Appointment further enhances potential of Riak in Big Data management for the enterprise market; Riak also exceeds funding milestones, successfully completing $7.5 million of equity financing
CAMBRIDGE, MA – June 29, 2011 – Riak Technologies, the fast growing data storage and management software company serving the enterprise market, today announced that its Board of Directors has named Donald J. Rippert, long time Chief Technology Officer of Accenture, as President and Chief Executive Officer of Riak, effective July 1. Mr. Rippert will lead Riak in what the Board expects to be a period of extraordinary growth for the company. In addition, Riak announced that it has successfully completed its $7.5 million Series D Equity Financing, further enhancing the company’s ability to capitalize on the fast growing demand of enterprises and government agencies for database software specifically built to manage the explosion of data being generated by growing Internet users and web applications. The extraction of value from this data explosion is often referred to as ‘Big Data’.
Prior to joining Riak, Mr. Rippert has enjoyed a highly regarded 29 year career at Accenture. As that company’s Chief Technology Officer for more than six years, Mr. Rippert has been overseeing and managing technology vision and strategy, as well as Accenture’s Technology Labs. Mr. Rippert’s decision to leave Accenture to become Chief Executive Officer of Riak is a reflection of his confidence in the enormous market potential for database software that is able to reliably manage enterprise and government agency’s Big Data needs. Mr. Rippert will succeed Riak’s Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Earl Galleher, who will continue in his role as Chairman of the Board.
Mr. Galleher said, “The Board and I are thrilled that Don has chosen to join Riak as Chief Executive Officer. There is no executive in the market today with a better understanding of the changing data management needs of large enterprises and government agencies. Don will build upon Riak’s growing customer base, which includes, among others, a number of major companies in the healthcare, cable, telecommunications and software industries.”
Mr. Rippert said, “I am looking forward to leading Riak as it capitalizes on its enormous potential in Big Data management for enterprises and agencies. The enterprise IT market is undergoing an extraordinary transformation in how it manages data. Relational databases have their place, but they don’t meet all of the changing data management needs of enterprises and agencies. Riak built Riak, its open source data store and management software, from scratch specifically to permit enterprises and agencies to capture enormous amounts of data with database software that is fault-tolerant, highly scalable and easy-to-install and use with absolutely no single point of failure. I have evaluated the needs of this market for many years, and I firmly believe that Riak has built the most differentiated and effective data storage and management software to satisfy the need for Big Data in enterprises and government agencies.”
Dr. Eric Brewer, a member of Riak’s Board of Directors as well as Vice President, Infrastructure at Google, a co-founder of Inktomi Corp. and creator of the CAP Theorem, said, “The tremendous growth of Internet users, social media, and the explosion of data-generating web applications has created a need for a new approach to data management in enterprises and government agencies. Riak’s flexible, simple design is ideally suited for this new, complex Big Data landscape. Riak’s Board is convinced that Don is the ideal chief executive to lead Riak forward.”
During his career at Accenture, Mr. Rippert has undertaken various management leadership positions, including most recently serving as Chief Technology Officer. Prior to assuming this executive leadership position, Mr. Rippert was a managing partner in Accenture’s Communications & High Tech operating group and, before that, was in charge of that operating group’s Global Solutions Group, with responsibility for product development, alliances, technology and marketing within Communications & High Tech. With respect to its Series D equity financing, Riak successfully completed raising $4.0 million in May, 2011, following its initial raise of $3.5 million in February, 2011.
Riak’s flagship open source database software product, Riak, is designed to free corporations from the constraints of traditional, highly centralized database architectures. Leading enterprises from across a broad spectrum of major industries use Riak as a superior alternative to traditional relational database software for the growing number of use cases ill-suited for constraints of a relational database architecture.
Applications running on Riak can sustain catastrophic server, data center, and network failures without outages while avoiding the complexity and expense that characterize applications built using traditional data architectures. Optimized for the world’s most demanding web and cloud-based architectures, organizations building applications using Riak can scale out dynamically to handle sudden surges in load and scale back when load decreases to reduce expenses.
About Riak Technologies
Riak Technologies, Inc., founded in 2008 by a core group of software architects, engineers, and executive leadership from Akamai Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM – News), has offices in San Francisco, California, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Reston, Virginia. Riak’s flagship solution, Riak, is a distributed data store that combines extreme fault tolerance, rapid scalability, and ease of use to meet the needs of the rapidly expanding Big Data management and storage software market. Designed from the ground up to work with applications that run on the Internet and mobile networks, Riak is particularly well-suited for users of cloud infrastructure such as Amazon’s AWS and Joyent’s Smart platform and is available in both an open source and a paid commercial version. For more information about Riak or Riak visit riak.com.
