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WANdisco, a leading provider of infrastructure software for replication, scalability & high availability, today announced two new additions to the company’s advisory board. The WANdisco executive team chose Ian Crayford and Lee Strafford as new members of the advisory board for their world-renowned expertise and industry leadership in key areas of business strategy, distributed networking and entrepreneurial leadership.
"From the start, WANdisco has focused on building a world-class team of experts to address every part of our business," said David Richards, President & CEO of WANdisco, Inc. "We are proud that these respected experts from various industries have joined the WANdisco Advisory Board."
Ian Crayford is one of the high speed networking industry’s most seasoned technologists. He has over 40 patents granted in the area of network architecture, has written and presented numerous papers on networking, and co-authored several reference books. He currently serves as an advisor to several start-up technology companies in the communications and software areas.
Over the past 20 years, Ian has worked extensively on the definition and development of Ethernet networking products, primarily for 10/100BASE-T, Gigabit, and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. He has been highly involved in the IEEE 802.3 standards development activities, initially serving as a Working Group member during the development and approval of the 10BASE-T and Repeater Management Standards. Later, he was heavily involved in the 802.3u "Fast Ethernet" Working Group, serving as Chair for the Link Signaling (Auto-Negotiation) Sub-Group, and subsequently Chair of the 802.3ac Working Group for VLAN Tagging on 802.3 Networks. Ian was also an active participant in the 802.3z "Gigabit Ethernet" Working Group, and co-authored the book "Gigabit Ethernet" (Prentice Hall), which was published in 1998 at the time the standard was ratified.
Since 2002, Ian has operated Network Generation LLC, an independent consultancy business. The company assists venture capital, start-up and public companies, with technology analysis, product definition and architecture, market positioning, and intellectual property protection in the communications silicon and systems businesses. Previously, he was Director, Technical Business Development at Broadcom Corp., a semiconductor company focused on the broadband communications arena. At Broadcom, Ian was responsible for Broadcom’s expansion into several new markets via acquisitions and investments, including Maverick Networks, BlueSteel Networks, Newport Communications, Allayer and SiByte.
Ian was previously Director of Engineering at Bay Networks, and at Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., he held a variety of technical positions in the communications division, the most senior being that of AMD Fellow for 4 years.
“WANdisco has unique technology in the field for distributed computing,” said Ian Crayford. “The company is pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved with distributed systems deployed on a Wide Area Network.”
Lee Strafford is the visionary and entrepreneurial leader who architected and drove the success of UK ISP PlusNet’s as its co-founder and CEO from 1997 to 2007, leading it through all the stages from start-up, sale to Nasdaq Business, IPO on LSE AIM and finally through exit by sale to BT in January 2007. All this was achieved by ensuring focus was maintained on very strong financial and customer KPI performance whilst driving innovation. A key driver for Lee is to create value by working with people who work well in a collaborative/open environment.
In addition to the plethora of awards won by PlusNet, in the UK technology Innovation & Growth Awards in 2005, Lee was named “Technology CEO of the Year”.
In late 2007, following exit from PlusNet after the sale to BT, Lee started pulling together the team of Internet Service Provider (ISP) industry veterans that are theNetStart Platform Ltd, in order to deliver on his vision of building a disruptive SaaS platform play.
Lee was recently named Chairman of Sheffield Wednesday Football Club; a professional soccer team that play in English Championship.
Lee Strafford commented; “WANdisco have grown the business from the ground-up with innovation and strong financial management. The company recently relocated its European Headquarters to Sheffield and I was delighted to help with that project.”
About WANdisco
WANdisco (wandisco.com) is a leading provider of distributed software development solutions. By using WANdisco's totally unique replication technology, software development can now occur anywhere without any constraints. Fortune Global 1000 companies such as AT&T, Honda, NTT and Motorola rely on WANdisco's suite of source code management solutions.
About theNetStart
theNETstart (theNetstart.com) is a new company with new ways of delivering platforms for online businesses. The Company provides a new type of service platform that will accelerate time to market, encourage innovation without the hindrance of legacy systems – and reduce costs through process automation.
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