It’s Always “Day 1”: AtScale’s New CEO

When we started AtScale five years ago, there were just five of us, driven by the desire to change the way enterprises deliver analytics to the business.

AtScale was born out of necessity. At Yahoo!, my team and I had grown frustrated that we couldn’t easily let users consume all Yahoo! data. Every day, my team had to work through the “anarchy of enterprise data”. Preparing data for business analytics required painful data movement and manipulation. And, no matter how much we optimized our data pipelines, keeping up with business needs felt like a losing battle.

We looked for solutions everywhere. But the industry was stuck in its own ways. Everywhere we turned, we found vendors trying to “lock us in” with a “full stack” solution. We knew that wouldn’t work, so we left to build what we couldn’t buy.

As it turns out, every enterprise has the same problem we had. Today, our customers include some of the world’s most valuable brands: Home Depot, Visa, GSK, JP Morgan Chase, UnitedHealthcare, Toyota and many more. And, as their needs evolve, their data tools and platforms have become even more heterogeneous. They have thousands of applications that need to connect to data that’s everywhere: on-premises, in the cloud and sometimes in multiple clouds.

They want an agile platform that can virtualize and federate data access for any data store and any BI tool. And no company can do that better than us.

So, it’s no surprise that, when I met Chris Lynch, and told him about our journey, he immediately related to our story. As Acopia’s CEO, he had seen the value of virtualizing file access. At Arrowpoint (which he took public), his team virtualized the web traffic with much success. And, as Vertica’s CEO, he knew the power of high-performance analytics, at scale.

The more Chris and I talked, the more we realized how much his skillset complemented mine. I’m a technologist. Chris is a go-to-market expert. We’re both rebels. We both combat the status-quo. And we’re not afraid of pushing ourselves.

You might have heard about Jeff Bezos’ speech on what he calls “Day 1”, the idea that winning companies never stop re-inventing themselves and challenging the status-quo.

Well, today is AtScale’s Day 1 again and I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Chris Lynch to our team as CEO and Executive Chairman.

You’ll hear more about Chris soon, but in the meantime, in case you don’t know him, watch this video interview about his arrival at AtScale and learn a little more about our plans.