Murli Thirumale – CEO
Murli Thirumale leads the overall strategy and business execution at Ocarina.

Prior to co-founding Ocarina, Thirumale was Group Vice President and GM of the Citrix Advanced Solutions Group, where he led the SSL-VPN division (acquired via Net6) to the number #1 unit market share and #2 revenue share position in eighteen months.

As the CEO and co-founder of Net6, Thirumale led the company from its inception through acquisition. He provided the vision and strategy for leveraging the company's unique network focus and approach to SSL-VPN security, IP telephony/VOIP applications and data mobility. Under his leadership, Net6 attracted $17 million in venture capital funding, secured OEM relationships with Cisco, Avaya and Nortel, and was acquired by Citrix Systems.

Prior to Net6, Thirumale was executive vice president and general manager of Symmetricom where he founded a new broadband division for the company and established Symmetricom as the undisputed leader in telecom network timing. Prior to Symmetricom, Thirumale also spent fifteen years at Hewlett-Packard where he served as general manager of Timing Solutions for Communications Operation. Thirumale also founded two new business units at Hewlett-Packard: Network Synchronization and OEM Wireless Timing.

Thirumale holds a BS in Electrical Engineering with distinction from the Institute of Technology-BHU in India and an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management where he was an Austin Distinguished Scholar.

Carter K. George – VP, Products
Carter George owns the product roadmap, product strategy and target market selection.

Prior to Ocarina, George was VP and co-founder of PolyServe. He drove product strategy, helped raise funding, defined product roadmap and early release schedules and helped close customers prior to the sale of Polyserve to Hewlett Packard. George played many roles including VP of Business Development where he closed several OEM deals with HP and Novell. He was also the VP and GM of Polyserve's scalable fault tolerant NAS storage division and was responsible for finding paths to market , managing OEMs, marketing ecosystem partnerships, and the P&L for the business.

Prior to PolyServe, George was at Sequent Computer. He was the Chief Enterprise Architect for Sequent and led a team focused on large deals in major accounts. He also ran Professional Services for Sequent and grew their consulting business from scratch to $100M rapidly. George also ran M&A for Sequent and orchestrated several strategic deals with Dell, IBM and others prior to the acquisition of Sequent by IBM for ~$1Billion.

Goutham Rao – CTO
Goutham Rao is responsible for algorithmic research and design, architectural guidance and technology vision.

Prior to Ocarina, Rao was the CTO of the Advanced Solutions Group for Citrix Systems. Citrix ASG provided solutions for Secure Remote Access, IP Telephony Applications, Business Continuity and Mobile Solutions. Rao provided technology and product leadership to Citrix Systems on identifying new market opportunities.

Rao was the CTO of Net 6 and joined Citrix via the acquisition. Rao invented the Hybrid VPN, the first of its kind to provide application access from any PC with support for real time applications such as VoIP. Using cutting edge SSL over IP techniques, Rao architected a channel ready product that worked seamlessly for all applications with superior application performance and geographical high availability.

Prior to joining Net6, Rao was an open source Linux kernel developer AND a key Operating Systems Architect at Intel where he worked on the IA-64 project. At Intel, Rao worked on various UNIX kernels, and in particular designed and implemented some key components of Linux's Intel 64 bit architecture. He was also a key architect with Lockheed Martin on a distribution and optimization network for low bandwidth radio based networks, a program used by the US Government in the defense industry.

Rao holds an MS in Computer Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania and a BE from Bangalore University both with high distinction. Rao has authored many patents and has published articles in areas such as business continuity, secure remote access and distributed fault tolerant architectures.

Matt Mahoney – Chief Scientist
Dr. Matt Mahoney serves as chief scientist for Ocarina. In this role, he applies his technical expertise in overseeing the contributions of our team of content-aware file compression researchers, as well as continuing his own research in context-mixing file type specific compressors.

Mahoney, most recently at the Florida Institute of Technology, is a recognized thought leader in the field of next generation data compression and has to date served on Ocarina's technical advisory board. Prior to joining Ocarina's management team, Mahoney helped develop the top-ranked PAQ series of compressors using a new algorithm called context mixing. He currently maintains one of the largest text benchmarks and continues to promote further research in statistical, natural language modeling. He is also on the committee for the Hutter prize to encourage open research in statistical natural language modeling. Before pursuing his Ph.D., Mahoney served as a software engineer for eleven years at Harris Corp. in Melbourne, Florida, and held a number of other hands-on technical development positions, including with the U.S. Navy.

Mahoney holds an MS degree in computer engineering and a Ph.D. in computer science from Florida Tech.

Mark D'Apice - VP, Engineering and Operations
Mark D'Apice is responsible for product development, product quality and technical support at Ocarina.

D'Apice has a 25 year track record of leading world class engineering teams and delivering mission critical products to enterprise customers. Most recently D'Apice was Co-Founder and Vice President of Product Engineering at Pillar Data Systems where he was responsible for the design and development of new products and global technical support.

Prior to Pillar Data, D'Apice was VP of Engineering for IBM's storage and subsystems group (Mylex). Prior to IBM, Mr. D'Apice was co-founder and VP of Engineering and Customer Support at CyberStorage Systems, a leading supplier of intelligent disk substorage systems, PC based networks and multi-user/multi-tasking operating systems. Earlier in his career, D'Apice held a variety of management positions at Kodak and AGFA-Compugraphic.

D'Apice holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science from Northeastern University.

Dave Withers - VP, Strategic Markets and Business Development
Dave Withers owns strategic OEM and ISV relationships that drive revenue and new market and product validation at Ocarina.

Mr. Withers has a proven track record of identifying disruptive technologies and bringing them to market as both an operational leader and a consultant. Prior to Ocarina, Withers was the Senior Director of Business Development at Isilon Systems where he built the BD practice and drove the expansion of the addressable market for clustered storage leading up to a successful IPO. Prior to Isilon, Withers was the Director of Business Development and a Sales Director for PolyServe (acquired by HP) where he closed the first definition customers and business partners.  Prior to PolyServe, Withers held sales and sales management positions with GE Access and American Power Conversion.

In a consulting capacity, Withers has also worked with publicly traded technology vendors as well as a wide array of start-ups and financial investors often acting as a member of the management team on an interim basis.

Withers holds an MBA in Finance from New York University's Stern School of Business and a Bachelor of Science in Decision and Information Sciences from Santa Clara University. He also completed the international management program at London Business School.

Eric Scollard - VP, Sales
Eric Scollard serves as Ocarina's vice president of sales. Scollard is a seasoned sales executive with over two decades of experience building and leading world-class sales organizations in the storage industry.

Prior to joining Ocarina, Scollard served as vice president of sales at Isilon Systems, where he built the sales organization from $0 to nearly $100M in revenue and led it to a successful IPO. From 1997-2002, Scollard served in various sales management positions at VERITAS Software, most recently as vice president of National Accounts where he was responsible for $150M in annual sales to its largest enterprise accounts. From 1991-1997, Scollard held a variety of sales and sales management positions at IBM Corporation and Catapult Software training, which IBM acquired in 1993. In his most recent position there he served as business unit executive in the Storage Systems Division.

Scollard started his career at EMC Corporation, which he joined shortly after its IPO in 1987, where he successfully launched its sales operations in Western Canada.

Scollard received a B.A. In Economics and Speech Communications from Gonzaga University.