Brad Lovering, a former technical fellow at Microsoft has landed at Splunk. Meanwhile another former Microsoftee, Frank Artale, joins Ignition Ventures.
Brad
Lovering, a former Microsoft Technical Fellow, will launch a new Seattle office
for
Splunk.
Lovering,
who left Microsoft in October 2010, will open the new Splunk office on Feb. 8
to focus on research and development for the San Francisco-based operational
intelligence software maker, according to a report
initially
in the All About Microsoft blog.
According
to the Splunk Website, "Splunk is the data engine for IT. It collects, indexes
and harnesses the fast moving IT data generated by all your IT systems and
infrastructure - physical, virtual and in the cloud. Use Splunk and your IT
data to deliver new levels of visibility and intelligence for IT and the
business."
As
vice president of development platform at Splunk, Lovering will help strategize
and deliver new components of the Splunk architecture, as well as to help
establish a developer ecosystem for the technology. He spent 24 years at
Microsoft and is listed among
eWEEK's
list of prominent departures from the software giant in recent years.
Lovering
joined Microsoft straight out of the University of Washington in 1988 and
started in the customer service department. He became a Microsoft Technical
Fellow and later helped lead the charge toward Microsoft's "Oslo"
modeling framework, and worked on BizTalk Server and Active Directory. He also
worked on other developer-focused products, ranging from Visual Basic, to
Visual J++, to Visual Studio .Net and the .Net Framework, to Windows Communication
Foundation (WCF), as well as on Microsoft's Web Services standards.
As
a technical fellow at Microsoft Lovering was viewed as one of the technical
leaders of the company - a distinction handed to fewer than two dozen of the
company's top technologists.
According
to Microsoft:
"The
special designation of 'Technical Fellow' is an acknowledgement of the key role
a technical leader plays in driving intentional innovation, in alignment with
Microsoft's business strategies, which in turn impacts the high-tech industry
overall. A Technical Fellow's technical vision, expertise and world-class
leadership is commensurate with that of a corporate vice president focused on
business leadership. These individuals are instrumental in developing and
driving technical strategies for Microsoft and the technology industry."
The
explosion of data and what to do with it apparently helped spark Lovering's
decision to go to Splunk. According to All About Microsoft, Lovering said,
"There's a complete revolution in data management happening, and it is great to
have found a place I can work on all that."
Lovering
landed at Splunk through contacts at
Ignition
Partners, a Bellevue, Wash.-based venture capital firm that features
several former Microsoft executives.
In
related news, another former Microsoft employee, Frank Artale, joined Ignition
Venture Management. Artale also brings 24 years of experience in the software
business to his new job. Artale spent nine years at Microsoft, where he held
various positions including General Manager for systems management during the
Windows 2000 project and Director of Program Management for Windows NT 4.0.
Artale
has been an entrepreneur and executive in several Ignition portfolio companies
including CEO of Consera (sold to HP) as well as vice president of business
development and strategic marketing at XenSource (acquired by Citrix Systems).
Artale has also worked alongside Ignition as Chairman of the Board and director
of Rendition Networks (sold to Opsware) and as an advisor to Zenprise. Artale
was most recently group vice president of business development at Citrix
Systems and a member of the venture development team at Accel Partners in Palo
Alto, California. While at Accel, he became an advisor to such companies as
Cloudera, an open source data platform, Membase, a NoSQL solutions provider,
and Centrify Software. Artale also held senior product management and sales
roles at VERITAS Software and Microsoft before becoming an entrepreneur and
start up executive.
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