Executive Team
Allan Wallack
President and Chief Executive Officer
Allan Wallack is responsible for the general management of the company. He has spent the last 40 years leading high-profile startup companies through their early stages to IPO or acquisition. Prior to joining Akorri, Allan held board, advisory, consulting and investing positions with numerous technology companies. Previously, Allan served as CEO and President of Spring Tide Networks, an IP services company purchased by Lucent Technologies. He also served as Chairman, CEO and President of Chrysalis Symbolic Design, an electronic design automation software company purchased by Avanti Corp.; was CEO and President of Synernetics, a communications company which was bought by 3COM; was COO of COGNEX Corporation during its IPO and Vice President of Marketing for MASSCOMP during its IPO. Allan began his career working at Digital Equipment Corporation where he held numerous engineering, marketing and management positions.
John Gavin
Chief Operating Officer
John Gavin is responsible for company's operations, finance, and administrative functions. He brings more than 25 years of financial and operations experience from leading technology organizations. Prior to joining Akorri, John served as COO and Interim General Manager for SMaL Camera Technologies which was acquired by Cypress Semiconductors. He also served as Vice President and CFO of Pirus, where he was instrumental in developing business strategies and optimizing planning processes that were critical to the company’s successful acquisition by Sun Microsystems. Prior to joining Pirus, John was Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for C-Port Corporation, where he was one of the chief architects of the $430 million merger of C-Port and Motorola. Previously, he held senior financial management positions at Compaq and Digital Equipment Corp., including Vice President of Finance, Sales and Marketing for North America.
Rich Corley
Founder, CTO and VP Engineering
Rich brings more than 20 years of experience leading and contributing to technology-based companies. He is responsible for leading Akorri's engineering and R&D teams. Before founding Akorri, Rich was the founder and Executive Vice President at Pirus Networks, where he was responsible for the company's overall leadership, technical strategy, and product architecture leading up to its acquisition by Sun Microsystems in 2002. Previously, Rich was Director of Advanced Technology at Nortel. Earlier in his career, Rich held founding and engineering management positions at Aptis, Arris, Chipcom, Data General, and Concord Data Systems. Rich holds an MSEE from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a BSET from Northeastern University. Rich is an active member of the College of Engineering Industrial Advisory Board at Northeastern and was awarded the College of Engineering Outstanding Alumni Award in 2004.
Paul Marichal
Vice President of Customer Support and Services
Paul Marichal is responsible for leading Akorri’s customer support and services team. He has more than 25 years of experience at leading storage and data networking companies. Prior to joining Akorri, Paul served as CTO of Sandial, where he established and executed the company’s strategic technology direction. Previously, he served in various senior engineering management roles at Cabletron Systems, where he oversaw the development of many of the company’s high-speed networking products. Prior to that, Paul served in software engineering roles at Data General, where he was instrumental in the early-stage development of fundamental storage technologies such as SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) and RAID (Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks).
Bill Simpson
Vice President of Worldwide Sales
Bill Simpson will be responsible for building and managing long-term partner and customer relationships worldwide. Bill has more than 20 years of experience and a proven track record of driving sales success in high-growth technology companies. He was named a Channel Chief by the Everything Channel’s Computer Reseller News (CRN) two years in a row (2009 and 2010), as a top influential executive who consistently defended, promoted and executed effective channel partner programs and strategies. In his previous role at Virtual Iron Software, the market leading VMware alternative acquired by Oracle, Simpson established its worldwide channel strategy and led strategy execution in the field. Prior to Virtual Iron, he served as Director of Strategic Alliances and Channel Sales at Pedestal Software (acquired by Altiris in 2005). At Pedestal, Bill developed and implemented a successful channel strategy that drove new revenue streams through various partner led compliance initiatives. Previously, he was Channel Sales Director at Corechange, Inc (acquired by Open Text), a leading provider of enterprise portal software. Bill also held various sales management roles at Ardent Software (acquired by Informix/IBM), a leader in the data warehousing and management space where he grew both the channel and OEM businesses. He began his career at Stratus Computer, a global leader in fault tolerant computing, holding various finance and international sales management roles. Bill holds a B.S. degree from Bridgewater State College.
Rob Strechay
Vice President of Strategic Accounts
Rob manages strategic accounts and runs the Technical Account Management team for Akorri. Before joining Akorri, he served as director of storage and disaster recovery for a global 200 financial services company, where he was responsible for their strategic and tactical architecture for storage infrastructure and disaster recovery planning. Rob has also held positions with Fortune 500 organizations in the areas of storage services, disaster recovery planning, networks and infrastructure operations.
Warren Mead
Vice President of U.S. Channels
Warren Mead is responsible for recruiting, enabling and enhancing relationships with premiere technology solutions resellers in the United States. Warren has nearly 15 years of experience in successful sales, sales management and business development leadership at early stage, venture backed software companies. His most recent role was as National Sales Director at Virtual Iron Software. At Virtual Iron, Warren built the direct and indirect sales model and helped launch the company and product in the market. He then built a 2,500 plus customer base including brand names such as Priceline.com, Putnam Investment, Harvard, Aetna, and University of Pennsylvania. Warren exceeded yearly revenue plans by 120% and built a national reseller program securing over 200 reseller partners. Prior to Virtual Iron, he served as Regional Director, Enterprise Sales at SpeechWorks, now Nuance Communications. Warren helped build SpeechWorks into a $50M market leader and the 12th most successful IPO of 2000. Previously, he was Regional Manager at Vicorp Interactive Systems and Open Development Corporation. Warren holds a B.A. in Communications from Marist College and Leeds University.
Jim Comstock
Vice President of Marketing
Jim Comstock is responsible for worldwide marketing and product management at Akorri. Jim is a proven executive with 25 years of extensive business management experience at top tier system, storage and virtualization companies. He was recently the Director of Storage Area Network (SAN) strategy at NetApp, where he defined and drove the implementation of NetApp’s long-term SAN product strategy. Prior to NetApp, Jim held senior positions in both engineering and business management at Sun Microsystems. As Senior Director of Storage System Engineering, he lead a team of 120 engineers responsible for testing and application integration of Sun’s Storage products. And as the Senior Director of Storage Strategy and Business Management, he led the strategy definition, implementation and business management of Sun’s $2B storage business. As Vice President of Business Development at storage virtualization startup Pirus Networks, Jim drove early sales activities, set up international sales channels and engaged in and closed OEM agreements, which led to Sun’s acquisition of Pirus in late 2002. Prior to this, Jim worked for Adaptec in several executive management roles. His last position was as Vice President/General Manager of the Storage Solutions Group. He also held roles including Director of Business Development, Director of Channel Marketing and Director of Product Management. Jim started his career at IBM in the storage systems group within the General Products Division where he served in a variety of engineering and marketing management positions during his ten year IBM career. Jim holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering with honors from Oregon State University.
