DevRev, the AI baby of Nutanix co-founder Dheeraj Pandey, poached a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) alum as its go-to-market lead.

Adnan Bhutta joins the firm after spending more than four-and-a-half years at HPE as sales VP for hybrid cloud software and AI-managed operations.

Bhutta’s remit will revolve around DevRev's flagship Computer product, an AI customer relationship management (CRM) tool that connects customer support tickets directly to product development workflows. In an interview with CRN, Bhutta said that with Computer working as an artificial teammate of sorts, the solution presented “an opportunity for the channel to help customers embrace AI.”

Bhutta joined HPE in 2021 as VP and GM for North America sales, progressing to storage and data revenue before moving on to the hybrid cloud and AI position.

Prior to HPE, the exec spent more than 11 years at Dell Technologies, starting in 2010 as its director for North America sales, then becoming senior director for cloud networking. Bhutta would ultimately take on the role of VP and GM for Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) data center sales, based in London.

The exec cut his teeth at Microsoft, having worked another decade-plus stint as a software engineer.

In his new role, Bhutta joins a $1.15 billion unicorn. The firm was founded in 2020 by Pandey after leaving the CEO position at Nutanix. Joining him for the ride was another Nutanix alum, former senior engineering VP Manoj Agarwal.

Bhutta is also the latest in a string of HPE departees, which has seen the networking giant mainly lose Juniper Networks talent such as VP for technical solutions architecture Pavan Kurapati; global partner and channel VP Gordon Mackintosh, who, as revealed by SDxCentral, joined Equinix in December; chief network strategist Neil McRae, who signed up to U.K. broadband firm CityFibre; and EMEA VP Gos Hein van de Wouw, now of Extreme Networks.

Extreme Networks CFO Kevin Rhodes recently touted his firm’s ability to attract HPE key executives and sales members, labelling defectors like van de Wouw as "rock stars."