MariaDB Leadership

Paul O’Brien, CEO of MariaDB plc, is a technology executive with broad operational expertise both launching and running startups as well as in venture capital and Fortune 500 firms. He first joined MariaDB in March 2023 to guide the global field operations team. Prior to joining MariaDB, he served as VP, Operations at NetApp, Inc., a storage and data management company and VP, Business Intelligence and Operations at Symantec Corporation, a security company. Prior to that, O’Brien held various management positions at EMC Corporation, a storage and data management company, and HP Inc. (then Hewlett-Packard Company), a technology company, and also served as a partner at Prism Venture Partners, a venture firm. In all these roles, Paul was responsible for successfully guiding companies in their evolution from on-prem deployments and perpetual license software to subscription and cloud-based models.

Franz Aman is the CMO at MariaDB, and brings more than 25 years of experience in leadership and innovation across marketing, including global product marketing, product management, strategy, brand and communications. Franz holds a degree in geophysics from Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany. He has held numerous executive positions within industry-leading technology companies, including Informatica, SAP, BusinessObjects, BEA Systems, SGI and Sun Microsystems.

Mick Carney has a long track record in the database industry and currently leads MariaDB sales in EMEA. With a background as a programmer and database developer/administrator, Mick joined MySQL in 2003 and ran sales in France. When MySQL was acquired by Oracle, he had responsibility for field sales in Europe. Mick was part of the team that co-founded MariaDB and has worked in various roles since inception but did have a few years off for good behavior where he worked in NoSQL (Riak) and load balancers (HAProxy). Born in the UK, Mick attended university in Bordeaux and due to a weakness for fine wines and cheeses, has never achieved escape velocity from France since graduating in 1990. He lives in the Paris region with his American wife and their two culturally confused daughters.

Gregory Dorman is SVP of distributed systems and analytics at MariaDB. Prior to joining MariaDB, Gregory served as SVP and general manager of iWay Software, a division of Information Builders, a provider of data integration, data quality and data mastering tools and technologies. Previously, he worked for BusinessObjects as chief software architect and served as VP of engineering for Oracle Corporation, where he worked on developing and enhancing the analytical capabilities of the Oracle database; in particular, integrating OLAP and OLTP engines, as well as inventing and designing analytical extensions to SQL.

Bill Flynn brings decades of field leadership in enterprise software, data management and analytics. At MariaDB, Bill previously led the Asia field organization before leading the Americas and opening up a business development center in Austin, TX. In the Americas, he is responsible for field sales, alliances, cloud channels, business development, operations and the end-to-end customer experience. Previously, Bill was head of global sales at C9 (acquired by InsideSales), one of the leading predictive analytics companies in the CRM space. Bill has held various field leadership roles both domestically and globally at Informatica, HP, Outerbay and iWay Software. Bill holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from St. Edward’s University and currently resides in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in Texas.

Sergei Golubchik leads Server engineering at MariaDB. He started his career modifying open source MySQL code in 1998 and continued as a software engineer at MySQL AB, later Sun Microsystems. He brought his expertise to further the project by working on the MariaDB Server at Monty Program AB and MariaDB Corporation. During all these years, he has touched nearly every part of the Server. Features he has implemented include full-text search, XA, HANDLER, parallel repair and bulk inserts in MyISAM, pluggable authentication and related features, and feedback plugin. Sergei is a primary architect of the plugin API and an author of the “MySQL 5.1 Plugin Development” book. He also serves on the board of the MariaDB Foundation.

Kurt Haberkamp brings two decades of leadership in database, open source and technical selling. Kurt is responsible for leading our global Customer Success organization including functions in support, managed services, professional services, and training/enablement. Previously Kurt led the technical field for presales and services in both the Americas and Asia. Previous experience includes time in various leadership and individual roles at Red Hat, Apptio, Oracle, and CME Group as well as other consumer facing companies.  Kurt holds a bachelor’s degree in applied sociology and political science from Lewis University and resides in the Chicago Metro area.

Jonah is CTO at MariaDB plc. Most recently, he served as the Director of AI/ML at ParshipMeet Group. Previously, Jonah held key leadership positions, including CTO and VP of Software & Systems Architecture at NASDAQ-listed The Meet Group. During this time, he played a crucial role in overseeing the technology organization, strategic acquisitions and consolidations of Skout, and driving the company’s growth and market presence. Earlier, Jonah led Oracle Database Compatibility and Performance initiatives as an early Sr. Software Architect at EnterpriseDB. Additionally, Jonah is a long-time user, developer, and contributor of open-source databases, including PostgreSQL, Redis, and others.

Iris Herrera Whitney has over 15 years of experience working in communications and marketing across high tech B2B companies and government agencies. While she can keep up with all the industry lingo (DBA, API, RDBMS, oh my!), she would rather dream up a creative angle that cuts through the noise. As VP of corporate marketing at MariaDB plc, she oversees global communications, content strategy and creation, and brand alignment. She also works closely with executives and senior leaders to ensure meaningful stories are being told. Previously, Iris worked at a public relations agency building awareness and defining new industries for clients in the tech sector. She started her career in California state politics where she believed (naively?) she could help change the world, giving voices to people and organizations at the place where laws were being made. She earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and philosophy at the University of California, Davis. Iris is a lifelong resident of the SF Bay Area where she lives with her family, including two kids who are always testing boundaries.

Venkat leads the SkySQL engineering team at MariaDB for its flagship multi-cloud DBaaS (database-as-a-service) offering. He has nearly two decades of experience leading globally distributed product development teams. Most of this time, he spent specializing in query federation across disparate sources and hybrid environments. Most recently, he helped bootstrap the engineering team at keebo.ai, an early seed stage “data learning” startup, taking the product from concept to a SaaS service acquiring high single digit customers within 8 months. Prior to that, Venkat spent a decade leading the engineering team for a “data virtualization” startup, Composite Software, through its acquisition by Cisco and subsequent divestiture to TIBCO. Before that, he held engineering management and software engineering positions at Actuate, Informix and Coromandel Software. Venkat has a Masters in Computer Science and an MBA from Santa Clara University. He is passionate about cloud database management, be it transactional, analytical or hybrid databases, and excited to be at the forefront of the disruption through open source software.

Saravana «SK» Krishnamurthy is a product management and technology leader with more than 25 years of leadership experience in big data, database and cloud industries. Currently, he is VP of Product Management (SkySQL) at MariaDB, overseeing the development of the company’s DBaaS SkySQL. Previously, he held senior management roles at BlueData Inc (acquired by HPE), Xplain.io (acquired by Cloudera), Pivotal/Greenplum where he launched the PivotalHD/HAWQ product line, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and SS8 Networks. He is a venture advisor at Draper Next (DNX.io VC firm) and lectures at San Jose State University, teaching big data in business and entrepreneurship. SK has a dual MBA from Columbia Business School and UC Berkeley Haas Business School, and a master’s degree in computer engineering from UC Santa Cruz.

Conor McCarthy has over 30 years of experience as a CFO in areas such as corporate strategy and corporate finance including capital raising. Conor most recently served as the CFO of Ideanomics, a NASDAQ listed cleantech company, where he developed the revenue models for vehicle-as-a-service and charging-as-a-service products. He was also CFO of OS33, a private equity backed FinTech SaaS platform for compliance and productivity enablement for the wealth management industry. Prior to that, he served as the CFO of Intent Media from May 2016 to July 2018, the CFO of Convergex Group from June 2014 to July 2015 and the CFO and Finance Director of the Americas for GFI Group, Inc., a NYSE listed fintech wholesale money broker with revenues of almost $1 billion (now part of BGC Partners, NASDAQ: BGCP), from March 2005 to June 2014. Conor holds a CA from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland. He started his career as an auditor with KPMG in Ireland before transitioning into financial services, working as CFO, treasurer, and in other executive finance roles, with trading and brokerage firms, as well as high growth technology companies supporting the SaaS industry.

Max Mether is a co-founder of MariaDB. He is currently head of server product management where he leads the development efforts on MariaDB Server and surrounding technologies. Prior to his current role, Max built the Professional Services team at MariaDB from the ground up. Max began his career consulting and training for companies such as MySQL and Sun Microsystems. He earned his Masters of Science (Eng) in physics and math from Helsinki University of Technology. A native of Finland, and by way of Paris, France, Max now resides in Atlanta, Georgia.

As VP of HR, Bill Munger has 30 years of experience in the HR world working for large public technology companies as well as several technology startups. Prior to joining MariaDB, Bill led the HR team at ChargePoint, Inc. as they transitioned from a pre-IPO company to going public in early 2021. Bill holds a bachelor’s degree in HR and an MBA from Kellogg’s Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.

Jags has spent more than two decades leading distributed data products. First as a co-founder of VMWare GemFire (acquired by VMWare; now Apache Geode), where he helped architect and lead the direction of a first-of-its-kind distributed in-memory data grid for highly concurrent and low latency apps. Later within VMWare/Pivotal, he integrated the technology with the Spring framework, virtualization and CloudFoundry, growing its footprint to hundreds of customers. As part of the leadership team within Pivotal, he helped define the vision for a new unified data fabric – a unified clustered platform that brought stream processing, transactions and analytics together to eliminate the “Lambda architecture” complexity and deliver Google-like speeds for complex analytic queries. This became the foundation for SnappyData, where he was the co-founding CTO.  At SnappyData, he worked on hybrid translytical processing in distributed memory using techniques like vectorization and approximate query processing. The platform was acquired by Tibco in 2019 and integrated as a central data management tier between visualization (Spotfire), data science and federated data management. Most recently, he was at a Fintech (a digital bank) company leading its global engineering team and experienced first-hand how cloud native modern apps are built with microservices and agility.

As Chief Accounting Officer, Will Sanchez is responsible for leading MariaDB’s global accounting function. Prior to joining MariaDB, Will completed an IPO with Applied Molecular Transport Inc. and participated in a reverse merger (SPAC) with Tobira Therapeutics, Inc. He has worked in both SaaS and biotechnology industries and has held senior positions at eGain Corporation, Electronic Arts Inc. and Johnson Controls, Inc. Will earned his B.S. Business Administration from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley and is a Certified Public Accountant.

As MariaDB’s VP of Global Alliances and Channels, Jim Sears is responsible for expanding our footprint into new and existing geographies that support our business growth and our customers. From co-founding a startup to growing indirect revenue at a breadth of companies including EMC, Brocade and Oracle, he brings 25 years of experience in global alliances and channels management in the technology sector, with most of that time in the database sector. Jim currently resides in Dallas, Texas with his wife and two children.

Roya Shakoori is the Company’s General Counsel with over 17 years of legal experience. Roya has significant law firm restructuring experience and experience in-house working with Silicon Valley start-up technology/sustainability companies. Prior to joining MariaDB, Roya was General Counsel for a sustainability-focused/electrification company helping it through a significant growth phase, organically and through multiple acquisitions. Prior to that, Roya led the in-house legal efforts for ChargePoint, Inc. transitioning it from a private company to a public company through deSPAC. Roya resides in beautiful Silicon Valley, California.

Tom leads the field sales, inside sales, sales engineering, sales development, customer success, consulting, support and training teams globally at MariaDB plc. He has an impressive background as a sales and operations executive, coupled with extensive experience building and leading high-performance teams for both private and public SaaS companies. He was most recently CRO at Bringg, a SaaS delivery management platform. Prior to that, he was chief sales officer at Fuze, a cloud communications software company and VP of worldwide sales operations at PTC, a global software company. He has also held sales leadership positions at EMC and BMC Software. Siegel has successfully driven accelerated growth for SaaS companies through a combination of go-to-market strategy, sales leadership and adherence to key performance metrics, with demonstrated ARR growth from $50 million to $100 million.

As Field CTO and Head of Performance Engineering at MariaDB, Manjot Singh is responsible for improving MariaDB product performance. He has previously led the global Professional Services and Enterprise Architect teams where he has been a champion of MariaDB products and surrounding technologies. Prior to joining MariaDB, Manjot was a technologist and architect for Fortune 50 companies, government and well-known consultancies, where he has been working with MySQL and MariaDB for two decades. He has also previously founded technology companies and non-profit organizations.

Magnus Stenberg joined MariaDB in 2011 as the VP of Strategic Sales. Prior to MariaDB, he managed sales at MySQL in Nordic and Benelux. Magnus is a seasoned business leader, with over 35 years of experience in software sales and business development in the technology industry. He currently resides in Sweden and spends his free time traveling to visit and explore new places with his family.

Alexey Vorovich is VP of ColumnStore Engineering at MariaDB where he leads the development of MariaDB ColumnStore, a pluggable storage engine optimized for analytical workloads. Prior to joining MariaDB, he served as VP of engineering at Information Builders, a BI and data integration provider. During that time, he managed the development of the core BI Server product, as well as of ETL and Data Preparation tools. He also managed the development of Server portable multi-platform architecture, and a continuing manufacturing process that allowed for the identical feature set to be delivered and maintained through multiple releases and on multiple OS platforms, from windows to linux to mainframes, and more recently, the cloud.

Laura Wang has over 20 years of experience in high tech B2B marketing working across many roles at companies such as Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, SAP Business Objects and Informatica. Across her rich career experience, she has developed a proven track record of bringing together the art and science of marketing; delivering impactful and relevant demand campaigns built on advanced digital platforms to produce industry-leading analytics. She earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.