ABOUT US


Jeff Cooke– Co-Founder and CEO

Mr. Cooke is a premier CEO and technology executive with a proven track record of creating major shareholder value both with start-ups and leading technology enterprise companies such as NEC and Hewlett Packard.

In January of 2002, Mr. Cooke assumed the role of President and CEO of FDI Collateral Management, a struggling early stage company that had been designed to provide electronic lien and titling services for the auto industry. Under Mr. Cooke’s leadership as CEO, FDI grew over 1000% and was sold in 2007 for a large return for the private equity owners.

Mr. Cooke led a similarly impressive turnaround at NEC Computers, Inc., where he was President and COO. During this time, the company went from losing millions of dollars after a troubled merger with Packard-Bell, back to profitability and a successful re-integration with their parent company, NEC of Japan.

Before joining NEC, Mr. Cooke had been recruited to lead a major portion of Apple Computer’s turn around. Apple lured Mr. Cooke away from Hewlett Packard where he had spent the bulk of his professional career. During his 16 years at Hewlett Packard, Mr. Cooke led several global businesses, including the company’s Global Procurement Operations, Worldwide Service and Support for the company’s PC and printer businesses and the Manufacturing and Distribution of PC’s and Servers.

Christopher Williams– Co-Founder and CTO

Chris is a proven and successful technology executive with a wealth of experience and intellectual capital in the storage industry. Chris developed early consumer oriented tape storage devices, the world's first 5.25” optical WORM drive, the world's first 3.25” optical MO drive and the world's first 1TB disc library. Extensive work in storage data compression led to a product of the year award.

Most recently, Chris was the COO of Nirvanix, where he lead the development and operational execution of the first storage cloud built as a direct competitor to Amazon’s S3. The Nirvanix storage cloud is a second generation web-service based enterprise grade media storage system and hosting environments that hosts more than 400 petabytes of user data for millions of users globally.

Chris has a successful track record of leading technology teams, having assisted in the development of several start-ups and leading 6 technology turnarounds to IPO or acquisition. After selling one turn-around to Intel, Chris stayed with Intel for 10 years, with a specific focus at Intel capital, which is the world’s second best performing VC fund.

He is an inventor and holder of over 18 patents in the storage, ITV and data mining and has 5 additional patents pending. He also holds the Queen's Award for Industry from the UK.

Michael Witz – Co-Founder and Director

Mr. Witz is a successful technology entrepreneur who has been starting computer related businesses for over a decade. He is currently an owner and investor in FreeDrive.com, a consumer facing online storage service. Prior to FreeDrive, Mr. Witz was a co-founder of RightSide.com, which was started in 2001 and then successfully sold in June of 2006 to a private equity firm in NYC.

Prior to RightSide, he founded StockJungle.com in 1998, a spectacular failure which folded in 2001. Besides the great learning experience for Mr. Witz, StockJungle had some other notable successes, including the creation of the first social networks for individual investors that received more than a million visitors in its short life, including notable mention by CNBC, Time, NY Times, Wall Street Journal and many others. Mr. Witz graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a degree in History.

Weili McClenahan - Sr. Director, Software Engineering

Ms. McClenahan leads Vaultscape's domestic and international software engineering teams. She brings to Vaultscape an incredibly high standard of excellence that comes from her more than 20 years as a group leader of software architecture and development teams. Ms. McClenahan comes to Vaultscape from Intuit, where she was a distinguished Software Architect for Core Technology Organization. At Intuit, she led a virtual R&D team for Intuit's Next Generation Web And Business Infrastructure. While at Intuit, Ms. McClenahan received the "Excellence Award for Outstanding Architecture Leadership" for her successful completion of a $30+ million effort in helping Intuit achieve PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance and for building an enterprises service platform. Prior to Intuit, Ms. McClenahan worked at Accredited Home Lender, Sun Microsystems and PNMSolutions. Ms. McClenahan has both a BS and MS in Engineering from Tsingua University, China.

David Hammond – Sr. Director, Data Center Operations.

Mr. Hammond brings over 20 years of IT infrastructure and operations experience. Most recently David was the Director of IT for Illumina, a global Biotechnology company that has consistently been among the fastest growing tech companies in America. Mr. Hammond oversaw all of Illumina’s IT operations and data centers around the world. Prior to Illumina, Mr. Hammond was the Director of IT for Glyphics Communications where he oversaw the IT infrastructure providing integrated communications services to a global customer base. David brings a long history of building and sustaining world class information systems in support of rapidly growing organizations. He holds a BS in Computer Science from James Madison University as well as a MBA from Averett University.

Aloke Guha – Scientific Advisor and Co-Architect of Vaultscape File System

Dr. Guha has over 20 years experience as a senior executive at both public and privately held technology companies. He was the co-founder and CTO of COPAN Systems, a pioneer in persistent data storage using MAID technology.

Prior to founding Copan Systems, Dr. Guha founded Datavail, a provider of storage management software, later acquired by Creekpath/Opsware (HP), a provider of data center management software. Earlier, Dr. Guha was the CTO and Chief Architect at StorageTek and Network Systems, where he was instrumental in the development of one of the first enterprise class SAN switches. Prior to StorageTek, Dr. Guha held senior technical positions at Honeywell Corporation, working in areas of high-performance networking and computing.

Dr. Guha is on the advisory board of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado and a founding Board and charter member of the Rockies chapter of TiE, an international entrepreneurial organization. He is a senior IEEE member, and has authored over 40 patents (20 issued) and 60 technical publications. He holds a B. Tech. (EE) from the Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur), an MSEE and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, and is a graduate of Stanford University's School of Business ' Executive Education Program.

Dr. Guha is currently the founder and CTO of AumniData