Akiban Technologies Expands Leadership Team Amid Growing Customer Adoption

BOSTON, Dec. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Akiban Technologies today announced a number of milestones including the addition of key executives to its leadership team. Joining the operational big data company are Susan Davis, VP Marketing; Niall Fitzpatrick, Sr. Director of Professional Services and Support; Tim Kasida, VP Field Sales; and Gregg Bjork, VP Business Development. Akiban has also announced that Frank Fanzilli, the first global CIO for Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB), has joined the Akiban board of directors.  This expansion comes as the Company ramps up its production customers, delivers significant product enhancements to support real-time social-local-mobile applications, and expands its open source product portfolio.

Executive Appointments:

• Susan Davis, VP Marketing. Over her 25-year career in technology, Susan has held senior roles in marketing and product management at both startups and global companies including Infobright, the open source analytic database company, Egenera, a pioneer in virtualization and blade server technology, and at telecommunications companies Lucent Technologies and Ascend Communications. Susan has a BS in economics from Cornell University.
• Niall Fitzpatrick, Sr. Director of Professional Services and Support. Niall joins with an extensive background in leadership roles at software, mobile, and consulting services organizations including Acquia, named one of Inc Magazines fastest growing software companies in the USA, and Endeca Technologies (recently acquired by Oracle). Niall holds a BS in Computer Science from Wentworth Institute of Technology.
• Tim Kasida, VP Field Sales. Tim has over 20 years of experience growing businesses through field sales, alliance sales management and sales leadership positions at early stage and established software companies.  Tim performed critical sales functions through IPOs at Exchange Applications and Unica Corporation and most recently held a sales leadership position in IBM's Enterprise Marketing Division for the US and Canada.  Tim is a graduate of Northeastern University.
• Gregg Bjork, VP Business Development. Gregg has been a senior technology executive for over 20 years in both venture-backed startups and publicly traded companies. Prior to Akiban, he was instrumental in establishing and growing companies in client-server technology (Powersoft), IP telephony (Netcentric), service oriented architecture (Systinet and WebLayers), and network security (Bradford Networks).  Gregg has a BSCS from Worcester State College.

Board of Directors Appointment:

• Frank Fanzilli spent 17 years at Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) and Credit Suisse as the Managing Director & Global Chief Information Officer, presiding over the firm's emergence as a technology-driven powerhouse. Fanzilli sits on the board of a number of leading technology companies including 1010data, Calypso Technology, CommVault, and the Linux Foundation. Frank is also on the board of the GFI Group, a leading broker dealer. 

New Customers

In recent months a number of leading companies in eCommerce, online dating, collaboration and online advertising have put Akiban into production. Akiban's technology augments their operational databases by combining the agility of a NoSQL document store with the robustness of a SQL transactional database. On average, these companies experienced a 50x improvement in query performance.

"Managing the world's largest premium domain marketplace with over 5 million domain names, we know that performance means revenue," said Mark Haseltine, Chief Technology Officer of NameMedia. "Deploying Akiban was as simple as deploying another MySQL instance and yielded a 50x performance improvement for the queries we optimized. Simply put, Akiban works as advertised."

By extending SQL to documents, geospatial and other complex data, Akiban helps these companies meet operational big data and real-time reporting demands, and easily deploy new applications such as dynamic, in-database search and location-based services.

"Akiban has made tremendous progress over the past few months on every front – having great success with new customers, hiring an incredible go-to-market team and a prominent new board member, adding major new product capabilities and expanding our open source offerings," said David McFarlane, CEO of Akiban. "This will enable us to take advantage of the growing market for operational big data systems, driving the growth of the company in 2013."

About Akiban
Akiban solves the operational big data challenge by combining the agility of a NoSQL document store with the robustness of a SQL transactional database. With Akiban, organizations can meet their mobile, big data and real-time reporting demands on operational systems with powerful SQL that executes complex queries 10-100x faster. Enabling instant insight and easy deployment of new applications such as dynamic, in-database search and location-based services, Akiban can be deployed standalone or seamlessly augment existing operational databases with no change to code, architecture or infrastructure. To learn more about Akiban and operational big data, please visit www.akiban.com.

All names referred to are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

CONTACT:  Susan Davis, +1-855-254-2264, [email protected]

SOURCE Akiban Technologies