MariaDB Leadership

Alexey Vorovich is VP of engineering at MariaDB Corporation where he leads the development of SkySQL, MariaDB’s database-as-a-service (DBaaS). Prior to joining MariaDB, he served as VP of engineering at Information Builders, a BI and data integration provider. During that time, he managed the development of the core BI Server product, as well as of ETL and Data Preparation tools. He also managed the development of Server portable multi-platform architecture, and a continuing manufacturing process that allowed for the identical feature set to be delivered and maintained through multiple releases and on multiple OS platforms, from windows to linux to mainframes, and more recently, the cloud.

Amir Ameri, CFO at MariaDB Corporation, is an accomplished financial professional with more than 25 years of leadership experience in finance and management. He is a dedicated leader with experience growing both public and private innovative software companies, including significant experience in fundraising. He has held executive positions at several SaaS and enterprise technology companies including CollabNet VersionOne, Precise Software and EnergyConnect. He earned an MBA in finance and management from Stanford School of Business and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford University.

Bill Flynn brings decades of field leadership in enterprise software, data management and analytics. At MariaDB Corporation, Bill previously led the Asia field organization before leading the Americas and opening up a business development center in Austin, TX. In the Americas, he is responsible for field sales, alliances, cloud channels, business development, operations and the end-to-end customer experience. Previously, Bill was head of global sales at C9 (acquired by InsideSales), one of the leading predictive analytics companies in the CRM space. Bill has held various field leadership roles both domestically and globally at Informatica, HP, Outerbay and iWay Software. Bill holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from St. Edward’s University and currently resides in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in Texas.

Franz Aman is the CMO at MariaDB Corporation, and brings more than 25 years of experience in leadership and innovation across marketing, including global product marketing, product management, strategy, brand and communications. Franz holds a degree in geophysics from Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany. He has held numerous executive positions within industry-leading technology companies, including Informatica, SAP, BusinessObjects, BEA Systems, SGI and Sun Microsystems.

Gregory Dorman is VP of distributed systems and analytics at MariaDB Corporation. Prior to joining MariaDB, Gregory served as SVP and general manager of iWay Software, a division of Information Builders, a provider of data integration, data quality and data mastering tools and technologies. Previously, he worked for BusinessObjects as chief software architect and served as VP of engineering for Oracle Corporation, where he worked on developing and enhancing the analytical capabilities of the Oracle database; in particular, integrating OLAP and OLTP engines, as well as inventing and designing analytical extensions to SQL.

Jags has spent more than two decades leading distributed data products. First as a co-founder of VMWare GemFire (acquired by VMWare; now Apache Geode), where he helped architect and lead the direction of a first-of-its-kind distributed in-memory data grid for highly concurrent and low latency apps. Later within VMWare/Pivotal, he integrated the technology with the Spring framework, virtualization and CloudFoundry, growing its footprint to hundreds of customers. As part of the leadership team within Pivotal, he helped define the vision for a new unified data fabric – a unified clustered platform that brought stream processing, transactions and analytics together to eliminate the “Lambda architecture” complexity and deliver Google-like speeds for complex analytic queries. This became the foundation for SnappyData, where he was the co-founding CTO.  At SnappyData, he worked on hybrid translytical processing in distributed memory using techniques like vectorization and approximate query processing. The platform was acquired by Tibco in 2019 and integrated as a central data management tier between visualization (Spotfire), data science and federated data management. Most recently, he was at a Fintech (a digital bank) company leading its global engineering team and experienced first-hand how cloud native modern apps are built with microservices and agility.

Jon Bakke is Chief Revenue Officer at MariaDB Corporation where he leads the field sales, inside sales, sales engineering, sales development, customer success, consulting, support and training teams globally. He has over 25 years of enterprise database experience, with an exceptional track record in innovation, customer service, solution development, delivery and global team leadership. Prior to MariaDB, Jon managed large, worldwide field organizations at Oracle and MarkLogic where his teams positioned and serviced critical business systems to a wide range of industries across the globe. Jon’s technical expertise transcends a wide range of IT specialties including ultra-scale database deployments, enterprise security and multi-model database technology. Jon earned a master’s degree at East Carolina University and currently resides in Arizona.

Laura Wang has over 20 years of experience in high tech B2B marketing working across many roles at companies such as Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, SAP Business Objects and Informatica. Across her rich career experience, she has developed a proven track record of bringing together the art and science of marketing; delivering impactful and relevant demand campaigns built on advanced digital platforms to produce industry-leading analytics. She earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Max Mether is a co-founder of MariaDB Corporation. He is currently head of server product management where he leads the development efforts on MariaDB Server and surrounding technologies. Prior to his current role, Max built the Professional Services team at MariaDB from the ground up. Max began his career consulting and training for companies such as MySQL and Sun Microsystems. He earned his Masters of Science (Eng) in physics and math from Helsinki University of Technology. A native of Finland, and by way of Paris, France, Max now resides in Atlanta, Georgia.

Michael Howard, CEO of MariaDB Corporation, brings decades of leadership in the enterprise software, data management and big data industries. As CEO of MariaDB, he has raised over $75M in funding from global strategic investors, led the acquisition of Clustrix and MammothDB, and orchestrated industry-leading innovation in the database, including a state-of-the-art database-as-a-service product. Previously, Michael was CEO at C9, which he transformed into one of the leading predictive analytics companies in the CRM space and led through its acquisition by InsideSales. Michael also served as CMO at Greenplum (now Pivotal), the big data division of EMC, as well as CEO at Ingrian Networks and OuterBay. He was also the VP of the internet division at Veritas and VP of data warehousing at Oracle, where he led the acquisitions of Thinking Machines, OneMeaning and Carleton Corporation. Michael has served on the boards of Acunu and FireEye, and keynoted at a variety of conferences, including EMC World, Oracle OpenWorld, Green Data Center Conference, Data Science Series, MariaDB OpenWorks and many others. Michael studied computer science and Slavic languages and literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Michael “Monty” Widenius is the “spiritual father” of MariaDB, a renowned advocate for the open source software movement and one of the original developers of MySQL, the predecessor to MariaDB. In addition to being chief server architect for MariaDB Corporation, he also serves as a board member of the MariaDB Foundation. He was a founder at SkySQL, and the CTO of MySQL AB until its sale to Sun Microsystems (now Oracle). Monty was also the founder of TCX DataKonsult AB, a Swedish data warehousing company. He is the co-author of the MySQL Reference Manual and was awarded the Finnish Software Entrepreneur of the Year prize in 2003. In 2015, Monty was selected as one of the 100 most influential persons in the Finnish IT market. Monty studied at the Helsinki University of Technology and lives in Finland.

Mick Carney has a long track record in the database industry and currently leads MariaDB sales in EMEA. With a background as a programmer and database developer/administrator, Mick joined MySQL in 2003 and ran sales in France. When MySQL was acquired by Oracle, he had responsibility for field sales in Europe. Mick was part of the team that co-founded MariaDB Corporation and has worked in various roles since inception but did have a few years off for good behavior where he worked in NoSQL (Riak) and load balancers (HAProxy). Born in the UK, Mick attended university in Bordeaux and due to a weakness for fine wines and cheeses, has never achieved escape velocity from France since graduating in 1990. He lives in the Paris region with his American wife and their two culturally confused daughters.

Robbie Mihalyi brings over thirty years of core software development experience in building RDBMS products as well as building and deploying SaaS applications. Robbie served 10 years as the key engineer on the database engine at Sybase, later becoming the director of SQL Server. As engineering VP at Marketo and MarketLive, Robbie implemented agile processes and practices, significantly improving concept-to-market deployment. More recently, he was VP of engineering at Clustrix (acquired by MariaDB Corporation), bringing to market a highly scalable, commercial-grade distributed RDBMS product. He is now SVP of engineering at MariaDB Corporation overseeing technology development for analytics and distributed systems as well as MariaDB’s database-as-a-service (DBaaS), SkySQL.

Saravana “SK” Krishnamurthy is a product management and technology leader with more than 25 years of leadership experience in big data, database and cloud industries. Currently, he is VP of product management at MariaDB, overseeing the development of the company’s DBaaS SkySQL. Previously, he held senior management roles at BlueData Inc (acquired by HPE), Xplain.io (acquired by Cloudera), Pivotal/Greenplum where he launched the PivotalHD/HAWQ product line, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and SS8 Networks. He is a venture advisor at Draper Next (DNX.io VC firm) and lectures at San Jose State University, teaching big data in business and entrepreneurship. SK has a dual MBA from Columbia Business School and UC Berkeley Haas Business School, and a master’s degree in computer engineering from UC Santa Cruz.

Sergei Golubchik leads Server engineering at MariaDB Corporation. He started his career modifying open source MySQL code in 1998 and continued as a software engineer at MySQL AB, later Sun Microsystems. He brought his expertise to further the project by working on the MariaDB Server at Monty Program AB and MariaDB Corporation. During all these years, he has touched nearly every part of the Server. Features he has implemented include full-text search, XA, HANDLER, parallel repair and bulk inserts in MyISAM, pluggable authentication and related features, and feedback plugin. Sergei is a primary architect of the plugin API and an author of the “MySQL 5.1 Plugin Development” book. He also serves on the board of the MariaDB Foundation.

Tim Yim has over twenty years in technology building industry-leading cloud platforms. He is VP of cloud platform operations at MariaDB Corporation where he leads a team of engineers that built the ultimate MariaDB Cloud, SkySQL, from the ground up. Previously, Tim was director of cloud operations at ServiceNow where he helped build the ServiceNow cloud with 100,000 MariaDB databases running in production, serving 100B queries per hour.