Schooner Information Technology, a provider of solid-state data access appliances for Web 2.0 enterprises, cloud computing and enterprise data centers, has found its new No. 1 business executive.
The startup, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., announced the appointment Jan. 12 of longtime industry executive Jerry Rudisin as its new president and CEO.
Rudisin brings to Schooner more than 20 years of experience in the IT infrastructure and application development sectors. Most recently, he was CEO and president of Agitar Software, a Java applications provider acquired by McCabe Software in June 2008.
Rudisin previously served as CEO and president of telecommunications software provider NightFire, which he led to profitability in spite of the telecom depression, resulting in the company’s acquisition in 2003. Rudisin was previously vice president of marketing at Rational Software (acquired by IBM in 2003) as it grew from a private company with $28 million in revenue to a public company with $412 million in revenue.
Schooner, which emerged from stealth mode April 13, 2009, had been captained in its first days by President, CEO and co-founder John Busch, who has a lengthy background in storage at both Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. When Rudisin comes aboard, Busch will become chairman of the board and CTO, in which role he will direct the company’s ongoing technology innovation.
Schooner claims that its first products — optimization appliances for Memcached and MySQL — substantially improve server and storage I/O performance over standard data center components, leading to vastly increased data center cost efficiency.
Schooner launched its first two data-access appliances in April: the Schooner Appliance for MySQL Enterprise and the Schooner Appliance for Memcached. Schooner replaces traditional DRAM (dynamic RAM) with NAND flash in the Tier 0 sector.
“In the past year, we’ve successfully brought the company and the Schooner appliances out of stealth and into production use by industry-leading customers,” Busch said.
“Jerry’s expertise will accelerate Schooner’s growth as we help customers around the world maximize the performance and availability of their data center infrastructures while cutting their costs.”
We at The Station will be keeping an eye on this very interesting new company.