Greg Knieriemen has moved from being Senior Director for Sales Enablement at Hitachi Vantara to heading up marketing for Quantum.
This is a significant move as it fills a gap in Quantum’s exec ranks following its rescue from looming financial problems by a boardroom coup. New CEO Hughes Meyrath appointed a new team with a CFO (William White), CRO (Tony Craythorne) and Chief Product Officer (Geoff Barrall) and worked on Quantum's financial structure. This started righting the sinking ship; debts have been reduced and revenues have started to grow again. Quantum’s full fiscal 2026 results will be revealed on June 15 and preliminary indications are that they will show continuing growth, wth a year/year increase.
CRO Tony Craythorne said: “Greg is a rare combination of strategic marketing leadership and authentic technical credibility. He has built compelling market narratives, led successful evangelism programs, and helped connect complex technologies to real customer value. Greg will play a critical role in articulating how we empower customers to manage data more efficiently, enabling the right data to be in the right place at the right time, and driving demand across all of Quantum’s markets.”
One of Quantum’s problem areas has been tape libraries, where the previous CEO’s efforts to sell them to hyperscalers foundered. But the rise of AI and coming need for data to be retained longer for inferencing has opened up a new enterprise tape library opportunity, and not just that. Strangled supply chains for memory have prompted a rise in demand for SSDs and also disk drives, which are both also supply-constrained.
This is encouraging organizations to look at how they can reduce their capacity needs for SSDs and HDDs by sending data off to lower cost storage, either in the public clouds, which have price issues as data amounts and movement increase, or on-premises.
Quantum can offer a flash-to-disk-to-tape storage management and tiering environment, data organisation, management and protection software and systems to help here, and needs messaging around this. Enter Greg Knieriemen.
He will, we’re told, lead Quantum’s global corporate and product marketing, focusing on strengthening its positioning, driving demand, and building stronger relationships with customers and partner channels. As part of this, he’ll “focus on amplifying how Quantum supports organizations in managing rapidly growing volumes of data. This includes, echoing Craythorne’s words, enabling the right data to be stored in the right place at the right time to balance cost, performance, and accessibility, and support more efficient and sustainable long-term data management.”
Earlier in his career, before marketing positions at Hitachi Vantara and NetApp, Knierieman was VP of Marketing at Chi Corporation, a longtime Quantum channel partner, which means he has ready-made Quantum channel knowledge.
Knieiemen said: “Across today’s data rich environments, organizations are under increasing pressure to manage rapidly growing data volumes while balancing cost, performance, and efficiency. Quantum supports organizations in storing and managing that data more efficiently, while maintaining control over cost, complexity, and power consumption, and enabling more sustainable long-term data retention. The opportunity is to simplify how we communicate our value, focus on our customers' priorities, and enable our partners to engage and sell more effectively. My priority is to make our messaging cleaner, crisper, and firmly aligned to the realities customers are facing today.”