Violin Memory is comprised of some of the most brilliant and innovative technology leaders, with a track record of creating new markets and making innovations a reality. Led by Don Basile, an industry stalwart who leads the company’s operations and drives strategic direction, Violin Memory is well positioned to take the enterprise storage industry by storm.
| Donald Basile – Chief Executive Officer | Dixon R. Doll Jr. – Chief Operating Officer | |
| Cory Sindelar – Chief Financial Officer | Chris Brozek – VP, Operations | |
| Steven Rose – SVP, EMEA & LATAM | Matt Barletta – VP, Corporate Marketing | |
| Jon Bennett – Founder & CTO | Jonathan Goldick – CTO of Software | |
| Narayan Venkat – VP, Product Management | George Kaldani – VP, Engineering | |
| Richard Dyke – SVP, Sales | Steve Dalton – VP of Software | |
| Andy Mattes – SVP, Global Strategic Partnerships | Herb Schneider – VP of Hardware |
As Violin’s CEO, Don leads the company’s operations and provides strategic direction. Don brings experience driving innovation, having managed the growth and sales of companies valued at more than $2B.
Prior to his role at Violin, 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, developed the infrastructure to support over 300 global enterprise customers, and earned a Red Herring Global 100 award.
Previously, Don served as Vice President of United Health Group, the nation’s largest healthcare company and member of the Fortune 50. United’s commercial software division, which sells software and related services to the entire healthcare industry, grew from $560M to $1.2B in revenue during his tenure.
As Vice President of Lenfest (acquired by Comcast for $5B), Don pioneered the use of Internet technologies in the cable ad market, as well as 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.
Don Basile High Resolution (3.4MB)
Dixon Doll, Jr. is the Chief Operating Officer at Violin 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 to 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 CEOs and Boards 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.
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 later served as the Vice President of Corporate Development at Recourse Technologies (2001), a leading security technology company 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.
Matt has more than 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). There he grew Wireless LAN sales from zero to $40M before the company was acquired by Cisco for $465M in 2005. Matt was a leader in the integration and subsequent wireless revenue ramp to $1.5+B 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.
Jon Bennett is a Violin co-founder and CTO of hardware and Technology, 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 20 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.
Jon holds over 25 issued US patents and many more are in process as a result of his work at Violin.
Jonathan is the Violin 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, Jonathan 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 such as Zambeel, Microsoft, and IBM Transarc Labs. As an architect at Zambeel, he designed the key components of the company’s Global File System (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 and holds eight patents in the field.
George has more that 25 years of industry experience in leading telecomm/datacom systems and high performance computer system development.
He has held various executive and management roles in companies such as Spontanets, Cortina systems, Cisco Systems, and Silicon Graphics Inc. He was the founder of Spontanets, developing low latency match networks for smart grid. Before Spontanets he was VP of Engineering at Cortina Systems where he led the enterprise and access products development. He spent seven years at Cisco Systems developing high-end GSR12000 and CRS-1 (terabit) core routers. His team developed the first 10GB/s and 40Gb/s technology in the industry.
Previous to Cisco, George was the Director of Engineering at StratumOne Communications, developing converged IP and ATM packet processing technologies. He spent 10 years at Silicon Graphics developing high performance compute platforms. He was part of a team that developed the industry’s first and highest performance at the time 1024 processor parallel compute system. Prior to Silicon Graphics, George worked at Mips Computers developing micro-processors, the R4000 and R4200, and a 64 processor parallel computing system. Previous to Mips he spent six years at Daisy Systems developing the industry’s first parallel computers for a CAE application.
Narayan brings 20 years of expertise in storage, data management, and virtualization platforms. Prior to Violin, Narayan was the VP of Cloud Infrastructure at VMware.
At VMWare, Narayan led the company’s storage initiatives for the vSphere virtualization platform. Prior to that, he was VP and business line director for the Engenio Storage Group at LSI Corporation, managing the $800M storage systems product suite. Before Onstor was acquired by LSI Corporation, Narayan was instrumental in driving the product and go-to-market strategies for the company’s enterprise NAS solution. He also led product strategy for Netapp’s NAS, SAN, and storage management solutions.
He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and an MSEE from Utah State University and spent his early career working with Narus, Barclays Capital, and Intel.
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, Chris was Director of 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.
Cory has an extensive 20-year background as a senior financial executive working for software and semiconductor companies. Most recently, he served as CFO of Kilopass Technology, a leader in embedded non-volatile memory.
Cory also served as CFO at Ikanos Communications, a leading provider of advanced broadband semiconductor and software products. During his tenure at Ikanos, he led several strategic transactions, including the purchase of Conexant Systems’ broadband access product line and the technology behind its advanced vectoring solutions. Cory was vice president, corporate controller, and principal accounting officer at Legato Systems from 2000 to 2003 when it was acquired by EMC Corporation. He continued with EMC Corporation in a number of roles before joining Ikanos in 2006. Cory, a certified public accountant in California, has a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration with an emphasis in accounting from Georgetown University.
Rich is responsible for new client acquisition strategies, including direct sales activities and new business development through industry partner channels. Rich joins us from Riverbed where he championed worldwide sales for their cloud storage BU, Whitewater. Rich brings over 20 years of experience in sales, sales management, marketing and business leadership.
Prior to joining Violin, Mr. Dyke spent 15 years in sales and sales management at EMC Corporation where he held the position of Western Regional Vice President driving over $500M in annual sales. Mr. Dyke then joined Storage Networks, Inc. as a Director of Sales. He later joined Stentor, Inc. as Vice President of Sales where he led all of sales and sales operations. Stentor was acquired by Philips Healthcare Informatics and Mr. Dyke was appointed Global Vice President of Sales Healthcare Informatics, where he was responsible for worldwide sales of the entire integrated product lines. Rich also held the position of SVP of Sales at Radiphere a company committed to deliver the highest standard of Radiology services through their unique technology platform.
Rich holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Steve has more than 30 years of experience in the storage and networking industry, bringing extensive knowledge in compute, storage software and flash infrastructures. At Intel, he was responsible for the enterprise datacenter flash software where he restructured the entire development organization to run more like a ‘start-up’ delivering products at a very rapid pace with very high quality. He established the flash software portfolio by leveraging internal groups as well as key partners to execute very complex products on schedule and within TTM windows.
Lastly, he refocused the server-memory tier to focus more on the value-added software such as I/O acceleration, storage/memory virtualization, cache pooling, and distributed NVM environments that helped position Intel as the leader in datacenter SW. Prior to Intel, Steve served as the GM of FalconStor’s File Storage Division. He also held executive roles at Quantum Corp, Gadzoox Networks (acquired by Broadcom Corp) and Silicon Graphics. Steve has designed many storage architectures with multiple patents, published articles and co-authored a book on storage computing.
Andy is responsible for driving Violin’s global partnership program. With more than 25 years of experience in the IT and telecommunications industry, Mattes most recently served as a corporate advisor to several company boards (including Violin), private equity firms and senior executives on high-growth initiatives, mergers and acquisitions, global expansion and restructuring.
Prior to his consulting role, Andy held senior executive roles for Hewlett-Packard (HP). As the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Enterprises Services in the Americas at HP, he drove double digit billion dollar revenue growth. In this role, he won numerous multi-billion dollar contracts, developed integrated account strategies for clients and expanded the business while streamlining costs. Andy was also the key driver of integrating EDS into HP and one of its subsidiary companies. He began his career with Siemens AG as a sales, finance, and post-merger acquisitions executive and eventually became the CEO of Siemens Communications, Inc., USA.
Andy earned a Management Science degree from Ludwig Maximillians University of Munich.
Herb has over 25 years of experience in hardware systems engineering. Prior to Violin, he was the co-founder of GridIron and Extreme Networks. At GridIron, Herb was responsible for hiring and managing the technical team that delivered hardware and software products to accelerate applications using consumer grade MLC flash.
Prior to GridIron, he co-founded Extreme Networks, where he oversaw the development of three generations of networking ASICS, two generations of Network Operations Systems and three generations of industry leading fixed and modular networking platforms that led to a successful public offering and over $2 Billion of products shipped.
Steven has over 25 years in technology and storage. He serves as SVP for Violins’ EMEA & LATAM business based in the UK. He is responsible for driving region revenues and go to market as well as ensuring customer success and market awareness for Violins’ products and solutions.
Before Violin Steven was SVP EMEA & LATAM for Informatica, VP EMEA & APAC for CommVault through their IPO and then for 6 years, VP at Veritas for UK and Africa (sold to Symantec), VP EMEA for New Era of Networks though their IPO (sold to Sybase) and VP EMEA for TCAM (sold to Stratus).
An Englishman, Steven was commissioned from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1976 and served as an officer in the British Army for six years.
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