GridGain Expands Management Team

GridGain Systems said Tuesday that Andy Sacks was named EVP of sales, Lisa Bergamo is VP of marketing, and Jeff Stacey as global head of business development. GridGain recently closed $10 million in funding led by Almaz Capital with contributions from previous investor RTP Ventures.

PRESS RELEASE

FOSTER CITY, Calif., Aug. 13, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — GridGain™ Systems (http://www.gridgain.com) today announced it has expanded its management team, tapping the talents of Andy Sacks as Executive Vice President of Sales, Lisa Bergamo as Vice President of Marketing, and Jeff Stacey as Global Head of Business Development, to build on its current momentum in In-Memory Computing. The announcement follows its recent closing of $10 million in Series B venture financing in a round led by global venture capital firm Almaz Capital, with continued participation from previous investor RTP Ventures.

The team additions mark key elements of GridGain’s three-pronged promise to use its new capital to rapidly expand sales, marketing and new product development to meet the growing need for In-Memory Computing in big data environments.
“The market need for new technology that can handle the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data that businesses generate has perfectly aligned with GridGain’s ability to offer unprecedented computing power,” said Nikita Ivanov, Founder and CEO, GridGain. “Andy Sacks, Lisa Bergamo and Jeff Stacey bring the skills and experience to capitalize this moment and offer In-Memory technology to every organization.”
As Executive Vice President of Sales, Andy Sacks brings more than 20 years of enterprise sales experience in developing direct and indirect routes to market. He comes to GridGain from Red Hat, Inc., where he spent over 8 years developing and leading sales teams, delivering substantial company revenue. Prior to Red Hat, he held sales leadership roles at Bluestone Software (acquired by HP), RightWorks (acquired by i2) and Inktomi (acquired by Yahoo! and Verity).
As Vice President of Marketing, Lisa Bergamo brings to GridGain more than 25 years of technology marketing, branding, and public relations experience. Bergamo, who has consistently delivered results for emerging technology companies over the past two decades, was founder and vice president of marketing for SOASTA, Inc., developer of an award-winning, on-demand cloud service for load and performance testing of websites and applications. Bergamo has also held executive marketing positions at Infochimps, Symplified, GlobalFluency, Sagent and CyberSource Corporation, and venture capital firm Canaan Partner. She currently serves as a mentor for start-up accelerator Founders Pad.
Jeff Stacey brings to his new position as Global Head of Business Development twenty years of experience at companies like Dell, IBM, SAP/Business Objects and Oracle, as well as smaller emerging technology firms, launching large scale analytic products into the marketplace. Partnering with system integrators, resellers and analytic solution providers, he repeatedly won, managed and grew technology ecosystems from zero to over $100M in global revenue.
“For enterprises, whether their data becomes a value prop or pain point depends largely on whether or not they embrace In-Memory technology,” said Ivanov. “From this moment, data will only become more unruly, problems more complicated, and time a more precious commodity. Companies need new technology to handle a new scope of data challenges, and GridGain provides the full stack.”
About GridGain™ 
GridGain’s complete In-Memory Computing platform enables organizations to conquer challenges that traditional technology can’t even fathom. While most organizations now ingest infinitely more data than they can possibly make sense of, GridGain’s customers leverage a new level of real-time computing power that allows them to easily innovate ahead of the accelerating pace of business. Built from the ground up, GridGain’s product line delivers all the high performance benefits of In-Memory Computing in a simple, intuitive package. From high performance computing, streaming and database to Hadoop and MongoDB accelerators, GridGain provides a complete end-to-end stack for low-latency, high performance computing for each and every category of payloads and data processing requirements. Fortune 500 companies, top government agencies and innovative mobile and web companies use GridGain to achieve unprecedented performance and business insight. GridGain is headquartered in Foster City, California. Learn more at http://www.gridgain.com.