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.

Howard Ting

Over the past decade, Howard has played a critical role in scaling two companies from initial sales to over $1B in revenue, generating massive value for customers, employees and shareholders. Most recently as CMO of Nutanix (Nasdaq: NTNX), Howard helped create the fastest growing category in enterprise infrastructure, build a marquee brand, and engineer a successful IPO. Before that, he held senior marketing leadership roles at Palo Alto Networks (NYSE: PANW) and architected the demand generation engine that fueled the company’s sales growth through their IPO.

Howard holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the Haas School at UC Berkeley.

Rafael Torres

Rafael has served as a CFO for the past eighteen years.  He has experience scaling companies in the Semiconductor, Networking, Storage and Software industries.  Most recently Rafael was the CFO of Instart, an Enterprise SaaS company in the digital experience space.  Prior to Instart, Rafael held CFO roles at PLX Technology (Nasdaq: PLXT, Acquired by Avago), Power Integrations (Nasdaq: POWI) and OCZ Storage (Nasdaq: OCZ, Acquired by Toshiba).  Since 2013, Rafael has served as board member and audit chair for Ubiquiti (Nasdaq: UBNT).

Rafael holds a B.S. degree in Accounting from Santa Clara University and is a CPA (non-active) attained through his experience at PriceWaterhouse.

Alvin Richards

Alvin has held various executive roles, most recently as the field chief technology officer at MariaDB, vice president of product at Aerospike and engineering lead at MongoDB. He has worked with SasS startups, enterprise storage (NetApp) and byte-code virtualization and containers (Docker). Alvin’s early experience as a software engineer at Oracle provided a springboard for his career success building and leading engineering teams across the globe.

Alvin holds a computer science degree from Thames Valley University and a Bachelor of Arts in photography from Nottingham Trent University, both in Great Britain.

Joshua McKenty

Joshua most recently served as Global Field CTO for four years at Pivotal, Inc. (NASDAQ: PVTL), helping them go public in 2018. An award-winning entrepreneur and technologist, he is a trusted technical and business advisor to the Fortune 500. McKenty led the development of the US Government’s first cloud computing platform at NASA. He co-founded OpenStack and then Piston Cloud, Inc., which Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) acquired in 2015. Early in his career, Joshua was a team lead for the Netscape browser.

Joshua has served on many boards, including those of the OpenStack Foundation, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, and the Canadian Cloud Council. He is an active investor and advisor, and a sought-after international speaker. In the humanitarian world, Joshua led the first release of the UN-backed Global Earthquake Model’s “OpenQuake”, an open source system for earthquake risk calculation. He lives in Canada.

Jim Welch

Jim is a proven technology sales leader with a fifteen-year track record of success selling hardware, software, services and SaaS solutions to large enterprises across North America. Most recently as vice president of cloud security sales at Imperva Inc., he was responsible for building the team and go-to-market strategy for a $45M SaaS business. Prior to that, Jim managed Imperva’s North American strategic account teams to ten straight quarters of double-digit revenue growth. He also held positions at IBM and Crossbeam, where he was responsible for driving the cybersecurity business across several industries.

Jim holds a Bachelor of Science in marketing from LaSalle University and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

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.

Madhukar Kumar

Madhukar is a product strategist with a track record of successfully running product management and product marketing teams for the last 10+ years. He has held several leadership positions in small and large technology companies like Zuora, HP and Oracle where he was responsible for building vision, go to market strategies and opening up new markets for hyper growth. More recently he ran product strategy and product marketing at Oracle for Customer Experience (CX) products portfolio including Marketing, CRM, Commerce and Service.

In the last 10 years he has also been writing in technology journals and speaking at several industry events across the globe around disruptive new technologies affecting businesses and the future of customer experience.

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.

Guy Korland

Guy has over 15 years of experience in software development, with key roles in team leadership and consultancies. Most recently, as the CTO of SelfPoint, he was responsible for building a high-end e-commerce SaaS solution. Previously, he was the founding CTO of shopetti, an online shopping app. Guy also served as vice president of research & development at GigaSpaces Technologies, where he managed the development of the XAP and Cloudily product lines.

Guy holds Bachelor of Arts and Master of Science degrees in computer science from the Technion, Israel institute of Technology, and a PhD from Tel Aviv University.

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.

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.

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.

Yaron Dolev

Yaron has twenty-five years of experience in IT management, and is an expert in mission critical systems and information security. His background includes management positions, as well as hands-on experience in various IT domains. Prior to Redis Labs, he served as head of global IT at Fundtech (NASDAQ: FNDT), where he led the company’s global IT team.

He holds a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification.

Lisa Contini

Lisa is a sales effectiveness expert with over 20 years experience and a proven track record for elevating sales performance to exceed revenue and market share growth objectives. Her background spans a range of technologies including software, SAAS, cloud services, big data and data security. Most recently Lisa was the global leader of Sales Productivity and Enablement at Palo Alto Networks. During her tenure she built and scaled programs to keep pace with 3X growth in sales headcount, drive 4X growth in revenue and delivered 32% increase in sales productivity.

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.