LOS ANGELES - OpenDrives, Inc. (www.opendrives.com), the provider of software-defined data storage and data services, has promoted Alex Dunfey to chief technology officer. He previously served as senior vice president of engineering. The promotion coincides with the company's recent launch of Astraeus, a new cloud-native, data-services platform that represents a significant expansion of the company’s capabilities.
Before joining OpenDrives in 2023 as VP of engineering, Dunfey served as an engineer and technical lead at EMC, VMware and Simplivity, later sharpening his skills at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he built scalable, customer-focused solutions. At OpenDrives, he's guided the company’s transition from a traditional hardware-based storage model to a software-defined organization, aligning strategies to match an evolving landscape and consistently delivering projects on time and within budget.
“Since joining OpenDrives, Alex has made a significant impact on how quickly and reliably we produce and release software,” explains OpenDrives COO Trevor Morgan. “He is a consummate engineering leader who knows how to organize and encourage development teams to outperform. More importantly, Alex is an experienced technologist who understands current market trends and how to drive our company and products to take advantage of them. With Alex bringing his broad experience and strategic mind to our C-suite, and with the other organizational adjustments he’s making within the engineering team, we’re nicely poised for our planned growth just ahead.”
As CTO, Dunfey will be responsible for driving the company’s entire technology and software development strategy, which now encompasses a broader range of next-generation data services and infrastructure solutions. To accomplish these long-range goals, he will lead a restructured engineering team — located across the US — to support OpenDrives’ future vision and address new functions emerging from its evolving product roadmap.
“The launch of Astraeus is just the beginning, both for our product and our team,” Dunfey notes. “Future updates to Astraeus will add new data services, simplify workflow management, and leverage AI for insights and automation, which means we have to evolve the way we operate to do that. We will need dedicated resources who can focus on researching and prototyping new technologies, ensuring we have the underlying architecture required to fulfill the vision for Astraeus. Fortunately, we already have a great team of engineering and product leaders to forge the path ahead, and I’m excited to continue this journey with them.”
In conjunction with Dunfey’s promotion, several members of the engineering team have been promoted to new leadership roles. Christian Kuntz moves from director of software engineering to director, advanced development, focusing on research, prototyping, and exploring new technology areas.
Heather Lapointe will now take on the role of chief architect, software engineering and infrastructure, leading a new architecture team, ensuring software, infrastructure and engineering operations evolve to meet new product challenges.
Sandy Luppino has been elevated to manager, quality engineering, while Joshua Marx joins the management team as manager, software engineering. Both will assume increased responsibilities in the day-to-day engineering development, testing and bringing new products to market.