Caringo Inc. announced the hiring of Jan Van Riel as its VP of Advanced Technology, reuniting him with fellow co-founder of Content Addressable Storage, Paul Carpentier, Caringo’s CTO.

Van Riel and Carpentier together invented the technology that created the CAS industry while they were partners at FilePool, a company they sold to EMC, which incorporated the CAS concept into its multimillion-dollar Centera. Van Riel served eight years as EMC’s Director of Technology following the acquisition of FilePool, where he was the company’s CTO. The software expertise of these two innovators over a span of 25 years will positively impact Caringo’s future as well as shake up and advance the state of content storage software.  

Before FilePool, Van Riel was VP of Engineering and co-founder of Wave Research, with Carpentier, where they invented FileWave, the first automated, model-driven software distribution and management system. Prior to that, Van Riel led engineering as co-founder of Gnosis/Technosis, again with Carpentier, where the two invented SequeLink, the first client/server middleware product to connect heterogeneous front ends to multiple databases.

“With EMC scaling down the Centera unit and the future of Centera unclear, the chance to join Caringo, which understands the potential of CAS, and partner once again with Paul Carpentier was too good of an opportunity to pass up,” said Van Riel. “The need for CAS solutions is ever increasing and I am excited to participate in the next chapter of the technology at Caringo.”  

“We are thrilled to bring Jan into the Caringo family and reunite the two ‘fathers’ of Content Addressed Storage under the same roof once again,” said Jonathan Ring, Caringo President. “Jan has more than two decades of experience designing and developing new technologies and his work with Paul has produced seismic changes in the industry. We look forward to his contributions here at Caringo to further our success with CAStor.”

Van Riel holds a collection of storage-related patents. He earned a Masters Degree in Industrial Engineering with a specialty in Electronics and Computer Science.


Caringo Inc.