{"slug": "weka-changes-marketing-head-as-messaging-moves-to-ai-inferencing-at-scale", "title": "WEKA changes marketing head as messaging moves to AI inferencing at scale", "summary": "WEKA appointed Shanta Kohli as its new Chief Marketing Officer, replacing Lauren Vaccarello, as the AI storage company shifts its messaging focus toward enterprise-scale AI inferencing and agentic AI. Kohli, formerly CMO at Sysdig, will lead marketing efforts to differentiate WEKA in a competitive market against rivals like DDN, Dell, and NetApp.", "body_md": "file\n\n# WEKA changes marketing head as messaging moves to AI inferencing at scale\n\nAI-focused high-performance file and object storage supplier [WEKA](https://www.blocksandfiles.com/file/2026/06/10/weka-software-speeds-long-context-ai-inferencing-on-oracles-public-cloud/5253536) has a new Chief Marketing officer, Shanta Kohli, as its enterprise customers look to move intro production-scale inferencing and agentic AI.\n\nShe replaces Lauren Vaccarello, who ran WEKA marketing since September 2024. Kohli joins from Sysdig, which she joined in August 2020 as VP Marketing and Demand Generation, progressing to CMO in November 2024. Before that she was with Palo Alto. And before that she was VP of Corporate Marketing at Nimble Storage, while the company made its go-to-market transition from SMB to enterprise, and managed its marketing integration with HPE following its 2017 acquisition.\n\nWEKA CEO and Co-Founder Liran Zvibel, to whom she will report, said: “Shanta brings impressive experience to WEKA. She is a customer-focused growth architect who has built demand-generation engines from the ground up, helping companies at our stage triple their ARR. Equally, she understands what it takes to move a technical brand through a crowded market and turn attention into revenue by reaching and engaging buyers navigating the same complex business and technology challenges our customers face. We’re thrilled she’s here.”\n\nHe says the convergence of inference economics, agentic workloads, and infrastructure modernization has created a set of challenges, including inferencing at scale and distributed GPU infrastructure, which WEKA’s AI data and memory products can meet.\n\nKohli said: “The AI industry has reached an inflection point where the infrastructure layer is no longer a background decision – it’s a critical architectural choice that has lasting implications for your business. What drew me to WEKA was the chance to build a category-leading brand and growth engine for a company solving the toughest challenges enterprises face in running AI at scale. WEKA has a product that actually delivers on its promises, devoted customers, a massive market opportunity, and a team with the ambition to match. My job is to make sure the world can't look away.”\n\nLauren Vaccarello now sits “on the board of Thryv (Nasdaq: THRY, Compensation and Audit Committees) and USA for UNFPA, and I was previously Executive in Residence at Scale Venture Partners. Today I advise AI companies including Lumana AI and StaffAI on GTM, positioning, and go-to-market build-out.” She [said](https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenvaccarello/) on LinkedIn: “At WEKA, I drove 60 percent of new logo pipeline and doubled our win rate, rebuilding product marketing and messaging for a company selling infrastructure to AI labs and enterprises training frontier models.”\n\nThe marketing messaging focus now includes enterprises and AI service providers with inferencing and agentic AI at production scale. It means WEKA faces strong competition from other enterprise AI storage providers moving in the same direction: DDN, Dell, Everpure, HPE, NetApp, and VAST Data for example, all with Nvidia integration and KV cache acceleration as table stakes. Kohli’s task is to make sure the WEKA signal stands out from this noise. We think performance will be a strong feature in her messaging.\n\n##### Bootnote\n\n[WhiteFiber](https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenvaccarello/) is a publicly traded AI infrastructure company which delivers end-to-end, high-performance AI infrastructure through GPU cloud services and its owned Tier 3 datacenters. Its vertically integrated model spans power procurement, data center design, and cloud, colocation, and hybrid deployment.\n\nWEKA has played a role in a WhiteFiber cross-datacenter networking project combining two datacenters 83km apart into one GPU supercluster, with 111.2 Tbps bandwidth using dark fiber, and 0.9ms round trip latency. That latency sits within 8 percent of the physical limit for light in fiber over that distance.\n\nWhiteFiber says its results were achieved while using only a portion of the available fiber spectrum, roughly double the capacity of comparable published full-spectrum field trials. That means there is headroom for more bandwidth performance.\n\nThe system was built in collaboration with DriveNets, which provides the high-performance Ethernet network fabric connecting both sites, and WEKA's [NeuralMesh](https://www.blocksandfiles.com/file/2026/06/10/weka-software-speeds-long-context-ai-inferencing-on-oracles-public-cloud/5253536), which provides high-performance data and memory infrastructure across the cluster.\n\nCommercial launch of WhiteFiber’s technology is planned later this quarter. Full-fiber lighting testing is planned before this commercial launch.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/weka-changes-marketing-head-as-messaging-moves-to-ai-inferencing-at-scale", "canonical_source": "https://www.blocksandfiles.com/file/2026/07/15/weka-changes-marketing-head-as-messaging-moves-to-ai-inferencing-at-scale/5271663", "published_at": "2026-07-15 12:06:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-15 12:32:33.157864+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-infrastructure", "ai-products", "ai-startups"], "entities": ["WEKA", "Shanta Kohli", "Lauren Vaccarello", "Sysdig", "Palo Alto", "Nimble Storage", "HPE", "Liran Zvibel"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/weka-changes-marketing-head-as-messaging-moves-to-ai-inferencing-at-scale", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/weka-changes-marketing-head-as-messaging-moves-to-ai-inferencing-at-scale.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/weka-changes-marketing-head-as-messaging-moves-to-ai-inferencing-at-scale.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/weka-changes-marketing-head-as-messaging-moves-to-ai-inferencing-at-scale.jsonld"}}