Ray Villeneuve CEO, Skytree

Skytree, Inc., the machine learning company, announced that Ray Villeneuve has joined the company as CEO.

 He joins Skytree from Riverbed Technology and brings more than 30 years of technology leadership experience to the role of CEO.

Martin Hack has been elected COB and will act as chief product officer.

The new appointments took effect on Oct. 13, 2014.

“I’m pleased to welcome Ray to the Skytree family. With Ray’s leadership and focus, Skytree is poised for its next phase of growth and continued leadership in the market. This announcement is a reflection of Skytree’s commitment to bringing world-class enterprise technology to the big data market,” said Hack. “I look forward to focusing my efforts on creating innovative products and furthering the evolution of Skytree with breakthrough technology such as the recently launched Skytree Infinity.”

Hack’s new role will focus on Skytree’s product and market strategy, machine learning leadership and direct engagement with customers to ensure that Skytree continues to deliver leading big data solutions to the marketplace.

During his tenure at Riverbed Technology, Villeneuve held roles as VP of corporate development and strategy and GM of the cloud storage acceleration business. Prior to Riverbed, he served as CEO of MonoSphere, Inc., a predictive analytics software company focused on optimizing datacenter storage resources. While at MonoSphere, he provided technical and business leadership, driving product development and bringing products to market and building the development, sales and marketing organizations and partner channels. His leadership in this role led to the acquisition by Quest Software in 2009. He has also held executive leadership positions at NetApp, Auspex Systems, Silicon Graphics Inc. and General Electric.

“I am extremely excited to join Skytree, an organization transforming the industry and enabling a new class of advanced analytics applications that are unimaginable with legacy approaches,” said Villeneuve. “As the addressable big data market continues to grow, Skytree is well positioned to lead the market in world-class machine learning. I look forward to ensuring solid execution and continued growth.”