Board of Advisors

The Attune advisory board includes some of the best minds in the storage and networking industries. The advisory board combines world-class expertise from several areas in storage networking including:

Gigabit Ethernet Technology
Mainframe and Systems Architecture
Storage Software Architectures
Networking and Communications Markets

The Attune advisory board provides a valuable advantage by bringing a track record of successful technology and business development in technology markets that are critical to Attune's future:

Rick Bahr
Francesco Lacapra
Richie Lary
Daniel Liddle
Talat Sadiq
Shmuel Shottan

Rick Bahr

Rick Bahr is currently vice president of engineering for Atheros Communications. Atheros is the leading producer of 802.11a, 5GHz WLAN silicon. Prior to joining Atheros, Rick was formerly the vice president of engineering for the high-end server and supercomputer efforts at SGI. In that role, he led engineering in California and the former Cray hardware teams in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Rick was responsible for developing MIPS processors along with the MIPS multiprocessor servers. He also supervised the first deployment of Intel-based Linux servers for SGI. Before joining SGI, Rick was a senior consulting engineer at Apollo/HP. In the past, he has contributed to or led processor implementations at Hewlett-Packard, Prime, and Apollo/HP.

Francesco Lacapra

Francesco is the chief technology officer and co-founder of stealth mode startup Maxiscale, Inc. Formerly chief technology officer and vice president of advanced technology for Attune Systems, Lacapra has also served as the director of software development for the U.S. team of BlueArc Corporation, where he led the development of the BlueArc cluster technology. Prior to this, he held management positions with Sanera Systems and Quantum Corporation's SNAP Division, as well as with Flexoft and Olivetti in Milan, Italy. He holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley , a bachelor's degree (equivalent) in Electronics Engineering from the University of Rome where he graduated summa cum laude, and is a recipient of a Fulbright-Hays scholarship.

Richie Lary

Richie Lary is a Compaq Fellow and was an engineer with Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq from 1969 to 2000. Richie was an architect of Digital's VAX computer family in the 1970s. He joined Digital's storage business in 1978, where he was a key architect and designer of the Digital Storage Architecture and its associated products. He became Digital's storage architect in 1990, technical director of Digital's Storage Business Unit in 1997, and technical director of Compaq's Storage Products Division in 1998. Richie holds 25 patents for his work in processor and storage system architecture and design, and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Server I/O Conference in January 2000 in recognition of his contributions. Since June 2000, he has been an independent consultant in the storage industry and a partner in IN-fusion, LLC.

Daniel A. Liddle

Dan is the vice president of marketing for stealth mode startup, Maxiscale, Incorporated. He was formerly vice president of marketing for Attune Systems where he defined the positioning, messaging, built the marketing infrastructure, and served as primary spokesperson while launching the company and its first two products. During this time, Dan also drove strategic alliances with Microsoft, NetApp, and Riverbed. Prior to Attune, Dan had executive marketing and business development responsibility from launch through two product releases at storage virtualization vendor NeoPath Networks (acquired by Cisco). Over the past sixteen years, Dan also developed his marketing career at First Virtual Corporation (IPO), Whitetree Networks (Ascend/Lucent), and layer-3 routing pioneer Advanced Computer Communications (Ericsson). Dan earned a Master's in Business Administration (MBA) from The University of Michigan and a bachelor's Degree from the University of California (Santa Barbara).

Talat Sadiq

Talat Sadiq was most recently CIO of Drugstore.com, an Internet retail company with revenue of about $400 million. Prior to that, he was CIO of Nextcard Inc., the first Internet-based credit card company. Before Nextcard, he held various executive-level IT and business development positions at Sun Microsystems. His previous work experience also includes Citicorp in London, where he architected and deployed Global Trading and Risk management systems. Talat’s high-tech career includes excellent hands-on experience selling software, hardware and services. He brings to Attune an impressive network of business relationships in Silicon Valley and the entire United States. Talat holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Shmuel Shottan

Shmuel Shottan is the senior vice president and CTO of BlueArc, the leading provider of the most scalable and the highest performing network storage solutions. Shottan was formerly the Chief Strategy Officer for SNAP Appliances, Inc. Previously, Shottan served as vice president and general partner of Quantum Technology Ventures. Previously, Shottan was the senior vice president of engineering and chief technical officer for Quantum's Snap Division. Under his direction, the award-winning Snap Server garnered 80 percent of the rapidly developing market for entry-level network-attached storage systems. Prior to Snap, Mr. Shottan held engineering development and management positions with Parallan Computer, AST Research, where he led the development of the Manhattan Multiprocessor server, and ICL.