February 5th, 2014 – Helsinki, Finland – SkySQL, the trusted provider of MariaDB and MySQL technology, today announced three executive appointments. Industry stalwarts Roger Levy, Dion Cornett and Steven Grandchamp join the innovative open source database company. The new team members bring expertise from HP, Red Hat and OpenLogic to the fast growing vendor as it accelerates adoption and expands its enterprise value proposition.
The new senior hires are in line with SkySQL’s stated Series B funding goals – closed in October last year – to invest in MariaDB development and accelerated sales growth. Their focus includes new business development and strategic partnering to take the company to the next level.
Roger Levy joins SkySQL as VP Products, tasked with evolving MariaDB to market leadership. He will work closely with the MariaDB engineering teams, the MariaDB Community and enterprise customers to achieve this goal. Prior to this, Levy was General Manager of Public Cloud Services at HP where he helped further its leadership position in Openstack and revised the Public Cloud product strategy to grow revenue. Levy served as Novell’s SUSE General Manager where he managed the $150 million SUSE Linux operating system business and doubled its market share.
He teams up with Dion Cornett, most recently VP Sales Strategy at Red Hat, who brings impeccable open source credentials to his new role as VP Global Sales at SkySQL. Cornett spent the last nine years at Red Hat, including as VP North American Sales, as well as building up Red Hat’s ISV, Embedded and System Integrator businesses. Dion was earlier VP Investor Relations at Red Hat. Cornett leads the continued growth of SkySQL sales and will expand the Company’s routes to market.
To complete the trio of senior hires, Steven Grandchamp joins SkySQL as VP North American Sales. He is the former CEO of OpenLogic, a company providing training and support for enterprises on a range of open source software. At OpenLogic, Grandchamp drove aggressive growth of the business to an ultimate successful exit. Steven has earlier business and technical experience from a number of other software companies.
Patrik Sallner, CEO, SkySQL said, “We are pleased to have hired not one, but three world-class talents at such an exciting time of growth and expansion for SkySQL. Roger, Dion and Steven have proven track records of growing open source businesses and delivering results for some of the world’s largest tech companies. These new hires strengthen our global presence, particularly in the strategic North American market, and enable us to deliver on our vision for MariaDB to become the world’s leading open source relational database.”