ibm-acquisition
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Gal Naor
Gal Naor is the co-founder and CEO of StorONE, a New York based enterprise storage company built on the idea that software, not more hardware, is the real bottleneck in data storage. He first made his mark in 2004 as co-founder of Storwize, which pioneered real-time enterprise storage compression and was acquired by IBM in 2010 for $140 million. Naor spent roughly six years and dozens of patents building StorONE's unified S1 storage engine, which provisions block, file and object storage from the same commodity drives at a fraction of legacy cost. He is known for a contrarian, efficiency-first philosophy and for steering StorONE to cash-flow positivity with an eye toward an eventual IPO.
Coco Brown
Coco Brown is the founder and CEO of Athena Alliance, a digital leadership platform that has placed nearly 600 women on corporate boards and helped thousands of executives build what she calls a Portfolio of Impact. A five-time entrepreneur who scaled the IT services firm Taos to $54M before its acquisition by IBM, she sits on the Nasdaq Governance Insights Council, has been named one of Silicon Valley's 100 Most Powerful People, and is now building Pantheon, an AI-enabled Career Care infrastructure for an economy being reshaped by automation.
Jay Kreps
Jay Kreps is the co-founder and CEO of Confluent, the data-streaming company built around Apache Kafka, the open-source platform he co-created at LinkedIn in 2010. In December 2025, IBM announced a deal to acquire Confluent for roughly $11 billion. He also serves on Anthropic's Board of Directors and wrote the book I Heart Logs.