Lou Shipley
President and CEO
Prior to joining VMTurbo, Lou was General Manager of Citrix Xen Products Group. Previously, he was President and CEO of Reflectent Software, an end user application performance monitoring company acquired by Citrix in 2006. Lou was General Manager of the Citrix Management Systems group, then took on the role as General Manager of Citrix XenServer when Citrix acquired XenSource in 2007. He joined Reflectent after working as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Highland Capital Partners. Prior to Highland, Lou served as Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations for WebLine Communications, a customer contact center software company acquired by Cisco Systems in 1999 for $325 million. Previously to WebLine, Lou served as Vice President of Americas and Pacific operations at Avid Technology. He joined Avid as a startup and oversaw growth to over $450 million in revenue. Lou also founded and served as President of Avid Japan, KK. Lou is a graduate of Trinity College and Harvard Business School, and is a Guest Lecturer at MIT Sloan School. He serves as a Trustee at Westminster School in Simsbury, CT and is on the Board of Directors at Xtranormal.com.
Shmuel Kliger
Founder (and former President and CEO)
Shmuel is currently focused on product and technology strategy, as well as strategic partnerships. Previously, he founded and served as President and CEO of VMTurbo. Prior to founding VMTurbo, Shmuel served as Vice President of Architecture and Applied Research in the EMC CTO Office. Prior to joining the CTO Office, Shmuel was the Chief Technology Officer of EMC’s Resource Management Software Group. Shmuel Kliger joined EMC with the acquisition of SMARTS. Shmuel Kliger was a Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of SMARTS. As CTO of SMARTS Shmuel Kliger was responsible for setting SMARTS vision and strategy, managing SMARTS R&D organization, as well as Professional Services, Technical Support and Technology Partner Development. Prior to joining SMARTS, Shmuel was a member of the Distributed Systems Software Technology department at IBM Research developing middleware technologies. Shmuel also served as a senior researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, and Manager of Technical Support Services for International Business Software in Israel. Shmuel holds a B.S. in mathematics from Bar Ilan University, an M.Sc.and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.
Shai Benjamin
Co-founder, Director of Development
Prior to founding VMTurbo, Shai served as senior director of system engineering at BigBand Networks (NASDAQ:BBND), a provider of digital video networking solutions. Before joining BigBand, Shai was development manager and senior staff engineer at Smarts, where he developed network management solutions for MPLS and IP networks. Prior to Smarts, Shai was senior system engineer at ECI Telecom, specializing in telephony and in multimedia systems. Shai began his career as an officer in the Israeli Air Force, where he developed advanced radar techniques, and retired as a Captain. Shai holds a B.Sc. in Math and Physics from the Talpiot program at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles. Shai has published several research papers in the area of telecommunication network design and synthesis, and holds several patents and patent applications in the fields of network modeling and multimedia systems.
Danilo Florissi
Co-founder, Chief Architect
Prior to founding VMTurbo, Danilo served as a Senior Technologist in the Office of the Corporate CTO at EMC, where he was responsible for exploring technological innovations for EMC. Prior to EMC, Danilo worked as Principal Scientist at Smarts, where he was responsible for exploring how to leverage SMARTS technology in new areas. Prior to joining Smarts, Danilo served as Director of R&D for NeXtorage/Activium, a company that developed a novel architecture for storage systems. Danilo also served as Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, where he helped lead several DARPA sponsored research projects in the areas of network management, system security, and active networking. At Columbia, Danilo also taught several graduate courses in networking, market-based research allocation, and programming languages. Danilo holds BA and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, PE, Brazil, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University. Danilo holds four patents and has published over thirty research papers.
Mo Garad
CFO
Mo brings over 15 years of financial management and business strategy experience to VMTurbo where as CFO he is responsible for finance and operations. Previously, Mo was CFO of dynaTrace, an application performance management software company acquired by Compuware for $265 million in July 2011, where he was the first U.S. employee and helped grow the business from less than a million dollars in revenue to a run rate of $32 million in four years. Mo also held executive roles at Bain Capital Ventures and VERITAS Software, which he joined after the acquisition of Precise Software. At Precise, Mo served as VP of strategic planning/M&A and VP of finance. He was part of the management team involved in the IPO of the company in June 2000 and its acquisition by VERITAS for over $650 million in June 2003.
Jim McInerny
Vice President of Sales
Prior to joining VMTurbo, Jim served as the Director of Sales for EMC Corporation's SMB Division (North America). During his 10 years at EMC, Jim held multiple sales leadership positions, spending the last 7 years building out the North American Inside Sales Division. His duties included: recruiting and training hundreds of ISR's and managers; developing sales process and strategy across the division; and leading a 140 person sales organization which drove significant net new market-share for the company. Prior to EMC, Jim spent 7 years in sales and sales management for UUNET, where he helped build out the Southeast and New England sales and support teams. Jim holds a B.A. degree from the University of New Hampshire and received his MBA from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College.
Yuri Rabover
Co-founder, Vice President of Product Strategy
Prior to joining VMTurbo, Yuri managed the Advanced Solution group in the EMC CTO Office and worked very closely with EMC's Architecture and Applied Research teams in prototyping and innovating across a broad range of technology stacks and solutions. He joined EMC with the acquisition of SMARTS. Yuri had a long and diverse career with SMARTS: he was a member of the founding team, managed engineering and product development, and was responsible for technology partnership development, managing relationships with strategic accounts. Yuri worked in several other high-tech startups managing engineering and products in storage and system management, IP telephony and collaboration. Earlier in his career, Yuri managed a research lab at the Russian Academy of Sciences Informatics Institute, carrying out applied research in operating systems, resource management, and user interfaces. Yuri holds a B.S. in electrical engineering and M.S. in computer science from Moscow Technical University of Electronic Engineering and a Ph.D. in computer science from Russian Academy of Sciences Informatics Institute.
Derek Slayton
Vice President of Marketing
Derek leads corporate, product and channel marketing at VMTurbo. Prior to joining the company, Derek was the senior director of product marketing and management at Citrix Systems where he drove the product direction, positioning and go-to-market strategies for the XenServer virtualization platform and cloud management solutions. Before joining Citrix, Derek ran marketing for Reflectent Software, an application performance management solution acquired by Citrix in May, 2006. Derek joined Reflectent in 2004 from Enterasys Networks where he managed the company's worldwide channel marketing efforts as director of global channel and field marketing. While at Enterasys he also oversaw the North American field operations and marketing organization helping the company to shift from a direct sales organization to a channel model and grow revenues to $600M. Prior to his tenure at Enterasys, Derek was responsible for the ProductSource offering at OrderTrust where he had P&L and product management responsibilities in bringing to market the company's software-as-a-service offering for e-commerce retailers. Derek holds a bachelor's degree in history and economics from Davidson College and an MBA from the F.W. Olin School of Business at Babson College.
Yechiam Yemini
Co-founder, Chief Scientific Advisor
Yechiam Yemini is a Professor of computer science at Columbia University, where he has led research of networked systems. He authored over 200 publications and 15 patents, and lectured widely in these areas. Technologies created at his lab have been widely exported to thousands of sites and commercialized by several companies. Professor Yemini is a co-founder of three companies: Comverse Technology; System Management Arts (SMARTS) acquired by EMC in 2005; and aROOTz, a start-up developing technologies for scalable video distribution over the Internet. Professor Yemini has served as a director and advisory board member of several high-tech companies and venture funds, and as a member of several government technology commissions and working groups.