Don Rippert CEO, Basho Technologies

Basho Technologies, Inc., a data storage and management software company serving the enterprise market, announced that its Board of Directors has named Donald J. Rippert, long time Chief Technology Officer of Accenture, as President and Chief Executive Officer of Basho, effective July 1.

Rippert will lead Basho in what the Board expects to be a period of growth for the company.

In addition, Basho announced that it has successfully completed its $7.5 million Series D Equity Financing, further enhancing the company’s ability to capitalize on the growing demand of enterprises and government agencies for database software specifically built to manage the explosion of data being generated by growing Internet users and web applications. The extraction of value from this data explosion is often referred to as ‘Big Data’.

Prior to joining Basho, Rippert has enjoyed a 29-year career at Accenture. As that company’s Chief Technology Officer for more than six years, Rippert has been overseeing and managing technology vision and strategy, as well as Accenture’s Technology Labs. Rippert’s decision to leave Accenture to become Chief Executive Officer of Basho is a reflection of his confidence in the market potential for database software that is able to reliably manage enterprise and government agency’s Big Data needs. He will succeed Basho’s Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Earl Galleher, who will continue in his role as Chairman of the Board.

Rippert was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Virginia. He attended Fairfax County Public Schools graduating from Groveton High School. He then went on to the University of Virginia where he graduated with a BS in Commerce in 1981. He is married with five sons and lives in Great Falls, VA.

Galleher said: "The Board and I are thrilled that Don has chosen to join Basho as Chief Executive Officer. There is no executive in the market today with a better understanding of the changing data management needs of large enterprises and government agencies. Don will build upon Basho’s growing customer base, which includes, among others, a number of major companies in the healthcare, cable, telecommunications and software industries."

Rippert said: "I am looking forward to leading Basho as it capitalizes on its enormous potential in Big Data management for enterprises and agencies. The enterprise IT market is undergoing an extraordinary transformation in how it manages data. Relational databases have their place, but they don’t meet all of the changing data management needs of enterprises and agencies. Basho built Riak, its open source data store and management software, from scratch specifically to permit enterprises and agencies to capture enormous amounts of data with database software that is fault-tolerant, highly scalable and easy-to-install and use with absolutely no single point of failure. I have evaluated the needs of this market for many years, and I firmly believe that Basho has built the most differentiated and effective data storage and management software to satisfy the need for Big Data in enterprises and government agencies."

Dr. Eric Brewer, a member of Basho’s Board of Directors as well as Vice President, Infrastructure at Google, a co-founder of Inktomi Corp. and creator of the CAP Theorem, said: "The tremendous growth of Internet users, social media, and the explosion of data-generating web applications has created a need for a new approach to data management in enterprises and government agencies. Riak’s flexible, simple design is ideally suited for this new, complex Big Data landscape. Basho’s Board is convinced that Don is the ideal chief executive to lead Basho forward."

During his career at Accenture, Rippert has undertaken various management positions, including most recently serving as Chief Technology Officer. Prior to assuming this executive leadership position, He was a managing partner in Accenture’s Communications & High Tech operating group and, before that, was in charge of that operating group’s Global Solutions Group, with responsibility for product development, alliances, technology and marketing within Communications & High Tech.

With respect to its Series D equity financing, Basho successfully completed raising $4.0 million in May, 2011, following its initial raise of $3.5 million in February, 2011.

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Basho Technologies, in Cambridge, MA, was founded in January 2008 by a group of software architects, engineers, and executives from Akamai Technologies like chairman and former CEO Earl Galleher, CTO Justin Sheehy and COO Antony Falco.

It has also offices in San Francisco, CA, and Reston, VA.

The start-up closes initial $3.5 million of this latest $7.5 million Series D financial funding in February 2011. The participating investors include Georgetown Partners, a private investment firm based in Bethesda, MD, and Trifork A/S, an IT systems integration company based in Aarhus, Denmark, and also its European distributor. With the investment, Chester Davenport, MD of Georgetown Partners, and Joern Larsen, CEO of Trifork A/S, have joined the board of directors. Also joining the board was Anthony S. Thornley, previously COO of Qualcomm.

Series C was $2 million in August 2009 and at that time, Basho said that it forecasts this financing will carry it to profitability by mid-2011.

Total raised reach now $17.5 million of equity.

Riak
Riak is a distributed data store that combines fault tolerance, scalability, replication and monitoring to meet the needs of the Big Data management and storage software market, to free corporations from the constraints of traditional centralized database architectures (like those offered by Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, etc.).

In a Riak cluster, if you double the number of servers, you double your amount of storage while maintaining the same throughput. Scaling is linear.

It can sustain multiple machine failures in a cluster or multiple cluster failures without data loss or loss of write availability with a combination of algorithms.

The shared-nothing architecture enables nodes in a Riak cluster to coordinate requests via asynchronous messaging. So, if a node in a cluster crashes or hangs, the other nodes can handle the failed node's requests, operating without clients noticing disruption.

If a node becomes unreachable, Riak compensates using hinted-handoff. This means that neighbors of the unreachable node will receive the messages that the failed node would otherwise have handled, at the same time ensuring that features such as replication are not degraded in the window before the failed node is repaired or replaced.

Depending on replication needs, Riak can be configured to replicate between multiple equal clusters or designate one or more clusters as read-only or backup. Any node on any cluster can respond to client read and write requests, and the replication eventer process ensures all clusters get updated. Algorithms running on every node ensure data consistency.

Designed to work with applications that run on Internet and mobile networks, Riak is aimed at users of cloud infrastructure such as Amazon's AWS and Joyent's Smart platform. It is distributed under the Apache 2 Open Source License, combines a decentralized key-value store, a MapReduce engine, and a HTTP/JSON query interface to provide a database for web applications.

Riak is available in an open source and a paid commercial version.

Other product, Riak EnterpriseDS, extends Riak with tools and services for applications requiring availability and operational simplicity without high cost, said the company. It features masterless multi-site replication and SNMP monitoring.

Riak EnterpriseDS for Startups provides early-stage and self-funded companies access to software on which they can build scalable and cost-effective applications, by providing them with access to EnterpriseDS at a discount price.

Customers
One customer, Wikia, a large Internet site that brings millions of people together daily to create and discover engaging content, opts for Riak over traditional databases and other storage technologies to distribute its data around the world and bring it closer to its global audience. Another one is Collecta to build its real-time search engine for the entire Web.

Other revealed clients are Ask Sponsored Listings, Cedexis, Citigroup, Comcast, Dayfindr.com, Division by Zero, Excel59, Gastown Labs, Hitta.se, Hova Networks, Inagist, Linkfluence, Mobile Interactive Group, Mochi Media, Mozilla, Opscode, Rigel Group, SelfServeApps, SensiSoft, Silentale, SwingVine, Tax Management Associates, TeleSkele, The Rock, Vibrant, We Geo, Western Communications, Widescript, and ZayMobile.