Hitachi Vantara has named Octavian Tanase as chief product officer effectively immediately. Tanase will report to Hitachi Vantara CEO Sheila Rohra.

Tanase was most recently senior vice president of hybrid cloud engineering at NetApp where he integrated the company’s software portfolio with offerings from AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

At Hitachi Vantara, a Constellation Insights underwriter, Tanase will oversee the storage, infrastructure and hybrid cloud management company's product vision, strategy, development and execution.

In a statement, Rohra said the addition of Tanase will help Hitachi Vantara position for generative AI and the "explosive growth of processing required for data." Tanase said his goal "is to help the company expand its leadership position by harnessing the power of generative AI and other emerging technologies to drive even greater innovation in its portfolio."

The addition of Tanase comes just a few weeks after Hitachi Vantara, a subsidiary of Hitachi, appointed Tony Gonnella as CFO. Gonnella had been CFO at Cortex and Unit 42 at Palo Alto Networks.

On the product front, Hitachi Vantara recently launched Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) for GKE Enterprise to manage hybrid cloud operations. UCP is delivered via Google Distributed Cloud Virtual and can distribute data workloads between Google Cloud Anthos and in-house infrastructure securely.