Longtime Intel Xeon Exec Lisa Spelman To Join Cornelis As CEO

‘We have a very strong track record in core HPC. That’s our heritage. But there’s the exploding AI market at this point. And our products are very well suited for that market. So we’re focusing heavily on thLe needs of AI. And that’s where Lisa’s experience complements us very, very well,’ says Cornelis Networks co-founder and vice president of solutions delivery and support Gunnar Gunnarsson.

Cornelis Networks Thursday said that Lisa Spelman, an 18-plus-year Intel executive, will join the company on Aug. 15 as its new CEO.

Cornelis, a Chesterbrook, Pa.-based developer of high-performance fabric technology for high-performance computing, high-performance data analytics and AI, was in 2020 spun out of Intel where it had focused on development of that company’s Omni-Path interconnect technology.

Spelman is taking the CEO role from Philip Murphy, a company co-founder who had been serving as president and CEO. Going forward, Murphy will assume the role of president and COO.

Spelman most recently spent nearly nine years as a key executive for Intel’s Xeon product line, including the last nearly five years as corporate vice president and general manager for Intel Xeon.

Gunnar Gunnarsson, co-founder and vice president of solutions delivery and support at Cornelis, told CRN that Spelman came out on top of a multimonth search by the company’s board of directors based on her experience.

“She has deep industry ecosystem partnership relationships and strong customer relationships in both the enterprise and cloud and AI spaces, which are critically important to us,” Gunnarsson said. “And she has a track record of building and leading successful businesses such as the Xeon business at Intel. She has run large organizations.”

It is the right time to bring in a separate CEO for Cornelis, Gunnarsson said.

“We’ve built a very strong foundation as a company, but we aspire to much greater things,” he said. “And so we believe that complementing our existing executive team with someone with the technical and organizational depth and experience that Lisa has will really help us drive forward and make sure that we’re taking advantage of the opportunities that are in front of us.”

Those new opportunities Gunnarsson mentioned entail taking Cornelis beyond its traditional focus on networking fabrics for HPC, or high-performance computing, he said.

“We have a very strong track record in core HPC,” he said.” That’s our heritage. But there’s the exploding AI market at this point. And our products are very well suited for that market. So we’re focusing heavily on the needs of AI. And that’s where Lisa’s experience complements us very, very well.”

For the rest of 2024, Cornelis will be focused on delivering its recently introduced CN5000 Omni-Path high-performance interconnect technology, targeted at improving latency, message rates and bandwidth to improve the performance of HPC and AI workloads, Gunnarsson said.

“The CN5000 is targeted to be out by the end of this year and is highly anticipated by our customers and partners, ecosystem partners and channel partners,” he said. “And our second priority is scaling our organization to be able to deliver to a much broader customer base, both in numbers and types of customers. Lisa’s organizational development and experience growing, building and leading successful growing businesses will be instrumental as we as we grow with the launch of our CN5000.”

AI will be a key driver for Cornelis going forward, Gunnarsson said.

“As we look ahead to AI, we think every business is going to need to adopt AI or become obsolete,” he said. “So AI is changing the business landscape. We see significant trends in that direction. And we think that matches our products and our road map extremely well. We see significant opportunity both in HPC and in the exploding AI market.”