10gen Expands Management Team with Veteran Technology Executives

NEW YORK, NY and SAN FRANCISCO, CA– 10gen, which sponsors leading open source non-relational database MongoDB, today announced three new appointments to its seasoned executive team including Vishy Karra, vice president of engineering, Lily Teng, vice president of finance, and Steve Francia, chief solutions architect. These key additions to the leadership team will help the company scale operations to keep pace with its tremendous growth. This year 10gen’s customer base has increased 150% over 2010, with the addition of several large enterprise customers including Disney and MTV Networks.

As Vice President of Engineering, Karra brings more than 18 years of industry experience working in high-growth enterprise software companies, and over a decade building engineering teams. Prior to 10gen, Karra served as the Research and Development Director at VMware and held management positions at Oracle. Most recently at VMware, Karra managed the release of the vCenter Operations Standard 1.0 product that won The Best of Interop 2011 grand prize. At Oracle, Karra was responsible for the development of the storage engine in the Oracle database, managing implementation of features such as online segment shrink and compression in Oracle 9i and 10g.

“It’s an exciting time to join 10gen,” said Vishy Karra, vice president of engineering at 10gen. “As someone who is interested in data management, I have long had 10gen on my radar as a company to watch, and I’ve been continually impressed with the breadth and scale of their innovative technology. Coupled with the passion that MongoDB inspires in the developer community, I believe the market opportunity for 10gen is tremendous.”

Industry leaders Lily Teng and Steve Francia have also joined 10gen. In her role as Vice President of Finance, Teng will be responsible for the finance and administrative areas of the company. Over the past twenty years, she has held key finance, operations and corporate development positions at companies ranging from fast-growing start-ups like imeem inc, where she was Chief Financial Officer, to Peoplesoft (PSFT, acquired by ORCL) where she ran finance for their $1.3 billion/year support business.

In his new position as Chief Solutions Architect, Francia will lead the company’s technical engagement with customers, including building out a global support capability. He brings more than 16 years of experience as a leader in technology organizations and a contributor to opensource technologies. Most recently, Francia was Vice President of Engineering at OpenSky, where he built the world’s first e-commerce site powered by MongoDB.

“Adoption of MongoDB is growing explosively. Our San Francisco conference attendance this year was four times that of last year’s event, and our base of support customers is growing rapidly. In addition, we’re powering major projects for global leaders such as Viacom, Disney, and Intuit, and web leaders including craigslist and foursquare. With this momentum, it is crucial that we build a leadership team that will drive the next stage of our expansion,” said Max Schireson, President of 10gen. “With Vishy, Lily, and Steve joining to complement our already strong team, we look forward to continued success in this exciting market.”

MongoDB is the leading open source NoSQL database, with a fast-growing community of software developers replacing RDBMS large and small with the agile, feature-rich data store. Users enjoy the freedom provided by a dynamic schema, and confidence in a solution that easily scales horizontally.