Pliant Technology was formed by several of the foremost experts and innovators in the data storage industry. The Pliant executive team collectively has more than 100 years of storage industry experience developing new technologies, bringing products to market, rapidly capturing dominant market share, and providing significant returns to investors.
Amyl Ahola, Chief Executive Officer
Amyl Ahola brings more than 40 years of storage industry experience to Pliant Technology. Prior to joining Pliant, Amyl served as president and CEO at TeraStor Corporation. Ahola has also held several executive management positions at Seagate Technology, including vice president and general manager, Tape Products, vice president of corporate development, vice president of marketing and vice president of product line management. Previously he served as president and CEO of WangDat and of Optical Storage International (OSI). Prior to OSI, Ahola held a number of executive positions with the pioneering storage and supercomputer company, Control Data Corporation. He holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota.
Mike Chenery, President/Co-Founder
Mike Chenery is a co-founder and president of Pliant Technology. Before founding Pliant, he served as the vice president of advanced engineering at Fujitsu Computer Products of America. At Fujitsu, he developed and managed the creation of an advanced architecture development group, as well as the design and introduction of three new serial interfaces. Under Chenery's leadership, the launch of these products helped dramatically enhance the market perception of Fujitsu's technical leadership capabilities. He has more than 35 years of experience in the storage industry, and has held senior management positions with Memorex, Unisys, Andor Technology, and Micropolis Corporation. Chenery holds the equivalent of a B.S. in Electrical Technology from the South-East London Technical College.
Doug Prins, Co-Founder/Chief Architect
Doug Prins is a co-founder and chief architect for Pliant Technology. Prior to co-founding Pliant, he spent 10 years as an engineering consultant for Fujitsu Computer Products of America. Prins designed and prototyped a number of hardware and software algorithms, including a serial protocol handler that supports the Serial Attached SCSI and the Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop protocols. He was also awarded patents on caching algorithms. Prior to Fujitsu, Prins held a senior architecture and design position at QLogic, where he created several unique industry designs, including a patented disk formatter. Prins holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan.
Aaron Olbrich, Co-Founder/Chief Technology Officer
Aaron Olbrich is a co-founder and CTO of Pliant Technology. Prior to co-founding Pliant, he was the director of hardware architecture for Fujitsu Computer Products of America. During his Fujitsu tenure, Olbrich worked closely with Doug Prins, co-founder and chief architect of Pliant, to jointly design and model software algorithms and hardware architectures. He has been awarded two patents for technologies that resulted in best-in-class performance for Fujitsu's mobile and enterprise-class drives. Prior to Fujitsu, Olbrich worked at IBM's disk drive division where he was the lead engineer responsible for the development of a ground breaking two-actuator disk drive, and was awarded two patents for his queuing algorithm design. Olbrich holds a B.S. degree (Suma Cum Laude) in electrical engineering from Washington State University.
William J. Dobbin, Chief Financial Officer
William Dobbin is the CFO at Pliant Technology. Prior to joining Pliant, Dobbin was the CFO and co-founder for TeraStor Corporation, an optical disc drive start-up company. From 1988 to 1996, Dobbin was a General Partner of Capform Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital fund. Previously, he was the founding CFO and senior vice president of Maxtor Corporation, where he helped lead the company from a venture capital backed start-up to a publicly held Fortune 500 company. Prior to joining Maxtor, Dobbin was vice president of finance and administration for a U.S. subsidiary of CII Honeywell Bull of France and corporate controller for Shugart Associates. He has also held various financial management positions with General Motors. Dobbin holds a B.S. degree in accounting and an M.B.A. in finance from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.
Gary Stager, Vice President of Engineering
Gary Stager is the vice president of engineering at Pliant Technology. In this role, he leads all engineering and product development activities for the company. Gary brings more than 20 years of technology engineering, technical leadership and management of cross-functional product development teams to his role at Pliant. Prior to joining Pliant, he served as vice president of engineering at Avistar Communications, where he was instrumental in the company's growth by restructuring the engineering organization and development process for greater productivity. Prior to Avistar, Stager was senior vice president of engineering and operations of Exavio, Inc., a provider of high-throughput Fibre Channel systems for digital media distribution. He has also held senior positions at Cisco and Fujitsu. Stager holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering, digital electronics and computer systems, and a B.A. in liberal arts from the University of Florida.
Greg Goelz, Vice President of Marketing
With more than 20 years of technology and international expertise, Greg Goelz brings a variety of marketing, product management, and business development skills to Pliant. Prior to joining Pliant, he was the vice president of marketing at UPEK, Inc. where he helped establish the company's leadership position in the PC market for trusted fingerprint biometric solutions. Goelz was also with SGI (formerly Silicon Graphics Inc.), as vice president and general manager of workstations and Intel-based servers. In the past, Goelz has held senior global marketing and sales management positions at several leading companies including Iomega Corporation and Conner Peripherals. Goelz was also the vice president of marketing of startup StorCard, Inc., where he was responsible for all facets of the go-to-market strategy. Goelz has a B.S. in industrial engineering from Lehigh University and a Masters in business administration from the University of San Diego.
Eric Shiroke, Vice President of Sales
Eric brings nearly twenty years of executive and senior-level sales experience in the storage, server and HPC industries to Pliant Technology. As vice president of sales, Eric heads Pliant's global sales operations and market development activities. Prior to joining Pliant, Eric served as director and general manager for the Professional Products Division of PNY Technologies, where he was responsible for all aspects of the division, including new market development and revenue growth. Before PNY Technologies, he was vice president and general manager of the Americas Operations at Elsa Inc., and has previously held management positions at Silicon Graphics, VARstreet.com, Iomega Corporation, and Micropolis Corporation. He holds an MBA from Duquesne University.
Marty DiPietro, Vice President of Operations
Marty DiPietro is the vice president of operations at Pliant Technology. In this role he directs all manufacturing operations for the production of Pliant's Enterprise Flash Drives. Prior to joining Pliant, he was vice president of operations at NeoScale Systems, developers of data storage security devices for enterprise networks, where he helped grow revenues from a $5 to 20 million run rate per year and consolidated manufacturing from three contract manufacturers to one. Prior to NewScale, DiPietro was the vice president of operations at Inkra Networks and then at Siara Systems, which was acquired by Redback Systems. DiPietro also has held management positions at FreeGate Corporation, NetFrame Systems and Flextronics. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Florida Institute of Technology.
