Susan Odle, CEO of StorMagic, has been named “Data Technology CEO of the Year” at the 2026 Data Breakthrough Awards. This recognition validates her exceptional leadership of StorMagic and champions our smart, simple, and flexible virtualization solutions.
About The Data Breakthrough Awards
The Data Breakthrough Awards program sets the gold standard for excellence in the data landscape, recognizing the companies, products, and visionaries driving innovation in our data-driven world.
This year’s program drew an impressive 3,500 nominations from across the globe, making Susan’s achievement even more significant.
Her win reflects StorMagic’s unique approach to solving one of IT’s most persistent challenges: how do we help businesses reduce costs and improve data simplicity in often complex edge environments?
A Q&A with Susan Odle
We sat down with Susan to discuss her award, her leadership philosophy, and what she sees for the future of our industry. Here are five questions that get to the heart of what makes StorMagic different and how Susan is shaping the industry’s direction.
Q: What Does Being Named Data Technology CEO of the Year Mean for You?
It is humbling and unexpected. I am not a seeker of awards or external validation. I’m focused on supporting my team to do great things that help our partners and customers thrive. To be recognized for doing my job means a lot.
Q: What Makes StorMagic Solutions Stand Out from Competitors?
Our understanding of why we exist. To keep our customers’ operations available to the point that they don’t have to think about infrastructure. We don’t compromise on this understanding. It informs how we build and how we engage with the market. It’s the basis of the trust we have built for 20 years, consistently showing up with this as our view of the world.
Q: How Do You Position StorMagic to Lead in Solving the Next Biggest IT Challenges?
The world will continue to increase in complexity. Organizations need simple, purpose-built solutions as the antidote to complexity. StorMagic will continue to lead in delivering simple, reliable, democratized, and affordable edge-virtualization solutions that run everywhere businesses operate.
Q: In What Ways Do You Use Your Leadership Role to Inspire and Drive Innovation?
I’ve been in tech for a long time. I understand that to succeed, you have to balance taking care of the business and your people equally. One cannot succeed without the other. You have to listen, you have to support safe environments that encourage transparency and debate. That is where creative and innovative thinking comes from, which solves really hard problems. Through success in leading cultures in this way, I know it works, and I’m seeing the success again, at StorMagic.
Q: Looking Ahead, What Are the Biggest Opportunities for StorMagic in the Next Few Years?
Doubling down on our unique value proposition. Software-only. Small footprint. Any hardware. Any use case. Anywhere. As the world shifts around us, organizations are facing more challenges and constraints than ever before. No one knows where the next five years will take us. We’re in a transformative time.
StorMagic is in a great position to help customers succeed in unpredictable conditions because we offer the greatest flexibility of any edge-virtualization vendor in the world. Full stop. It’s not a complicated response. We’ll never compete with vendors who shine so brightly in the enterprise data centre; that’s not our playground. We shine bright everywhere else, and that matters in these days of data sovereignty, economic slowdown, and supply risk.
Why StorMagic?
Data doesn’t live in one place anymore. You’ve got headquarters, remote locations, edge sites, and everything in between. To overcome these challenges, virtualization solutions (compute, storage, and networking) make it easier than ever to manage enterprise-grade IT infrastructure in edge environments.
StorMagic is a software-only solution, with a small footprint, that can run on any x86 hardware. And we’re so excited that this is championed in our latest award win! Ultimately, this recognition reflects more than a single achievement; it highlights Susan’s continued commitment to solving one of today’s biggest IT challenges: managing data wherever it lives at the edge.
As organizations continue to navigate increasingly distributed, multi-site environments, the need for simple, reliable, and cost-effective IT infrastructure has never been greater. If you’re interested in learning about implementing virtualization solutions in your business, take a look at our latest IT infrastructure modernization roadmap.
