Cloud storage vendor Nasuni installed Sam King as its new CEO this week. King was previously CEO of security vendor Veracode.
Nasuni's flagship product, the Nasuni File Data Platform, is a cloud-based global file system that creates a single namespace to manage unstructured object data.
The company is focused on pivoting from its cloud storage base to offering data lake services that support Agentic AI applications, King said.
"This was an opportunity to sit at the confluence of infrastructure," she said. "We want to be the AI data lake."
Nasuni's expansion into data lake services will be challenging, but King's business experience will help with the transition, according to analysts.
Competing in the data management and storage markets isn't getting any easier, said Steve McDowell, founder and analyst at NAND Research. Nasuni needs to vie for customer attention with the likes of similar cloud storage companies such as Wasabi and data storage management vendors Komprise, as well as cloud service providers like AWS and Azure.
Focusing on data lakes for AI applications is a way to stand out, but specific implementation remains to be seen, he said.
"That's a growth play, but it's a hypercompetitive market dominated by some big names," McDowell said. "This requires the right leadership."
Under new management
King replaces Paul Flanagan, Nasuni's former CEO for the past eight years, who will remain as the non-executive chairman on the company's board of directors.
Sam King
King's stint as Veracode CEO ran from 2019 to 2024, after she joined the company in 2006, around its founding. She has experience in product, M&A and corporate strategy.
Nasuni launched data management capabilities last year called Nasuni IQ, which added storage consumption metrics and user analytics to the platform.
These additions are the start of how the platform should evolve toward a data lake in the future while prioritizing built-in ransomware protection, according to King.
Keeping Nasuni strictly as a global file system isn't enough, she said. Unstructured data likely holds the content, behaviors and knowledge needed for organizations to build agentic AI applications using Generative AI models to automate business processes.
"The uniqueness of Nasuni is helping organizations take advantage of [infrastructure] investments they've already made," she said. "As we move from all of the talk in AI being around large models to applications and software, that [shift] will require access to unstructured data."
Doing nothing is not an answer anymore.
Sam KingCEO, Nasuni
Nasuni will also aim to update and release capabilities to its platform more frequently to meet the demands of storage and data administrators. In the coming months, the company expects the platform will be able to enable customers to connect Nasuni data to cloud AI services from AWS and Azure, King said.
"Doing nothing is not an answer anymore, and standing still means you're falling behind," she said. "If the folks responsible for enterprise storage and enterprise data strategy [have to remain agile], we have to be as well."
The jump from security to storage will have a learning curve, but King's business acumen should help Nasuni grow in the market, according to McDowell.
"While she doesn't have deep experience in this space, she's a seasoned executive with solid execution skills," he said. "Nasuni's at that stage [as a company] where those skills are valuable."
Nasuni may need those executive skills as the company takes on incumbent vendors in the data lakehouse space, said Mitch Lewis, an analyst at the Futurum Group.
Databricks is the clear leader in the data lakehouse market, but there are a handful of other companies in the space, as well as storage vendors like Vast Data, he said.
"What Nasuni is doing is still a ways off from here, as they aren't really a database company," Lewis said. "But they are offering some things like a unified global namespace and data insights that can provide some value in this area."
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.
Sam King
