LOS ANGELES—Software-defined data storage and data services provider OpenDrives has elevated Alex Dunfey to chief technology officer, responsible for driving the company’s overall technology and software strategy.
The promotion of Dunfey, who had been senior vice president, engineering, coincides with the soft launch of OpenDrives’ Astraeus platform, a cloud-native data services platform announced in September. Astraeus is designed to configure, store, orchestrate, manage, secure and deploy mission-critical applications across dynamic environments, whether on-premises, cloud, or hybrid, OpenDrives said. It extends OpenDrives’ reach beyond the media and entertainment space to include IT departments across a wide range of enterprise organizations, the company said.
“Since joining OpenDrives, Alex has made a significant impact on how quickly and reliably we produce and release software,” said OpenDrives Chief Operating Officer Trevor Morgan, to whom Dunfey will report. “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.”
In conjunction with Dunfey’s promotion, OpenDrives said, several members of the engineering team were also promoted to new leadership roles:
- Christian Kuntz advanced from director of software engineering to director, advanced development, focusing on research, prototyping, and exploring new technology areas.
- Heather Lapointe was named chief architect, software engineering and infrastructure, leading a new architecture team to ensure software, infrastructure and engineering operations evolve to meet new product challenges.
- Sandy Luppino was elevated to manager, quality engineering, and Joshua Marx will join the management team as manager, software engineering. Both will assume increased responsibilities in day-to-day engineering development, testing and bringing new products to market, OpenDrives said.
“The launch of Astraeus is just the beginning, both for our product and our team,” Dunfey said. “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.”
Dunfey joined OpenDrives in 2023 as vice president, engineering. Prior to joining the company, he was an engineer and technical lead at EMC, VCMWare and Simplivity, later joining Amazon Web Services (AWS). OpenDrives said he 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.
