Dr. Brewer takes active consulting role guiding Riak’s product roadmap and R&D projects.
CAMBRIDGE, MA – January 27, 2010 – Riak Technologies, Inc. today announced Dr. Eric Brewer, Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley and formerly founder and Chief Scientist of Inktomi Corporation, a leading provider of scalable search (sold to Yahoo! in 2003. NASDAQ:YHOO), is joining the Riak Board of Directors and he will serve as an active advisor on Riak’s product roadmap. Dr. Brewer begins in his dual roles effective immediately.
Dr. Brewer, globally recognized for his work on scalable, distributed systems, promoted the CAP Theorem, a seminal idea that fueled the emergence of a new class of distributed systems, including Riak’s own distributed data store, Riak.
“The impact of the cloud is still in its early stages – it will affect all aspects of life over the next ten years,” said Dr. Brewer. “New cloud-centric computing and database systems are at the core of this revolution and Riak’s team and their technology are emerging as one of the leaders of this space.”
Dr. Brewer will take an active role in shaping the Riak OS and Riak EnterpriseDS product roadmaps and he will advise the development team on long-term research and development projects.
“We are extremely fortunate and honored that Dr. Brewer has chosen Riak to invest his considerable knowledge and expertise,” said Earl Galleher, Chairman and CEO of Riak. “His involvement will make a true difference to our customers, our open source users and to our employees. To be guided by the person who has had the biggest impact on the NoSQL movement immediately places Riak in a leadership position among all NoSQL companies. His involvement with Riak goes a long way to validate the entire NoSQL space.”
As a researcher, Dr. Brewer has led projects on scalable servers, search engines, network infrastructure, sensor networks, and security. In 2000, he founded the Federal Search Foundation, an organization focused on improving consumer access to government information. Working with President Clinton, Dr. Brewer helped to create USA.gov, the official portal of the Federal government, which launched in September 2000.
Dr. Brewer has a MS and Ph.D. in EECS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BS in EECS from UC Berkeley. He was named a “Global Leader for Tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum, by the Industry Standard as the “most influential person on the architecture of the Internet”, and in 2007 was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
About Riak Technologies
Riak Technologies, Inc., founded in January 2008 by a core group of software architects, engineers, and executive leadership from Akamai Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq:AKAM – News), is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Riak produces Riak, a distributed data store that combines extreme fault tolerance, rapid scalability, and ease of use. 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. Current customers of Riak include Comcast Corporation, MIG-CAN, and Mochi Media.
