Leynette Larioza COO, Open Source Storage

Open Source Storage LLC (OSS)announced that Leynette Larioza and Mark Nelson, formerly from Oracle, have joined the executive team.

Larioza has been named COO and Nelson EVP of solutions sales for the growing Silicon Valley company.

OSS brings a breadth of storage solutions and support services. The company, which works with start-ups, Fortune 500 corporations and government agencies, designs, installs and maintains enterprise storage systems built with open source software and open standards components to deliver high-performance scalable solutions. Unlike proprietary storage offerings, OSS solutions are free of software and hardware licensing fees, enabling enterprises to reduce the total costs of data ownership by an average of 30%.

“Our team continues to focus on educating the storage industry about the benefits of employing end-to-end, scalable and secure open source solutions, and both Leynette and Mark have the knowledge to communicate this vision to enterprise businesses,” said Eren Niazi, CEO, OSS. “Each of them brings the technical expertise, business management skills and customer experience that will propel company growth and deliver the complete open source solution demanded by the market.”

 Larioza brings more than 30 years of experience in the lifecycle complex high-end systems related to systems design, development, manufacture, sales, operations, deployment, and support. Her proven understanding of business processes and the ability to build, lead, and motivate high-achieving cross-functional teams makes her well suited to drive OSS towards success. As principal program manager of high-end systems quality at Oracle, she led critical product quality and customer satisfaction programs. Prior to Oracle, she was with Sun Microsystems, Maui HPC Center, and Cray Research. Her experience with open source and open standards began in the early 1980s with BSD Unix, C, X11 (X Window System), and BBS (Bulletin Board System).

She has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Information Systems from Coleman College in San Diego.

 Nelson brings to OSS more than 30 years of experience in systems development, sales, and support, and will drive the company’s solution sales. He was the top strategic customer manager at Oracle and Sun Microsystems where he partnered with both Fortune 100 and rapid growth start-ups. He is experienced in managing the difficulties of handling and growing storage with multiple closed vendor interfaces while protecting the data, and resolving issues associated with the intricacies of closed architecture multi-vendor solutions. He understands how companies can use open source to run their businesses and how the community’s building and support of tools, applications, and solutions can be used across an enterprise. Prior to OSS, Nelson was with Sun Microsystems and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in sales, support, and engineering supporting the government, commercial and academic sectors. These roles have given him insight into the product development lifecycle and the end-to-end customer journey.

Nelson has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from NC State University.