eXludus Adds High-Profile Directors, Sales/Marketing Executives

eXludus Technologies Inc. has added high-profile outside directors and hired two ex-Sun Microsystems executives to head its sales and marketing efforts, the company announced today. eXludus Technologies founder and CEO Benoît Marchand said, "We are enhancing our board of directors and sales team because eXludus will soon introduce the first in a series of software products that we expect to revolutionize the performance of clusters and grid computers. eXludus is preparing for the exciting transition from a development-stage company to an operating-stage company." Benoît Marchand is a renowned computer scientist, active in the field of high-performance computing and distributed processing applications for over 20 years. He has held senior management positions at Sun Microsystems where he grew the European high performance computing (HPC) business from the #5 ranking to the top position in two years. While at Sun he also pioneered compute cluster product design and sales. Prior to joining Sun, Marchand managed pre-sales technical support operations in Europe for SGI for eight years and developed innovative code optimization techniques and marketing initiatives which enabled SGI to take and maintain a leadership position in HPC in Europe. Marchand was also a frequent lecturer at major European research centers. He holds an MBA from HEC in Montréal and a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Waterloo. Dr. Stephen Perrenod has joined eXludus Technologies as VP, worldwide sales and marketing. Perrenod was most recently at Sun Microsystems, where he led business development in the high-performance and technical computing market for the Education and Research sector and for several years led Sun’s HPC marketing team. He has over 25 years’ experience in the HPC industry in North America, Europe and Asia, including with Alliant, Cray, and SGI prior to Sun. He is responsible for eXludus’s global sales and marketing and strategic partnering activities. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in astrophysics from Harvard University and a B.S. in physics from M.I.T. Peter Randall has joined eXludus Technologies as director of sales for North America. Randall will be responsible for creating and implementing the company's North American sales strategy, expanding opportunities for eXludus's products in North America, and collaborating closely with the company's product development and other technical leaders. Randall was most recently at RLX Technologies as a regional manager and OEM sales director. Before that, he spent 16 years in increasingly responsible sales management positions at Sun Microsystems. Joining the company's board of directors are Dr. Wolfgang Gentzsch and Ron Haber. Gentzsch is currently the coordinator of D-Grid, the German government's five-year, $120 million grid initiative to build the e-science infrastructure for the German research community. He is also a visiting scientist at RENCI, the Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC Chapel Hill, contributing to the development of the North Carolina statewide grid initiative. Earlier, Gentzsch was senior director of grid computing for Sun Microsystems. Gentzsch joined Sun in 2000 when it acquired GRIDWARE, a subsidiary of the distributed computing software company GENIAS, which he founded in 1990. He is a widely published author of more than 150 articles about computer science, numerical algorithms, engineering applications, and grid computing. He is also an adjunct professor at Duke University, North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Ron Haber has more than 25 years' experience in the technology sector. Since 1999, Haber has taken the role of General Manager for CLUMEQ, a consortium which includes Université de Laval, UQAM, McGill University and several eastern Quebec enterprises working in engineering, aeronautics, nanomaterials, environment, bioinformatics and other fields. At the same time, he served as sales manager of StorageTek Canada for the Quebec region. Ron is a board member of C3.ca, a Canadian association of high performance computing users in academia, business and government whose objective is to facilitate research and innovation. According to industry analyst firm IDC, clusters are the fastest-growing segment of the technical server market and a growing array of standards, software and partnerships promises to greatly expand the newer, closely related category of grid computing. eXludus is developing a family of software products addressing the need to transport data efficiently in Grid Computing applications. In practice, most Grid Computing deployments suffer performance degradation due to data serving bottlenecks, and are ill-prepared to cope with the constantly varying demands placed by networks of computers. eXludus’s innovative technology removes data serving limitations and enables larger problems to be solved on larger cluster and Grid deployments than ever before. Previously announced members of eXludus's board of directors include Benoît Marchand; Sophie Forest, managing partner of investment firm Brightspark Ventures; and François Gaouette, managing partner at investment firm Propulsion Ventures.