Panzura Leadership

Leadership Team

Panzura was co-founded and funded by a team of engineers and venture capitalists with over ten years of working experience and success together. Before Panzura, they developed the core security and performance technology at wireless networking leader Aruba Networks, and the application delivery technology in Alteon WebSystem’s Layer 4-7 switching products. Today, Aruba is a public company (NASDAQ: ARUN) and Alteon was acquired by Nortel for $7.8B.
Howard Dratler, Chief Executive Officer

Howard brings more than 25 years of leadership experience in the data storage, content management and data warehousing markets to Panzura. Prior to joining Panzura, Howard was Chief Executive Officer of Anacomp, a leading provider of SaaS-based document management and eDiscovery services. Howard also held senior roles at Captiva, which was acquired by EMC, and Allocity, an e-mail application storage start-up. From 1993 to 2002, Howard served in a variety of management and executive positions at VERITAS Software and was a key member of the management team that led VERITAS’ revenue growth from less than $30M to over $1.5B. Earlier in his career, Howard spent ten years in a variety of engineering and product management positions at NCR/Teradata, a leading provider of massively parallel data warehousing systems. Howard is a graduate of The Ohio State University with a degree in Computer Science.
Randy Chou, Co-founder & VP of Product Development

Randy’s experience spans 15 years of technical and management leadership in the security, networking, and application acceleration fields. Prior to co-founding Panzura, Randy was a member of the founding software team at Aruba Networks, where he managed the architecture and development of the company’s security software. The combination of his technical expertise and business acumen helped Aruba become the leader in the enterprise Wi-Fi security market. Prior to Aruba Networks, Randy led the development of SSL security and load balancing software at Alteon WebSystems. Randy holds a degree in computer science from UC Berkeley.
John Taylor, Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer

John built his career in software development and engineering management in the computer and networking security industries. His work is the foundation behind leading ATM switching, web acceleration, and Wi-Fi products. John has a reputation for growing start-ups into publicly traded companies. Before co-founding Panzura, John was a member of the founding software team at Aruba Networks, where he served as Director of Engineering. Prior to Aruba Networks, John was a lead software architect and engineer at Alteon WebSystems, playing an instrumental role in the creation of the load-balancing market. At FORE Systems, John was a software engineer before the company began trading publicly in 1994. John completed his master’s degree in computer science at the University of Virginia.
Rich Weber, VP of Operations

With over 20 years of experience in the enterprise software, networking and storage industries, Rich is a hands-on manager of IT and operations teams. Rich has also held Director and VP-level roles in product management and operations. Before joining Panzura, Rich was VP of Operations at Opvista and prior to that ran operations at Wi-Fi infrastructure provider Trapeze Networks, which was acquired by Belden in 2008
Diptish Datta, VP of Technical Services

Diptish brings over 25 years of technical leadership experience in the computer networking and storage industry. His passion is customer support and services with a focus on automation and process improvement. Most recently, Diptish led customer operations at Gridiron Systems where he built and managed all customer-facing functions and led the strategy and implementation of back-end data mining and alerting tools. Prior to that, Diptish served as VP of services engineering at NetApp where he was the pioneer and executive champion for the development of the remote support technology and infrastructure.  Diptish holds a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech and a Bachelor’s degree from IIT in India.
Peter O’Brien, Vice President of Channel and OEM

Peter has more than 25 years of experience in storage and software for storage markets. Prior to joining Panzura, Peter served at five start-ups as the Vice President of Business Development and Channels: Aprius, a PCIe over Ethernet company; InMage a CDP software company; Diligent Technologies, a deduplication company sold to IBM; Mendocino Software, a CDP software company; and Sistina Software, the creator of the Linux free Volume Manager and the Clustered File System (CFS), sold to Red Hat.  Pete was also Director of Sales at Rhapsody Network, sold to Brocade. Prior to that Peter was the Director of Strategic Licensing at VERITAS and worked at Sun Microsystems for over 11 years in manufacturing and sales.