In this blog post, we are going to find out a bit more about Clemens Engler, who joined Bright in June, taking the role of Director, Business Development in EMEA.
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Another new recruit that was mentioned in the announcement that the Bright EMEA team is expanding, is Haroon Ibrahim. In the interview below, we find out a bit more about him.
Why did you decide to take the job at Bright?
First and foremost, I am really delighted to be working with a great team of dynamic self-starters at Bright! Secondly, I was very impressed with the Bright technology. The product is technically very strong, and this is clear by the number of high caliber customers we have attracted so far. There are some really big global organisations that rely on Bright to keep their IT infrastructure up and running; and that excites me.
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In this blog post, we are going to find out a bit more about new recruit, Dietmar Fuchs.
Why did you decide to take the job at Bright?
I was looking for a new challenge and I was also interested in tackling current IT challenges that the industry is facing right now. Our technology addresses some of the hottest issues in the IT industry, so I am happy to be a part of that.
Following the announcement that the Bright EMEA team is expanding, we wanted to take the opportunity to find out a bit more about one of the new recruits, Mark Sargeant.
Why did you decide to take the job at Bright?
After 22 years at IBM, I was looking for a fresh challenge. Lee Carter, VP EMEA at Bright, reached out through LinkedIn and introduced me to Bright and its successful history, and described the potential for the Bright technology in the Enterprise space. He asked if I would be interested in helping that mission in the UK, Ireland and Benelux regions. I jumped at the chance, beginning as a consultant and becoming fulltime from December 2014.
Read More >Shape the program of the Hadoop Summit Europe 2015 with your votes. Is there a better way to demonstrate community? We think not!
The Summit features 6 tracks. By tapping the expertise of our Hadoop braintrust, we’ve submitted 4 ideas to 3 different tracks. Because we’d like to earn your votes, please allow us elaborate.
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Who says you can’t get something for nothing? With CUDA 6.5, you can! The something is improved performance. The nothing is no code change required.
NVIDIA made improved performance a focal point of the recent CUDA 6.5 release. For example, if you make use of CUDA-enabled FFTs and/or sparse-matrix routines, all you’ll need to do is recompile your application with this latest release of the toolkit. You’ll see performance improvements without having to change a single character in your source code. Even the size of object files can be optimized through use of the nvprune utility.
I have some exciting news to share today. Bright has just closed a new financing round, raising $14.5 million of capital from a syndicate of prestigious venture capital firms.
This Series B round was co-led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) and DFJ Esprit, with participation from Prime Ventures and existing shareholder ING Corporate Investments. They share our long term vision and will support us in building an enduring business that will thrive for decades to come.
DFJ Partner Bill Bryant, Prime Ventures Partner Alexander Ribbink, and DFJ Esprit Partner Richard Marsh will be joining our board of directors. New board member for ING will be Rob Bening, CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) for ING Bank. Our new board has the perfect mix of investor experience and operator experience, ranging from CEO, COO, VP Sales, VP Marketing and CTO experience in startups as well as multinationals. We look forward to working with the new board as we strive to bring advanced cluster management to system administrators and IT managers around the world.
As many startup entrepreneurs know, it is hard to attract the attention of the well-known Sand Hill Road VCs, so I am particularly proud of the fact that DFJ wanted to lead this B round in Bright Computing and made a very compelling offer. DFJ is well known for its backing of serial entrepreneur Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity) as well as Twitter, Tumblr, Skype, Hotmail, and many other well-known, and less well-known but equally successful, enterprises.
We have enjoyed tremendous growth since we founded the company in 2009. We now have more than 400 customers around the globe, including more than 20 of the fortune 500. The range of customers is also broad, from startups to Fortune 500 giants, from small NGOs to the US Department of Energy, and from hospitals to universities. Looking ahead, we will continue to invest in building our team, expanding our product line, and extending our ability to serve our customers. We are committed to developing the cluster management framework that allows our customers to maximize their returns on cloud and cluster infrastructure.
Bright is in markets as competitive as we’ve ever been, especially in the big data Hadoop and OpenStack private cloud spaces. I believe we will thrive in these markets because we are bringing years of relevant experience to bear in new ways that will accelerate the adoption of these new technologies. But most people today are still struggling to build and maintain their clouds and clusters using a collection of mismatched tools. We have a lot of work ahead of us, and we’re ready to roll. Onwards!
