Company - Management Team

Management Team

Tom Gill, Chairman & CEO

Tom joined Violin in January 2008 to lead the transition of Violin from a development phase company to an industry leader. He provides significant leadership, finance & operating experience in high growth environments to the executive team and the Board.

Tom was previously the CEO at FORE Systems, an industry leader in high speed networks with 6,000 customers in 75 countries. Tom was CFO during FORE's NASDAQ IPO in May 1994, before becoming COO in 1997 and CEO in 1998. During Tom's tenure, FORE's revenue grew from $5 million in 1990 to almost $1 billion in 2000. The company acquired 8 private and one public company as part of its expansion strategy. As CEO, Tom sold FORE Systems in June 1999 to Britain's General Electric Company. Since 2000, Tom has served on many private and public company boards.

Donpaul Stephens, President & Founder

Donpaul co-founded Violin in 2005 after identifying that the increasing demand in the market for high performance storage and scalable memory systems was not adequately addressed by any existing or foreseeable solution.

Donpaul has Masters and Bachelors of Engineering degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and also received an Executive MBA from NYU. In his 14 year career, he has held engineering positions at Fore Systems, Ascend Communications and Bell Labs and was a General Manager at Vitesse. In 2000, he founded Xebeo which was acquired by UT Starcom.

Greg Kenepp, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing

Greg Kenepp has joined Violin to lead the teams responsible for global sales, marketing and customer support. Greg has a Masters of Engineering degree from Stanford and over 20 years engineering, product management and executive leadership experience.

Previously, Greg was President and COO of IPC, where he was the principal executive officer and responsible for a $325M global business with 36 offices and >1,000 employees. During his tenure, Greg led the sale of the company to Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, developed and launched the company's VoIP product platform, launched a new network services business unit and expanded the company's business presence to global financial institutions throughout EMEA and Asia. With Goldman Sachs, he drove significant market share growth and developed successful new business units.

Jon Bennett, Chief Technology Officer & Founder

Jon Bennett is a co-founder, CTO and the primary inventor of the Violin Switched Memory (VXM) technology.

Jon has a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from Carnegie Mellon and a Masters degree from Harvard University. In his 15 year career, he has held senior architect positions at Fore Systems, BBN Technologies, Xylan and Motorola. Jon was Chief Engineer at RiverDelta Networks (1999-2001), a company that developed an industry-leading Cable head-end platform (CMTS) and was acquired by Motorola.

He has over 20 filed patents and more are in process as a result of the work at Violin.

Morgan Littlewood, VP of Marketing and Business Development

Morgan has 20 years of high technology business experience and leads Violin's marketing and partnership activities.

He has a Bachelor of Engineering degree (1st Class Hons.) from University of Melbourne and spent his early career doing research in fast packet switching systems with Telstra, BT and Bellcore (now Telcordia). He received several patents for this work.

At Cisco Systems (1991-2004), he held various positions, including Senior Director Marketing and General Manager. He initiated several multi-billion dollar products, including the GSR 12000, MGX8000 and MPLS VPNs. In 2004, he helped found Nemo Systems. This memory technology was subsequently acquired by Cisco Systems and the technology is being integrated into many Cisco products.

Rich Sanzi, VP of Engineering

Rich has a B.S in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and has 20 years of experience in engineering and management roles at leading technology companies. Rich leads a large and talented team of engineers at Violin.

Rich was a founder and VP of Engineering at Spinnaker Networks, a leader in performance storage, which was acquired by Network Appliance. He served as Director of Engineering in Network Appliance where he led many of the technology integration efforts. Prior to this, Rich was the Director of ATM Switch Software at FORE Systems and was Manager of File Systems Development at Transarc Corporation (acquired by IBM) where he was one of the first employees and a leader in the development of the Andrew File System, a precursor to NFSv4.