UPDATED 06:00 EDT / JUNE 26 2018

BIG DATA

AtScale hires Christopher Lynch as its new CEO

Business intelligence abstraction platform company AtScale Inc. is reshuffling its leadership pack, hiring ex-Vertica Systems Inc. Chief Executive Christopher Lynch (pictured) as its new executive chairman and CEO.

Lynch takes over the top spot from AtScale co-founder Dave Mariani, who will focus on the technology side of the business as executive vice president of technology. Lynch, who was responsible for Vertica Systems’ acquisition by Hewlett-Packard Co. in 2011 for more than $350 million. He recently was general partner at the venture capital firm Accomplice, will focus on expanding the commercial side of the business.

Lynch, brought on board as CEO of then-independent Vertica Systems in 2010, is largely credited with turning around the struggling organization’s sales and marketing operations and significantly boosting employee morale following the tumultuous tenure of his predecessor, Vertica founder Mike Stonebraker.

Founded in 2013, AtScale has made a name for itself by making business intelligence easier for its enterprise customers. Its software provides an abstraction layer for Hadoop clusters and other back-end data stores, and enables these to be accessed by a wide range of business intelligence applications without the need for extensive data extract/transform/load procedures.

Essentially, AtScale makes it simple for companies to tap into massive data lakes, which are repositories of structured and unstructured data that are typically used for business analysis, and gather insights from this information.

AtScale’s ability to abstract away this difficulty is one of the key attractions for Lynch, he said in an interview with SiliconANGLE co-CEO John Furrier on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s video studio in Palo Alto (below).

“AtScale is the only player in the game with a production product that can take customer’s data from the data center to the cloud transparently,” Lynch said. “The idea of an abstraction layer makes sense to me, and there’s a $200 billion opportunity here that these guys are uniquely qualified to take advantage of.”

Lynch said there’s an even bigger opportunity for AtScale to play a role in helping enterprises with their cloud transformations, which involve migrating their most critical business applications to the cloud. He said that for all of the talk of the cloud and its benefits, many migrations have largely stalled because of the complexity and dangers of doing so.

“It’s like trying to perform heart surgery on a patient while simultaneously running the Boston Marathon,” he said. “It’s too difficult, too disruptive and too risky.”

Lynch said he believes his new company can help to facilitate these transitions. AtScale can abstract the complexity of disparate data silos and enable organizations to shift dynamically among on-premises, cloud and multicloud deployments, without disrupting users or applications, he said. Lynch said he thinks the company is well-placed to help organizations shift workloads from legacy environments without disrupting their business operations.

“We basically separate those things and that’s going to allow people to scale and evolve into the cloud,” Lynch said. “Today cloud is a revolution, not an evolution, but it needs to be an evolution for Fortune 500 companies to take advantage of it.”

That’s not to say AtScale is trying to disrupt the cloud industry itself, or go up against established players such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC. Instead, Lynch believes AtScale can help these companies to achieve their own goals of becoming indispensable to enterprises.

“If Google, for example, wants to be relevant in the enterprise, they need to get those big-data workloads to their clouds,” Lynch said. “We can help them do that. This is the first opportunity I’ve seen where the game isn’t to disrupt but to work with all of these people to drive workloads to the cloud at a scale that hasn’t been done before.”

Here’s the full interview:

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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