UPDATED 17:00 EDT / DECEMBER 08 2017

BIG DATA

Kinetica hires industry veterans to kick-start growth of its GPU-fueled database

With a product that’s riding one of the hottest trends in high-performance computing right now – graphics processing unit acceleration — Kinetica Db Inc. is bringing in experienced management to help it scale.

The company plans to announce the appointment Monday of Paul Appleby (pictured) as chief executive. A veteran of more than 20 years of high-tech startup experience whose pedigree includes executive sales and management positions at Salesforce.com Inc., Siebel Systems Inc. and BMC Software Inc., Appleby has an enterprise track record that the young company sees as essential to better defining its unique niche.

Kinetica has raised $63 million in venture capital financing, including $50 million in a single round in June. Its streaming database engine is the commercial offspring of projects hatched in the U.S. military for streaming-data applications such as real-time drone tracking. Former Oracle Corp. President Ray Lane has taken Kinetica under his wing, spearheading the fundraising efforts and personally recruiting Appleby.

Founder and former CEO Amit Vij will become president and chief strategy officer. In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Appleby said his predecessor “embraced” the decision to bring on senior management. “He’s playing a major new role in strategy and working with our largest customers,” he said.

Kinetica’s database harnesses GPUs to speed up applications that lend themselves well to parallel execution. GPU coprocessors are seen as one way to continue to ramp up computer performance as the once-exponential gains of Moore’s Law begin to wind down.

Their popularity has fueled a sixfold rise in the stock price of market leader Nvidia Corp. over the past two years and prompted companies such as IBM Corp. to make GPUs a core part of their high-performance computing strategies, especially for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications. However, relatively little GPU-specific commercial software is available.

In addition to the fundraising, the company this year has signed up blue-chip accounts that include Caesars Entertainment Corp., GlaxoSmithKline PLC, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and the U.S. Postal Service.

Appleby said his most immediate tasks will be to “bring in enterprise-grade processes with lifecycle management and couple that with incredible innovation. There is so much we could do with this technology, but like many young companies we’re trying to do all of them at once,” said the Australian native. “It’s about homing in on the business problems that we need to solve for customers.”

Kinetica’s technology is still seen by many people as being in the realm of a ”science experiment,” Appleby said. “To me, this is about turning real-time analytics from a science experiment to something that’s real and understandable.”

Coincident with Appleby’s appointment, Bryan Morris has been named chief financial officer. Morris has held senior financial roles at numerous startups, including Xamarin Inc., Ooyala Inc. and LiveRamp Inc.

Image: Twitter

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU