Raj Cherabuddi
CEO, President, and Co-Founder

Raj Cherabuddi is CEO, President, and co-Founder of Kickfire. A seasoned executive, he is experienced in both the startup and corporate worlds. 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.

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

An accomplished technologist, Dr. Joseph I. Chamdani is CTO and co-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, 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 29 issued patents in computer architecture, microprocessor, compiler, networking, storage, and circuit design areas.

Steve Dille
Vice President of Marketing

Steve Dille is Vice President of Marketing at Kickfire. A seasoned executive and data warehousing/BI veteran, Dille has a proven ability to identify trends, quantify market segment opportunities, design products and execute growth strategies.

Dille joined Kickfire from Morgan Stanley Capital Intl/Barra where he was Chief Marketing Officer of the $350M risk management software and data provider for the investment management industry. Previously as Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Viador Inc., Dille led a 45 person sales and marketing team from $1M to $26M and a successful IPO. He held progressively responsible positions at Sybase, most recently as Director of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence where he managed this $100 million business. Whilst at Sybase he launched Sybase IQ, the first column store database for data warehousing, which is still the leading product in this category.

Dille has a Bachelor of Science cum laude in Computer Science and Math from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Karl Van Den Bergh
Vice President of Business Development

Karl Van Den Bergh combines extensive international experience with expertise in strategy and business development, product management and negotiations. At Kickfire he is responsible for developing and managing channels and partnerships.

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.

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.

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.