Technology Space that grew from $0 to $1B in five years and a cloud platform-as-a-service business that reached triple-digit growth.

Darji has a proven track record of accomplishments in growing new businesses in the areas of Financial Performance Management, Database, and Cloud Platforms. He is also the author of several publications with a broad range of expertise in GTM, operations, R&D, sales, and services.

Darji holds a Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Software from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Cathleen Southwick

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER

Cathleen “Cathy” Southwick is the Chief Information Officer of Pure Storage. In this role,  Southwick leads Pure’s global IT strategy and advances the company’s operations through the delivery of next-generation technology capabilities and systems.

Southwick is an accomplished leader with over 25 years of experience defining and executing forward-looking IT strategies, most recently at AT&T. During her tenure at AT&T, which began in 1996, she served in various IT roles where she was a core member leading cloud planning and execution of AT&T’s D2 (Network virtualisation) transformation journey. Most recently, Southwick served as Vice President of Technology Engineering and led a team responsible for the planning, design, engineering, capacity management, and asset management functions of IT Cloud, Mobility and Core Network. 

Before joining AT&T, Southwick spent 11 years working in the transportation industry for a Fortune 100 company where she held a variety of positions responsible for IT architecture and planning, merger integration, strategic planning, human resources management, procurement, project/portfolio management, and process re-engineering.

Southwick resides in the Bay Area with her husband and has two daughters. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from St. Mary's and an MBA from the University of Phoenix.