Big Data Storage Startup Basho Nabs $7.5M (And Accenture CTO Don Rippert)

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

Basho Technologies, a data storage and management software startup serving the enterprise market, this morning announced that it has raised $7.5 million in Series D funding.

In addition, Basho announced that its board of directors has named Donald J. Rippert, long time CTO of Accenture, as the company’s new president and chief executive officer.

In a statement, Accenture said it has named Paul Daugherty chief technology architect and Gavin Michael chief technology innovation officer – the duo will assume the management responsibilities previously held by Rippert.

Rippert, whose career at Accenture spanned 29 years (of which 6 years as CTO) will succeed Basho’s CEO and co-founder Earl Galleher, who will continue in his role as chairman of the board. According to his Twitter feed, Rippert starts next Friday.

Basho’s flagship open source database software product, Riak, was specifically built to manage the explosion of data being generated by growing Internet users and web applications (often referred to as ‘Big Data’).

Rippert explains why he picked Basho for his next gig:

“Relational databases have their place, but they don’t meet all of the changing data management needs of enterprises and agencies.

Basho built Riak, its open source data store and management software, from scratch specifically to permit enterprises and agencies to capture enormous amounts of data with database software that is fault-tolerant, highly scalable and easy-to-install and use with absolutely no single point of failure.”