Eric Scollard VP of Sales and Matt Mahoney Chief Scientist for Ocarina

Ocarina Networks announced that Eric Scollard, former VP of sales at Isilon Systems, and Dr. Matt Mahoney have joined the company as vice president of sales and chief scientist, respectively. The additions to Ocarina’s leadership team come amidst strong demand for the company’s solutions that increase the capacity of existing online storage solutions.

As vice president of sales, Scollard will leverage his deep storage industry experience to position the Ocarina sales organization for continued rapid expansion as the explosive growth of stored data puts a major strain on mission critical storage infrastructure and budgets. Ocarina’s file-aware storage optimization technology delivers up to a tenfold reduction in the data footprint of files such as photos, video, and PDFs that are crippling data storage infrastructures worldwide.

Eric Scollard

Scollard is an industry veteran who has been in sales leadership roles at the world’s top storage and technology companies, including EMC, IBM and Veritas Software. At Isilon, Scollard played a key executive role in taking the company public, growing the sales organization from startup to $100 million revenue and through a successful IPO.

Dr. Matt Mahoney also joins Ocarina as chief scientist. Dr. Mahoney, currently at the Florida Institute of Technology, is a recognized thought leader in the field of next generation data compression.

Dr. Mahoney helped develop the open source PAQ series of compression archives using a new algorithm called context mixing. He also maintains one of the largest text benchmarks and continues to promote further research in statistical, natural language modeling. He currently serves on the committee for the Hutter prize, which is awarded for advancements in text compression and artificial intelligence. Dr. Mahoney holds an MS degree in computer engineering and a Ph.D. in computer science from Florida Tech. He will also be joined on Ocarina’s research and development team by Dr. Premislaw Skibinski, a previous winner of the Hutter Prize and joint holder of the Calgary Corpus Prize.

"Bringing Eric and Matt on board is truly a coup for Ocarina, and a major affirmation of our business proposition," said Murli Thirumale, CEO of Ocarina Networks. "As we continue to gain momentum, we are drawing the cream of the crop in both the sales and research arenas of the storage industry and all three of these hires provide the expertise and experience required to tackle one of the storage industry’s greatest challenges. We are pleased and proud to welcome them to our growing team of experts."

"Successful storage optimization for online data is one of the key pain points that I see when dealing with customers across a wide range of industries," said Scollard. "There is immense potential for growth in this emerging niche, and I am thrilled to be working with industry luminaries who are responsible for bringing this innovative solution to market. I look forward to having the opportunity to serve the many companies that need to meet the challenge of managing their growing data storage in a way that reduces environmental impact as well as costs."