Pepperdata Establishes All-Star Technology Advisory Board to Guide Future Innovation and Growth

Industry and Academic Luminaries from BlackRock, Carnegie Mellon, Stripe and Others Help Pepperdata Define its Next Generation of Big Data Products


CUPERTINO, CA--(Marketwired - Feb 21, 2017) - Pepperdata, the Big Data performance company, today announced the formation of its Technology Advisory Board to help the company develop advanced performance products for modern Big Data architectures. Leading experts and influencers from technology, industry and academia -- with backgrounds at BlackRock, Carnegie Mellon University, Stripe, VMware and more -- will provide focused input and advice to guide product strategy as Pepperdata brings new innovation to Big Data.

As enterprise use of large production Hadoop and Spark continues to grow, the need to run at scale, with high performance, continues to increase. Pepperdata has a proven track record of helping Fortune 500 customers ensure performance in production Big Data applications and will be collaborating with these expert advisors to chart the future direction of the company's technology. 

"Enterprise Big Data application performance is more important than ever," said Ash Munshi, CEO of Pepperdata. "Performance means the difference between business critical or business useless. Our new Technology Advisory Board members not only understand Big Data, but also know how to build systems at scale. As a result of their guidance, as well as feedback from our customers, we will be bringing exciting new products to market in the coming months."

The Pepperdata Technology Advisory Board includes David Andersen, Thomas Bain, Ian O'Connell and Carl Waldspurger.

David Andersen is an associate professor in the Computer Science department at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from MIT, and received B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Biology from the University of Utah. Before joining MIT, he was a co-founder and CTO of an Internet Service Provider in Salt Lake City. His research is focused on computer systems in the networked environment. Andersen's research and published talks can be accessed through Carnegie Mellon and Google Scholar.

Thomas S. Bain, CGEIT, CISM, CRISC, is an information technology professional with more than three decades of financial services experience. Currently, he is a managing director at BlackRock and is Chief Administrative Officer for BlackRock's Aladdin Product Group. Previously at BlackRock, Bain managed the technology and corporate services departments and founded the business continuity, information security, internal audit, and technology risk management departments. Before joining BlackRock in 1994, Bain was employed in technology roles at CS First Boston, Goldman, Sachs & Co., and ITT Avionics.

Ian O'Connell is an accomplished software engineer with a decade of experience in Silicon Valley. His unique expertise in monitoring, performance and scalability is derived from leading projects for several successful companies. He currently works at Stripe, driving mission-critical projects including the architecture and design of the underlying infrastructure that processes billions of dollars a year. Previously, Ian was at Twitter, where he led development on several data-processing-related open source libraries, including Scalding, Bijection and Summingbird. He holds a MSc degree in computer science from Trinity College in Dublin.

Carl Waldspurger has a long record of innovation in systems software and resource management. As a consultant and technical advisor, he works closely with engineering and research teams on a range of topics including resource management, performance analytics, storage caching, security and hardware support for processor-level QoS. While at VMware, Waldspurger led the design and implementation of processor scheduling and memory management for the ESX hypervisor, and was the architect for the VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT, for which he received the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Supporting Quotes
"The team at Pepperdata is tackling hard technical problems that are of interest to everyone doing Big Data. I'll bring my experience with projects designing and building systems at extreme scale, which lends a deep understanding of performance and its implications in production environments to the work Pepperdata is undertaking."
- David Andersen

"I am delighted to sit on the Technology Advisory Board and look forward to working closely with Ash and his team. With more than three decades of IT infrastructure and management experience at BlackRock and Credit Suisse, I understand firsthand the impact of underlying infrastructure and software systems on business performance and success."
- Tom Bain

"The importance of performance when building systems at scale has never been more critical. Pepperdata is addressing the needs of large production Hadoop and Spark, where guaranteed performance throughout the application lifecycle is key."
- Ian O'Connell

"I enjoy working with the talented Pepperdata team on challenging problems related to improving the performance and predictability of modern Big Data systems. Providing value to users requires a deep end-to-end understanding of the entire Big Data stack, from processor hardware to application-level issues. Pepperdata is in the right place at the right time, delivering practical, innovative solutions with a Big Data focus."
- Carl Waldspurger

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About Pepperdata
Pepperdata is the Big Data performance company. Leading companies such as Comcast, Philips Wellcentive, and Zillow depend on Pepperdata to manage and improve the performance of Hadoop and Spark. Enterprise customers use Pepperdata products and services to troubleshoot performance problems in production, increase cluster utilization, and enforce policies to support multi-tenancy. Pepperdata products and services work with customer Big Data systems both on-premise and in the cloud.

Founded in 2012, Pepperdata has raised $20M from investors including Citi Ventures, Signia Venture Partners and Wing Venture Capital, and attracted senior engineering talent from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Netflix. Pepperdata is headquartered in Cupertino, California. For more information, visit www.pepperdata.com.

Pepperdata and the Pepperdata logo are registered trademarks of Pepperdata, Inc. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Contact Information:

Media Contact
Jim Dvorak
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