Donald Basile, Chief Executive Officer

As Violin’s CEO, Donald Basile is responsible for leading the company’s operations and driving strategic direction.

Don brings to Violin more than 20 years experience driving innovation at leading public and private companies in a variety of industries including storage, data networking, cable, telecommunications, computing and semiconductor. Among his past accomplishments, Don has managed the growth and sales of companies valued at more than $2 billion.

Prior to this role Don was Chairman and CEO of Fusion-io and pioneered the use of PCIe flash cards for servers and workstations.  In his first year as CEO, the company achieved over $10M in sales and developed the infrastructure to support over 300 global enterprise customers and earned a Red Herring Global 100 award.

Don previously served as Vice President of United Health Group, the nation’s largest health care company and member of the Fortune 50. United’s commercial software division, which sells software and related services to the entire health care industry grew from $560 Million to $1.2 Billion in revenue during his tenure.

Don previously served four years as Vice-President and Managing Director of Raza Foundries, Inc., a Silicon Valley based broadband networking and communications investment company, investing in semiconductor, systems and software companies. Notable successes included semiconductor, systems and software companies such as Mellanox, Nishan, Intruvert, Yuni, Pacific Broadband and RMI.

Don began his career serving in both technical and management roles at AT&T Bell Labs and IBM.  He holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Dixon R. Doll, Jr. Chief Operating Officer

Dixon Doll, Jr. is the Chief Operating Officer at Violin Memory, Inc and a member of the Board of Directors since September 2009.

Dixon was previously the Senior Vice President of Sales and Corporate Development at Fusion-io for one year from March 2008-February 2009.  He built the field sales team from infancy and led Fusion-io to its first 300 enterprise customers and 30 business partners.

Previously Dixon founded Longstreet Ventures, a consulting company that provided angel investment capital and assisted CEO’s and Board of directors of startup companies in developing strategic options.  He worked with the CEO of Trapeze Networks and Revolution Partners during its acquisition by Belden in 2008.  He has made private investments in 25 technology startups since 2002 and served one year as a consultant at Oak and one year working at Secure Elements a Carlyle led deal that was sold to Fortinet.

Dixon began in the technology industry as a business Development Manager in 1994 at Oracle Corporation in the Business Alliances Division.   He qualified for Oracles Club Excellence all 4 years (1995-1998) for outstanding performance.

He subsequently served as the Vice President of Corporate Development at New Era of Networks (NEON) a public company in the middleware space from 1998-2001 through its acquisition by Sybase.  While at NEON he built the Channel Sales Organization from infancy in 1998 to $50M in 2001 while participating in NEON’s M&A activities including strategic partnerships and 12 acquisitions.  He was presented with the MVP award for his sales achievement in 2000 at NEON’s presidents club.

He later served as the Vice President of Corporate Development at Recourse Technologies (2001) a leading security technology company that was sold to Symantec in 2002 for $135M.

He is a graduate of Georgetown University class of 1990 where he received his BA in Government, and The University of Michigan Graduate School of Business class of 1994 where he received his MBA.  He was a White House Intern in 1989.

Kevin Rowett, VP of Engineering

Kevin is responsible for product development and product quality.

He’s fulfilled various engineering roles including MTS, CTO, Director of Engineering, and VP of engineering, at a wide range of silicon valley companies including Tandem Computers, Cisco Systems, Force10 Networks, Blue Coat (then Cacheflow), Gigafin, and Seamicro. Prior to coming to the valley, Kevin worked for IBM and Boeing.

He has lead product development for VoIP products, large scale routers and switches, small scale routers, network security chips, and cloud computing platforms. His engineering experience extends thru ASIC development, Systems Architecture, and embedded software. He has built and lead several successful engineering teams. Kevin has more than a dozen patents.

Donpaul Stephens, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer

Donpaul Stephens is the Chief Strategy Officer and a member of the Board of Directors of Violin Memory, Inc., which he founded in 2005 after identifying that the increasing demand for high-performance storage and scalable memory systems was not adequately addressed by any existing or foreseeable solutions.

Donpaul has Masters and Bachelors of Engineering degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and also received an Executive MBA from New York University. In his 15 year career, he has held engineering positions at Fore Systems, Ascend Communications and Bell Labs and was a General Manager at Vitesse Semiconductor. In 2000, he founded Xebeo which was acquired by UT Starcom.

John Kapitula, Chief Financial Officer

John has more than 30 years experience in senior management positions in both public and private technology based companies. Most recently he served as  VP Finance at Vehix.com, COO at Aurant, CFO/COO at Firstwave/Lambda Optical Systems.

Previously John was an Area VP for Utah, Colorado and Arizona, Sprint PCS , VP/GM StarNet Development – a Lenfest Communications/ TCI company and CFO/ COO, Standard Communications.

John also worked as a CPA in a big Four accounting firm. He earned an AB from Bowdoin College and an MBA from the Tuck School at Dartmouth College

Jon Bennett, Founder & Chief Technology Officer

Jon Bennett is aco-founder, Chief Technology Officer as well as the inventor of the Violin Switched Memory (VXM) technology.

Jon has a Bachelor of Computer Science degree (with Research Honors) 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 many more are in process as a result of the work at Violin.

Morgan Littlewood, VP of Product Management

Morgan has 20 years of high technology business experience. Prior to Violin, he was VP of Marketing at Nemo Systems and a Senior Director at Cisco Systems.

At Cisco Systems (1991-2004), he held various positions, including Senior Director Marketing and General Manager. He was the initial product manager of 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.

He has a Bachelor of Engineering degree (1st Class Honors) from the 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.

Matt Barletta, VP of Product Marketing

Matt has 20 years of technology and marketing experience in both enterprise and service provider networking. Prior to joining Violin, Matt was the VP of Product Marketing at Fusion-io.

He holds a Masters of Computer Engineering degree from the University of Southern California and Bachelor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Technology degrees from Bradley University.

Matt was an early member of Airespace (2003) who grew Wireless LAN sales from zero to $40 million and was acquired by Cisco for $465 million in 2005. He was a key leader in the integration and subsequent wireless revenue ramp to $1.5+ Billion and top market share position that continues to this day.

He has also held Product and Technical Marketing management positions at Tahoe Networks, Cisco (1998-2001), Ipsilon Networks (acquired by Nokia), Cisco Systems (1993-1996) and AT&T Bell Laboratories.

E. Casey Roche III, VP of Business Development

Casey has over 25 years of experience in high tech and leads Violin’s strategic business development efforts. He began his career with IBM where he and held various positions on the east and west coast. He has since worked for several successful start-up companies including Conner Peripherals (IPO, then acquired by Seagate 1996), Allodyne Inc. (acquired by Sigma Designs in 1997), Netfish Technologies (acquired by Iona Systems in 1999), Outride Inc. (which he led as CEO through an acquisition by Google in 2001), and Fusion-io.

He holds an MS degree in Econometrics from Rutgers University Graduate School, and a BS degree from Rutgers College in Economics with a minor in computer science.