Longtime Technologist Will Lead Company as it Moves Aggressively to Scale Business and Expand to New Distributed Computing Environments
CUPERTINO, California—August 9, 2016 – Pepperdata, the world experts in the performance of distributed systems at scale, today announced that Ashfaq Munshi has joined the company as chief executive officer. Munshi has held CEO roles at several successful startups, as well as numerous other technology executive positions including CTO at Yahoo, and brings over 30 years of experience to his role at Pepperdata. Cofounder and former CEO Sean Suchter will assume the position of CTO, working directly with customers to shape the next frontier of distributed computing performance.
Big data is prompting a shift from traditional server-based computing to distributed computing in the data center, particularly in the enterprise. Hadoop represents the first wave of this shift. Yet as enterprises embrace Hadoop they face growing pains associated with scaling in production. These challenges include underutilization, lack of predictable performance, and increasingly difficult troubleshooting. Pepperdata solves this gap by measuring and controlling Hadoop clusters in real time, thereby reducing complexity, improving utilization, increasing predictability, and making it much easier to problem solve. This unique capability has led to the company’s 100 percent year-over-year customer growth for two consecutive years.
“Ten years ago Sean was one of the first people to understand the transformative power of Hadoop for businesses, while it was being invented at Yahoo,” said Ash Munshi, CEO, Pepperdata. “Pepperdata was born out of this experience and in just a few years the company has become the leader in distributed computing performance.”
Munshi’s expertise in large-scale processing and systems architecture across a variety of industries will be key as Pepperdata tackles performance challenges for a broad range of distributed computing environments. Most recently, Munshi was executive chairman for Marianas Labs, a deep learning startup sold in December 2015. Prior to that he was CEO for Graphite Systems, a big data storage startup that was sold to EMC DSSD in August 2015. Munshi has also served as CTO of Yahoo, a CEO of both public and private companies, and is on the board of several technology startups.
“Ash’s reputation in the industry for strong, hands-on leadership has helped a long list of technology market leaders successfully scale their businesses, and is exactly what Pepperdata needs as we move to the next stage of growth,” said Sean Suchter, cofounder and CTO, Pepperdata. “We’re thrilled he has chosen to join Pepperdata at a time when the demand for distributed computing performance is only expanding. Ash’s proven experience will help us continue to accelerate our market and customer momentum.”