SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jan 21, 2016) - MapD, the GPU-powered database and visualization platform for interactive data analytics, today announced that industry veteran Brock Alston has joined MapD as VP of Worldwide Sales.

Alston brings over 25 years of enterprise software sales and marketing experience to MapD. MapD is excited to leverage Alston's sales and marketing strengths to introduce its revolutionary data analytics product to a worldwide audience.

"The opportunity to bring MapD to market is very exciting," said Alston. "MapD's ability to visualize queries in milliseconds that previously took minutes presents a huge competitive advantage for any company who needs to make fast decisions on huge amounts of data, such as telecom, finance, retail, IoT, government, and many more. Visualizing data at these speeds has never been done before."

Todd Mostak, co-founder and CEO of MapD, said, "Brock's deep background in databases, analytics, and data visualization will be immensely valuable as we bring our product to market. We're an engineering-driven culture committed to building the fastest analytics platform and Brock's combination of sales talent and technology acumen fits our mission perfectly."

Founded in 2013, MapD builds a big data analytics platform that can query and visualize big data up to 100x faster than other systems. It leverages the massive parallelism of commodity GPUs to execute SQL queries over multibillion row datasets with millisecond response times, and optionally visualize the results using the rendering capabilities of the GPUs. MapD's seed round investors include Vanedge Capital, Google Ventures and Nvidia.

Alston comes to MapD from Pepperdata where he was VP of Sales and responsible for global field operations. Prior to Pepperdata, Alston held sales and leadership roles at EdgeSpring, Vertica, Oracle, Enkata, Brio Technology, and Sigma Dynamics. Before embarking on his sales career, Brock worked as a rocket scientist at Lockheed and other organizations after receiving a BS in aerospace engineering from Purdue University.

For more information on MapD, go to www.MapD.com.