Dremio Corp. developer of a data-as-a-service platform that enables businesses to analyze, curate and serve data from multiple sources in a converged platform called a “lakehouse,” today said it has appointed former Splunk Inc. Chief Cloud Officer Sendur Sellakumar as chief executive officer. The CEO position has been open since former CEO Billy Bosworth left the company in February for personal reasons.

Sellakumar was most recently senior vice president of commercial construction markets at ServiceTitan Inc., a maker of software for home and commercial service contractors. Prior to that, he spent nine years at Splunk, where he guided much of the company’s transition from a data center-oriented to a cloud delivery strategy.

Dremio said Sellakumar’s expertise in driving growth at the intersection of cloud, software and data is valuable as it navigates its own cloud transition. The company, which has raised $410 million in funding, enables information stored across multiple clouds and on-premises servers to be analyzed in one location without moving it.

During his tenure at Splunk, Sellakumar helped grow that company’s cloud business to more than $1 billion in annualized recurring revenue in an ultimately successful transition that was not without its difficulties. He was also previously a technology investment banker at Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC covering the software sector. There he advised customers on initial public offerings, capital structure, and mergers and acquisitions.

That experience didn’t escape the notice of Dremio’s search team. “We are on a journey to becoming a public company and we needed somebody who has that experience,” said Chief Product Officer Tomer Shiran.

Although Splunk is not technically a database company, Shiran said, “We wanted somebody who has data infrastructure experience working with scale-out architectures and who has built a winning product that thousands and thousands of enterprises rely on for mission-critical use cases.”

He also praised Splunk’s bottom-up model that started as a simple downloadable utility and spread through word-of-mouth. Shiran likened that scenario to that of Apache Arrow, which is the foundation of Dremio’s data lake engine and which Shiran said is downloaded 70 million times a month.

Photo: Dremio/Twitter