Team

Ofer Bengal

Ofer is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and led several companies in the areas of data communications, telecommunications, Internet, homeland security and medical devices. Ofer was founder & CEO of RIT Technologies (NASDAQ: RITT), a provider of sophisticated telecommunications and data communications systems to major world carriers. He began his career as an aerospace engineer in the Israeli Air Force and then built his own aerospace engineering consulting firm. As a hobby, he has also invented, developed and licensed toy concepts to companies such as Milton Bradley, Hasbro and Tomy.

Ofer holds a Bachelor of Science (cum laude) in aerospace engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Yiftach Shoolman

Yiftach is an experienced technologist, having held leadership engineering and product roles in diverse fields from application acceleration, cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS), to broadband networks and metro networks. He was the founder, president and CTO of Crescendo Networks (acquired by F5, NASDAQ:FFIV), the vice president of software development at Native Networks (acquired by Alcatel, NASDAQ: ALU) and part of the founding team at ECI Telecom broadband division, where he served as vice president of software engineering.

Yiftach holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science and has completed studies for Master of Science in Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University.

Salvatore Sanfilippo

Salvatore started his career in 1997 as a security researcher, writing the hping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hping) security tool and inventing the Idle Scan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idle_scan). Later he worked on embedded systems, focusing on programming languages research and creating a small footprint Tcl interpreter, which is still in active development. With a colleague, Salvatore created the first two Italian social applications in partnership with Telecom Italia. After this experience, he decided to explore new ways to improve web app development, and ended up writing the first alpha version of Redis and open sourcing it. Since 2009, he has dedicated most of his time to developing Redis open source code.

Over the years, Salvatore has also created a number of other open source projects ranging from software defined radio, to line editing tools, to children development environments. He lives in Sicily, Italy.

Jason Forget

Jason is a seasoned go-to-market leader with a track record of building multinational sales teams and driving revenue growth. Over the past fifteen years, he has served in several global sales, marketing, services and operations leadership positions in private and public technology companies. Most recently, he was senior vice president of worldwide field operations at Imperva (NYSE: IMPV). As part of the IPO executive team, Jason was responsible for building the “sales machine” that grew sales from $1M to $225M. Prior to this, he held senior sales leadership roles at IMlogic (acquired by Symantec, NASDAQ: SYMC) and Netegrity (acquired by CA, NASDAQ: CA). Jason holds a Master of Business Administration from Bentley University and a Bachelor of Science in finance and marketing from Northeastern University.

Manish Gupta

Manish has consistently grown enterprise value by building brand equity, architecting strategic ecosystems, managing efficient product portfolios, and driving metrics based demand generation programs globally. He has established leadership position in new market categories, built world-class marketing organizations, and orchestrated successful exits. Most recently, he was the chief marketing officer at Liaison Technologies, the leading cloud service provider for data management and integration. Previously, he has held marketing leadership roles at public corporations such as Apple, National Semiconductor, and Symmetricom (acquired by Microsemi). His private company successes include Kabira, the in-memory transaction platform pioneer acquired by Tibco Software.

Manish holds Masters and Bachelors degrees in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and MBA from Santa Clara University.

Regev (Reggie) Yativ

Reggie is a seasoned commercial leader, with worldwide experience in technology sales, marketing and business management. Reggie was the senior director of marketing and worldwide services at Johnson and Johnson (ASP division) in the Americas, where he managed a $500 million business portfolio. Before J&J, he served as regional vice president of sales and marketing for Magic Software Enterprises (NASDAQ: MGIC) in the Americas, EMEA and APAC. He has also held positions such as COO of A. Marches International S.A Group in Paris, CEO of G.E.D B.V. (a VC fund in Amsterdam), and vice president of sales and marketing at Edusoft (a Nasdaq-traded educational software company).

Reggie holds a Bachelor of Arts from Tel Aviv University and studied human resources training at the University of Amsterdam.

David Maitland

David has a track record of launching technology start-up companies into the EMEA region, he also is a proven sales executive with experience at several of the world’s most influential enterprise technology providers. Before Redis Labs, he was the General Manager for Couchbase, Inc. EMEA where he was responsible for building the EMEA business from its inception, resulting in Couchbase gaining customers from some of the largest brands across the region. Prior to joining Couchbase, he was the EMEA Sales Director for Terracotta Inc, where he was responsible for building the EMEA business from scratch, which grew rapidly resulting in being acquired by Software AG (Frankfurt TecDAX: SOW). David also held positions at Oracle Corporation where he was responsible for driving the Middleware business for Financial Services, also Sun Microsystems and Progress Software.

David holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Distributed Information Systems and a Higher National Diploma from the University of East London, United Kingdom.

Leena Joshi

Leena has spent over fifteen years in the high tech industry in a variety of product marketing and product management roles. Most recently, she spent five years leading the Splunk solutions marketing team for IT operations, application management and application development. Prior to Splunk, she led product marketing for VMware’s flagship product VMware vSphere. She has also held product management and business operations roles at VMware, Intel and Accenture. Leena has a Bachelor of Engineering degree in computer technology from VJTI (the University of Mumbai), and a post graduate degree in management from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta.

Cihan Biyikoglu

Cihan is a big data enthusiast who brings over twenty years of experience to Redis Labs’ product team. Cihan started his career as a C/C++ developer. Most recently, Cihan was Dir. of Product Management at Couchbase, responsible for the Couchbase Server product. Cihan was also part of the team in Redmond, WA that launched Azure public cloud platform at Microsoft. He also delivered a number of versions of SQL Server product suite. Previously Cihan worked on Informix and Illustra database products that were later acquired by IBM.

Cihan holds a number of patents in the database filed, and has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and a Master of Science in Database Systems.

Rod Hamlin

Rod is a proven enterprise software sales executive having helped lead and grow several notable companies to IPO or successful acquisition. Before Redis Labs, Rod served as a senior executive at Couchbase where he was responsible for all global alliances and partnerships. He joined Couchbase after his company, WIMM Labs, was acquired by Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) in late 2012. Rod has been a senior executive for two publically traded companies, serving as SVP of Sales & Marketing at Opera Software,and as EVP of Global Sales and Services at Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN). As an early employee with CRM pioneer, Onyx Software, Rod helped the company achieve a global presence and dynamic growth, leading to a successful IPO on NASDAQ. Rod has served on several advisory boards including Spoke Software and Jibe Mobile (acquired by Google). Rod received his bachelor’s degree from Pacific Lutheran University, and attended the master’s program in business administration at Seattle University.

Itai Raz

Itai is a technology enthusiast who brings over seventeen years of experience, both technical and business-oriented, to Redis Labs’ R&D team. Itai was one of Redis Lab’s first employees, and as VP of Product, he established Redis Lab’s Product Management team to optimize the process of shaping Redis Labs’ products.
Itai began his career as a software developer at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems LTD, and then joined Intel Corp. as a software architect. Later, as a member of Microsoft’s Product Management team, Itai helped launch Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. He managed business development and sales at U.S. consulting company, Neudesic LLC, and led Customer Success at BreezoMeter, a small Israeli startup. He has also tried his luck at founding his own startup.

Itai holds a BSc degree in Information System from the Technion – Israel institute of Technology, and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business.

Oren Yaqobi

Oren is a highly technical and customer-oriented individual, helping companies get more value with less effort. Previously, he managed the support team at OpTier, a leader in application performance management, where he spent years with global customers both on-site and off-site.

Oren holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Haifa in computer science and philosophy. In his nonexistent spare time he plays the keyboard in jazz and blues bands.

Ron Klinger

Ron leads the Global Support team of Redis Labs. With over 18 years of experience in the industry, Ron is an experienced Customer Support Executive. Before Redis Labs, he was the Senior Director of WW Support at Imperva (NYSE:IMPV) where he has successfully built a Global Support Org. of several support groups from the ground up. Prior to that Ron held roles at P-Cube (acquired by Cisco, NASDAQ: CSCO) and was part of the team at Commtouch (NASDAQ: CTCH).

Ron holds a B.A.Sc from the IDC in Israel. In his spare time Ron enjoys reading Military History books, snowboarding and riding bikes with his son.

Gabe Stanek

Gabe has spent twenty years helping companies around the world realize significant value from technical solutions powered by leading Relational and NoSQL database technologies. He is a hands-on technologist with tenures at Sybase, Oracle and Neo Technology (the creators of the Neo4j graph database). He and his teams have helped a wide variety of companies—from the Global Fortune 100 to Silicon Valley startups—architect, develop and deploy internal and large-scale customer applications. At Redis Labs, Gabe continues to focus on driving successful customer solutions with a brilliant team of Solution Architects, helping ensure that customers view us as the go-to technical experts for designing and deploying Redis-based solutions.
Gabe holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from San Jose State University and is officially certified in a number of technologies including Oracle and Neo4j.

Sharon Link

Sharon brings fifteen years of solid financial management experience to Redis Labs. Previously, she served as a finance manager at a variety of companies, including Claymonut Medical Devices, Tau Hedge Fund, and Technomatix.

Sharon holds a Bachelor of Arts in accounting and economics from Tel Aviv University and a Master of Arts in law from Bar Ilan University.

Adi Stern

Adi has over ten years of experience managing recruitment and HR processes in the high tech industry. She brings vast experience supporting rapid growth and leading change within startup environments. Prior to joining Redis Labs, she served as an HR specialist and recruitment manager at PrimeSense (acquired by Apple), PTC (NSDAQ: PTMC) and Tripletec. Adi holds both a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and literature and a Master of Business Administration, specializing in information systems, from Bar-Ilan University.