Management

Bruce Armstrong
Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer

Bruce Armstrong is a database industry veteran who brings 25 years of technology-specific development, marketing and sales expertise to his position as Chairman  and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Kickfire.

Armstrong began his career at data warehousing giant Teradata Corporation where he spent 15 years as part of the team that established the company as the leader in the market.  After the company's successful initial public offering (IPO) and acquisition by AT&T/NCR, he was named Vice President and General Manager of the $500M Enterprise Solutions Division, President of the Teradata subsidiary, and a company officer of AT&T. Following Teradata, Armstrong held the position of Vice President and General Manager of the Server Products Group at Sybase, where he ran the company's $700M enterprise database management business.

Previously Armstrong served as President and CEO of publicly-traded KNOVA Software, a leading provider of customer service, self-service and intelligent search applications that he grew from a private venture with innovative technology to a public company serving some of the world's largest call centers.

He also held posts as partner at Internet Capital Group (ICGE), where he helped lead the strategy and management of software infrastructure investments; President and CEO of CMPnet, where he led CMP Media's web-based applications and services subsidiary; and Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Broadbase Software (now KANA), where he helped create the analytic application category for CRM.

Armstrong has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Raj Cherabuddi
President and Founder

Raj Cherabuddi is President and Founder of Kickfire, the company that developed the first SQL chip for the MySQL data warehouse market. A seasoned executive, he is experienced in both the startup and corporate worlds. Cherabuddi co-founded Kickfire in 2006 and served as its CEO and President for over two years. Under his leadership the company raised Series A and B financing from top tier investors and successfully brought its first product to market.

Prior to Kickfire, Cherabuddi was the founding CEO of Sanera Systems, a startup that focused on mission-critical, high-performance SAN switches. Sanera was successfully acquired by McDATA Corporation, an $800M public company now part of Brocade. At McDATA, Cherabuddi served as the corporate CTO for nearly two years, where he advised on strategy and was responsible for future technologies.

Before co-founding Sanera Systems, he served as lead architect for Sun's UltraSPARC IIIi processor. He also worked for Intel Corporation as a micro-architect in the Processor Group. During his early career he developed and was issued patents for 23 inventions.

Cherabuddi earned a B.S degree in Electronics & Communication Engineering from Osmania University and an M.S. degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University.

Richard Nieset
Vice President of Sales and Services

Richard Nieset is Vice President of Sales and Services at Kickfire and brings over 25 years of experience selling and supporting hardware, database and software technology at start ups through large scale enterprises.

Most recently he served as Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Helpstream, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider of an innovative, community-driven customer service application.          

Nieset is an expert in data driven business applications. Prior to Helpstream he held posts as Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Services for KNOVA (KNVS). He joined the company shortly after its founding and helped grow it into a global publically traded organization serving the Fortune 500.

At Agile Software (AGIL), a leading provider of Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) solutions, Nieset helped develop the go-to-market strategies that led to Agile's dominance in the industry.

Previously he was Executive Vice President of Operations for Rexcom Systems, an early entrant into the Fourth Generation Language (4GL) and relational database systems market. Before that he held progressively senior sales positions at several high tech companies.

Nieset holds a degree in Physics from Loyola University of the South and a BA in Business from the University of Phoenix.

Karl Van den Bergh
Vice President of Marketing and Business Development

Karl Van den Bergh combines extensive international marketing experience with expertise in strategy and business development, product management and negotiations.

Prior to Kickfire he spent seven years at Business Objects in progressively senior management roles, most recently as General Manager, Emerging Business responsible for building and running a strategic On Demand business. As Senior Director, Corporate Development & Strategy he worked for the Chairman helping with M&A and corporate strategy.

Before joining Business Objects, Van den Bergh was the European
Marketing Manager for ASG, one of the world's largest privately held software companies. Van den Bergh started his career as an engineer at SDP, a database design tool startup, that was ultimately successfully acquired by Sybase.

Van den Bergh has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics from Trinity College Dublin, a Master of Science in Computing with distinction from Imperial College London, and a Diploma in Humanities from the Istituto Internazionale, Loppiano Florence, Italy.

Thomas J. Muise
Chief Financial Officer

Thomas Muise brings more than 25 years experience in finance and operations at both start-up and public companies including significant roles in the database, hardware and software industries to his role as Chief Financial Officer of Kickfire.

Muise began his career at parallel-processing pioneer Tandem Computers where he held senior finance positions over a period of 12 years, including Director of Finance for the Nonstop Software business unit with  P & L responsibility for the database and transaction processing technology business.

Prior to joining Kickfire, Muise was the Chief Financial Officer for PanTerra Networks, a provider of SaaS unified communications services, and for publicly traded Knova Software, a leading provider of service resolution management applications. During his career, Muise has also held CFO positions at Embrace Networks and Solopoint, and was the Senior Director of Corporate Finance at Synopsys.

Muise graduated cum laude from Bowling Green State University with a Bachelor of Science in economics, and earned his Master of Business Administration, with honors, from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

Joseph I Chamdani, Ph.D.
Chief Technology Officer and Founder

An accomplished technologist, Dr. Joseph I. Chamdani is CTO and Founder of Kickfire. Prior to Kickfire, he was co-Founder, Chief Systems Architect, and VP Systems Integration at Sanera Systems, which was later acquired by McDATA. At Sanera and McDATA, Dr. Chamdani led the architecture for the high-end switching systems and fabric-based storage virtualization/services using hardware acceleration.

Before Sanera, he was the lead architect for Sun Microsystems' UltraSPARC IIIplus and UltraSPARC IV microprocessors for their high-end SMP servers, with a focus on improving database performance. Dr. Chamdani led the technical team on several innovations including performance enhancements and high availability which are presently deployed and shipped on Sun's high-end datacenter server systems.

Dr. Chamdani earned a BSEE and BSCS from Washington University, St. Louis and received his MSEE and Ph.D in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech. He currently holds 31 issued patents in computer architecture, microprocessor, compiler, networking, storage, and circuit design areas.

Dr. Ravi Krishnamurthy
Chief Software Architect

As Chief Software Architect, Dr. Krishnamurthy brings 25+ years of experience conducting and managing database research at top US industrial and academic institutions. He has converted his research at the frontiers of computer science into commercial products at two successful startups.

Dr. Krishnamurthy started his career working with Dr. Moshe Zloof (the inventor of Query-By-Example) at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He held Senior Researcher & Chief Architect positions in the Database Program at MCC, Austin, TX. This database program included the LDL/Bubba projects that were credited with the seminal paper on column store in 1986. In 1989 he co-founded LIM, his first startup, a profitable company that leveraged column store technology to deliver high performance databases to Wall Street and energy trading institutions. He still holds the position of Chairman. Dr. Krishamurthy was a co-founder & CTO of Exemplary which spun out of HP Labs after seven years of research.

He has published over 40 refereed papers and holds a Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani, India and a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Jey Govindan
Senior Director of Technical Services

Jey Govindan brings 20 years of experience in application development, consulting and customer support to Kickfire. Govindan is an expert in building and growing customer service teams by creating a strong value-chain from employees to customers to company goals. Govindan has had proven success in creating strategic methods to stay relevant to customer needs and understanding the customer experience.

Most recently at Symphony Metreo, Govindan established and led their Customer Support organization. Govindan successfully implemented innovative programs with a holistic approach that created opportunities for more revenue while improving retention, learning and growth of the team. Previously, as a Sr. Director of Customer Support at Agile Software, Govindan led a 25 person team and was responsible for  global support for over 600 customers through support centers in India, Japan and the USA. Govindan held support and consultant roles earlier on in her career at Remedy Corporation, Silicon Graphics and Seagate Technology.

Govindan has a Bachelors degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the National Institute of Technology (NITT) India.