Lightbits Commits to Channel with New Executive Leadership

April 07, 2022 at 08:30 AM EDT

Lightbits plans for accelerated growth through the channel with this key leadership appointment.

Lightbits®, the first software-defined and NVMe® data platform for any cloud, today announced that it has appointed Charla Bunton-Johnson as its new Vice President of Global Alliances and Channel. The role will be to drive growth velocity through the channel, forming and strengthening alliances that better enable partner success, and manage the firm’s global GoPurple program.

Charla Bunton-Johnson, who was channel chief at WekaIO and built the 5-Star award-winning WIN global partner program there, is a channel veteran with more than two decades of experience with channels, alliances, and OEMs. She has worked across AI/ML, enterprise storage, security, networking, graphics, and software industries. Before joining Lightbits, Bunton-Johnson worked at Telos, NVIDIA, Symantec, and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. In addition, Charla is a member of Chief, a private network specifically designed for senior women leaders to strengthen their leadership journey, cross-pollinate ideas across industries, and affect change from the top-down.

“This key appointment combined with our technical expertise in private, public, and edge cloud storage provide the backbone that partners can leverage to serve the market more effectively. Charla has a wealth of experience in the channel and building programs for partners to deliver value through technology-driven leadership. We have exciting opportunities ahead of us, and we are looking forward to Charla’s influence in increasing the footprint of Lightbits as the partner of choice for a high-performance cloud data platform,” said Kam Eshghi, Chief Strategy Officer at Lightbits.

A key focus for Bunton-Johnson will be the collaboration with Intel. Lightbits software-defined storage when combined with Intel high-performance hardware—Xeon Scalable processors, Intel Optane Persistent memory (PMem), and Intel Ethernet 800 Series Network Adapters—delivers the ultimate in performance, resilience, and scalability while lowering cost.

Lightbits provides a unified, consistent, high-performance data platform for any cloud that delivers efficiency, simplicity, and agility for container-based applications in a Kubernetes environment, as well as virtualized applications in a VMware environment. The innovative Lightbits Cloud Data Platform is architected to leverage the performance and latency benefits of NVMe/TCP and Intelligent Flash Management™ (IFM), solving the complexity and high-cost problems of high-performance storage for any cloud. Having a comprehensive partner network to deliver complete cloud solutions to the marketplace is crucial and one which Bunton-Johnson will help drive.

“Lightbits is a technology leader and channel-focused company that affords enormous opportunity for partners to upgrade their customer’s existing primary storage environment to disaggregated and NVMe/TCP storage,” added Bunton-Johnson. “I am looking forward to building a world-class program to help partners maximize value for their clients and to further strengthen and extend our important and strategic alliance relationships.”

For more information on the Lightbits leadership team, go to: https://www.lightbitslabs.com/company/

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About Lightbits Labs

Lightbits Labs® (Lightbits), is a cloud data platform company that delivers ease of use and efficiency while unlocking agility for modern businesses. Creators of the NVMe® over TCP (NVMe/TCP) protocol, Lightbits is leading the digital data center transformation by making software-defined storage that is easy to deploy at scale and delivers performance equivalent to local flash to accelerate cloud-native applications in bare metal, virtual, or containerized environments. Backed by leading enterprise investors including Cisco Investments, Dell Technologies Capital, Intel Capital, and Micron, Lightbits is on a mission to make high-performance elastic block storage simple, scalable, and cost-efficient for any cloud.

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