Gerrit Schutté Member of Violin Industry Advisory Board

Violin Memory, Inc. announced that Gerrit Schutté, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of ConAgra Foods, Inc., is the latest executive to join the company’s Industry Advisory Board.

  Schutté will advise Violin’s executive management team in support of its goal to accelerate adoption of the company’s silicon storage solutions as a fundamental technology in the transformation of modern data centers.

"ConAgra’s business relies on a fully functional and reliable SAP ecosystem with high performance transactional and analytics capabilities," Schutté said. "We see Violin’s technology as a potential means to help meet our increasing I/O demands and reliability requirements. I look forward to advising Violin’s management team along its path toward delivering products that can help large companies running SAP improve their ability to deliver better performance to users."

"It’s truly an honor to welcome Gerrit Schutté to Violin’s Industry Advisory Board," said Don Basile, Chief Executive Officer of Violin Memory and former CEO of Fusion-io. "He and his team have already helped test the capabilities and assessed the benefits of Violin’s technology in the ConAgra Foods data center. Gerrit’s participation and guidance will be instrumental in enlightening CIOs at Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies in the use of silicon storage to overcome the physical limitations of hard-disk storage arrays to realize data center efficiencies that were previously unattainable."

Schutté joined ConAgra Foods in 1998. He has successfully led ConAgra’s restructuring, consolidation and modernization of IT resources including the design and construction of state-of-the-art data center capabilities, outsourcing of legacy application systems and proliferation of PMO disciplines and standards across the enterprise. He has deployed effective technical and leadership development capabilities throughout all areas of the IT organization. Schutté’s organizations have successfully implemented a single SAP instance across multiple business platforms and functions including Finance, Supply Chain, Sales and R&D. In 2009, ConAgra became the first company in the Americas to be awarded certification from SAP as an Advanced Customer Center of Expertise. Prior to joining ConAgra, he served as SVP IS Infrastructure for the Mutual of Omaha Companies and VP of Systems and Operations for the Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company. Schutté is a native of New York City, holds a BA degree from Fordham University and an MA from Central Michigan University.

Schutté joins Broadcom CIO Kenneth Venner and Asurion SVP of Technology Solutions Chris Corrado as the founding members of Violin Memory’s Industry Advisory Board.