Object First appoints new Chief Product Officer

Author: Simon Rowley

Object First, the creator of Ootbi (Out-of-the-Box-Immutability), ransomware-proof backup storage appliance purpose-built for Veeam, has announced the appointment of Eric R Schott as its Chief Product Officer (CPO).

With deep expertise in storage technology and decades of product management experience, Eric will drive Object First’s continued product innovation and growth. As 93% of ransomware attacks explicitly target backups, businesses seek secure, simple, and powerful backup storage to mitigate loss, downtime, and financial impact from attacks.

David Bennett, CEO of Object First, comments, “We are thrilled to welcome Eric to the Object First leadership team. He has the deep technical knowledge and product management leadership skills we need to evolve our successful Ootbi product line. Eric’s impact is already evident with our recent product update, increasing storage capacity to 192TB on a single node and up to 768TB in a cluster – or 3 petabytes and beyond as part of a Veeam repository.”

Bringing decades of product management experience to Object First, Eric has specialised in building easy to use, scaling, and innovating storage products as businesses increasingly invest in protecting data from rising cyber threats. This expertise has ranged from helping the world’s largest technology companies to start-ups.

Eric began his career with Hewlett Packard (HPE), where he spent the first 20 years focusing on Unix and file systems development. Most recently, he was Senior Director of Product Management at Veeam, where he was responsible for new integrations, including public cloud offerings, Nutanix AHV, and RedHat Virtualisation. Eric also held product leadership positions at Dell, OneCloud Software, and EqualLogic.

“Securing backup data has become imperative in our current threat landscape, and this has put a spotlight on the protection capabilities and benefits of immutable backup storage solutions,” Eric explains. “I’m excited to build on Object First’s foundation with expanded Ootbi capabilities that ensure customers and partners have the best backup storage solution for Veeam with guaranteed security and resiliency from ransomware.”

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