Donald Basile, Chief Executive Officer

As Violin’s CEO, Don leads the company’s operations and drives strategic direction.

Don brings experience driving innovation managing 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.

As Vice President of Lenfest (acquired by Comcast for $5 Billion) Don pioneered the use of Internet technologies in the cable ad market, digital advertising insertion and VOD technologies.

Don worked for the CEOs of Internet pioneers Remarq (acquired for $300m) providing cloud services to Excite, Ebay, Lycos, Amazon and other  internet brands and Netfish technologies (acquired for $272m) a pioneer of B2B Internet commerce. Don spent four years as Managing Director of Raza Foundries, a Silicon Valley  venture  investment company which invested in software, systems and semiconductor companies.

Don holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees 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 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.

Martin Patterson, VP of Software

Martin Patterson leads software development at Violin. He brings broad experience in storage, networking and systems management and joins Violin from Gear6 where he was Vice President Engineering. Prior to Gear6 he was a director in Sun Microsystems’s Clustering division and previously co-founder of Terraspring, a California-based company widely regarded as a pioneer and leader in data center virtualization and provisioning products. Terraspring was acquired by Sun in 2002 and its technology was used in systems management for Sun products. Before Terraspring, Martin was a Senior Staff Engineer at Sun working on a range of software projects encompassing network security, key management, protocol design, systems management and telecommunication products. He has authored 30 patents since he began his career at British Telecom and he holds an Honors Degree in Computer Science from the Queen’s University of Belfast.

Garry Veale, Managing Director, Violin Memory Europe Limited

Garry Veale serves as the Managing Director of Violin Memory EMEA business, where he is responsible for driving the aggressive growth and go-to-market strategies for Violin Memory’s full range of products and solutions.

Garry has a broad technology background and significant field sales, marketing and operations experience in EMEA, having worked in the industry for over 20 years.

Before joining Violin Memory, Garry was VP & GM of the $2billion HP EMEA StorageWorks Division. Prior to his tenure at HP, he was the EVP of Global Sales & Services at COPAN Systems. In addition, Garry served in several executive positions at EMC Corporation in both North America & European theatres, including Global VP of ‘Go to Market’, VP Northern EMEA and VP of EMEA Channels & Partners. After being part of the original EMC UK/EMEA start up team in 1987, Garry went on to gain further experience via several director level positions at IBM & Hitachi Data Systems.

A native of Wales, Garry holds a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) from University of Wales, Cardiff (UWIC), a Master of Science (M.Sc.) from Springfield College (Massachusetts) and a Masters in Business Administration (M.B.A) from Cardiff University.

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

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.

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.

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.

Rich Heaton, VP of System Engineering & Corporate Development

Rich came to Violin from Cisco Systems in May 2011, where he was Director of Engineering in charge of the development of Cisco’s Data Center Application Delivery Controller platforms. Prior to this Rich was Director of Engineering for the Cisco Catalyst Chassis switches, where he was responsible for Metro Ethernet, Wireless Services and Application Services. Rich re-joined Cisco in December 2006 as a result of Cisco’s acquisition of Greenfield Networks, where he was Co-Founder and Vice President of Software. Greenfield Networks was a semi-conductor startup focused on the Metro-Ethernet space. Prior to co-founding Greenfield in 2001, Rich worked at Cisco delivering some of Cisco’s highest volume and highest revenue platforms – the Catalyst 2900XL, 3500XL and 3550 Ethernet switches.

Rich holds a BASc in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Jon Bennett, Founder & Chief Technology Officer

Jon Bennett is a co-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.

Jonathan Goldick, CTO of Software

Jonathan is the CTO of Software responsible for driving the data management software architecture. As the former CTO at OnStor, he set the technical direction for scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) hardware and software design. After OnStor was acquired by LSI in 2009, he transitioned to the role of LSI Fellow, where he was part of the company’s Corporate Strategy Office, defining the company’s strategic direction and identifying key areas ripe for technical innovation.

Prior to that, Jonathan held technical leadership and key architect roles at organizations including Zambeel, Microsoft and IBM Transarc Labs. As an architect at Zambeel, he designed the key components of the company’s GFS. At Microsoft, Goldick served as a key technical contributor for CIFS protocol design futures, the backup/restore framework (VSS), NTFS performance and feature enhancements, and WebDAV futures. Goldick was also Chief NT architect for the file systems group at IBM Transarc, where he designed multi-protocol algorithms to bridge the Windows and UNIX worlds.

Jonathan is the author of four IEEE and USENIX publications related to mass storage and Global File Systems (GFS), and holds eight patents in the field.

Scott Metzger, Vice President of Corporate Development

Scott Metzger is vice president of corporate development at Violin Memory. Before Violin, Metzger was the senior vice president (SVP) of products, engineering and operations for Apigee Corporation. At Apigee, he was instrumental in strategically transforming and scaling the company, increasing revenue growth from 400 to 900 percent in just a year and a half. Prior to Apigee, Metzger was CTO of TransUnion Interactive (formerly TrueLink), where he was recognized by InfoWorld as one of the top 25 CTOs for his vision and ability to drive double digit growth year-over-year. During his tenure at TransUnion, Metzger helped grow the company’s revenue from less than 10 million to well over 100 million while maintaining high margins.

Metzger has worked in a number of industries including game development, education, healthcare, financial services and technology products and services. He has filed more than a dozen patents with two awarded to date. Prior to his executive roles at Apigee, TransUnion, Metzger held senior consulting and engineering positions at Baxter International, CalPoly Media Lab, and Zmode.

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.

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.

Ken Hoppe, VP of Channels

Ken brings over 20 years of experience in the technology industry and leads Violin’s Partner and Channel strategy.  His team is tasked with managing customer acquisition and support through its  growing partner ecosystem.   Ken joined Violin’s Executive staff in 2010.  Violin is working side-by-side with Global Systems Integrators, Managed Hosting Providers and the VAR 500 Community to ensure successful Client engagements.  Prior to joining Violin, Ken developed a formal partner program for Fusion-io. During his two years at Fusion-io, the Channel delivered hundreds of incremental customers.

Earlier he spent nine years at EMC in several leadership and visionary roles, including developing the CLARiiON Reseller Channel following the EMC acquisition of Data General.   Ken was also instrumental in launching EMC’s Service Provider Division that ultimately evolved into the Telecommunications, Media and Entertainment Organization.

Ken began his career in IT at Oracle Corporation where he directed Oracle’s Authorized Reseller Program through its inception and growth.  Ken is a graduate of UCLA and holds a  Bachelor of Science degree.

Chris Brozek, VP of Operations

Chris Brozek joined Violin Memory in October, 2010 to lead Violin’s Manufacturing and Operations Team. From 2008 through 2010, Chris was Vice President of Manufacturing and Operations at Arch Rock Corporation. Chris led the transformation of Arch Rock’s wireless sensor technology through development of a hardware, software, and services portfolio. Arch Rock was acquired by Cisco Systems in the fall of 2010. Prior to Arch Rock, he was Director Manufacturing Operations at Omneon during which time Omneon grew to $100M+ and registered for IPO. From 1999-2005, Chris held several positions at Cisco Systems, including account relationship management of Cisco’s Contract Manufacturers. He developed and implemented a standard pricing model applied to $4B in annualized turnkey product spending.

Chris began his career in the U.S. Navy, serving as Submarine Officer and Flag Officer Aide. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Santa Clara University.

Donpaul Stephens, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer

Donpaul Stephens is the Chief Strategy Officer 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.