John Chambers, Ex-Cisco CEO, Invests In Storage Vendor Rubrik

Data protection and data management technology developer Rubrik Thursday said John Chambers, Cisco's Chairman Emeritus and former CEO, has taken an investment stake in the storage company and joined it as a board adviser.

The company also said it has hired former VMware executive Avon Puri as its new chief information officer.

Rubrik executives were unable to respond to a CRN request for further information by press time.

[Related: Storage M&A: Rubrik Buying Datos IO To Get Cloud Native, Modern Application Data Management Tech]

Chambers, who in 2015 stepped down from his longtime role as Cisco CEO, said in a Thursday morning blog post that he has seen Rubrik co-founder and CEO Bipul Sinha build his company into one with a clear path to becoming a multibillion-dollar business and "one of the world’s next great enterprise technology companies."

"Rubrik developed the world’s first cloud data management platform to give customers power over their data, freeing it from its underlying infrastructure and allowing organizations to fully realize the cloud advantage. This single platform can manage, recover and protect data in the cloud, at the edge, and on-premises," Chambers wrote.

He said in the blog that Rubrik's success stems from three places.

The first is a strong leadership team with executives from companies like Adobe, Atlassian, Box, FireEye and Mulesoft, as well as $292 million in funding from multiple leading investment firms and at least three high-profile angel investors including Microsoft Chairman John Thompson.

The second is a focus on customer satisfaction, which has given the company the chance to close in on a $300 million annual bookings run rate.

The third is a 100 percent focus on indirect sales channels combined with support for all the major cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Sinha, in a prepared statement, said that Chambers has an ability to identify market transitions and take advantage of them, making him a "go-to" adviser for industry leaders.

"Today, the cloud is transforming every industry, helping businesses to run faster, smarter and more efficiently. Rubrik expands this opportunity by enabling enterprises to liberate their data from legacy infrastructure and fully realize cloud agility and economics," he said.

Puri is an eight-year veteran of VMware, the last four years of which were spent as that company's vice president of IT where he drove the company's IT transformation with a budget of over $100 million.

Puri's is not Rubrik's first high-profile executive hire this year. The company in January unveiled the hiring of Bertrand Yansouni, the former vice president of global partner sales and strategic alliances at Google Cloud, as its new vice president of worldwide channels.