Ethan Erchinger Named Finalist for Rising Star Category in Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal 2012 Best Bay Area CIO Awards
Erchinger Recognized for Innovative IT Decisions with SchoonerSQL for Plaxo
Sunnyvale, Calif. – June 12, 2012 - Schooner Information Technology, Inc., which develops and markets high-availability (HA), high-performance software solutions optimized for flash and engineered for mission-critical use, today announced that Ethan Erchinger, vice president of operations and solution architecture for Plaxo, has been named a finalist in the “Rising Star” category in the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal 2012 Best Bay Area CIO Awards for his innovative use of SchoonerSQL to solve availability and performance challenges. Plaxo.com is the world’s leading online address book, hosting over 50 million address book accounts, and is a subsidiary of Comcast located in the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center.
The 2012 Best Bay Area CIO Awards recognize Bay Area executives that substantially helped their companies by using IT in innovative ways to create competitive advantage, optimize business processes, and enable growth. Award winners were honored at the CIO of the Year awards celebration on Monday, June 11 at the Marriott San Mateo in San Mateo, Calif.
“I am honored to be named a finalist in the ‘Rising Star’ category and I congratulate all 2012 Best Bay Area CIO finalists on their achievement,” stated Erchinger. “I have dedicated my professional career to ensuring consistent availability and high performance for Plaxo’s address book application and its customers. Being part of Comcast’s Silicon Valley Innovation Center means delivering the highly available solutions Plaxo and Comcast customers have come to expect, so I value the recognition of those efforts.”
When faced with the challenge of selecting the best IT system for Plaxo, Erchinger would not accept the status quo that high availability and high performance cannot be achieved in parallel. Erchinger chose SchoonerSQL to increase his database performance and availability. He was an integral part of the back-and-forth of R&D; to develop a solution that would maintain compatibility with Plaxo’s current MySQL database to ensure no costly switch-over, but would also provide a significant upgrade in service. Erchinger’s innovative and diligent efforts freed Plaxo developers to concentrate on writing customer-requested applications, instead of building back-end availability systems.
“It’s no secret that our mission at Schooner is to provide our customers the peace of mind that comes with achieving high availability and high performance,” said Jerry Rudisin, CEO at Schooner. “We are so pleased to see Ethan being recognized for his notable commitment to innovation.”
About Schooner Information Technology
Schooner Information Technology delivers cost-effective, enterprise-grade software solutions engineered for flash. These solutions free customers from the traditional tradeoffs between availability, performance and total cost of ownership (TCO). Schooner’s offerings include SchoonerSQL, which is 100 percent compatible with MySQL for easy adoption, and the complementary Membrain software cache. Based in Sunnyvale, California, Schooner is privately funded and supports a variety of customers across technology, entertainment, financial services and telecommunications industries.
For more information, please visit www.schoonerinfotech.com. Follow us on Twitter @schoonerinfo.
About Plaxo
Plaxo (www.plaxo.com) helps over 50 million people around the world stay connected with the people who are important to them in business and life. The company develops the only intelligent, self-updating address book that solves the problem of keeping contact information in sync and relevant. Plaxo enables users to have one up-to-date address book across all of the most popular Web-based and client-based email accounts, social networks, and mobile devices – providing one unified address book that is securely stored and available where and when they need it.
Plaxo is not a social network but rather, complements social networks and media companies by helping users pull in disparate sets of contacts (e.g., from Facebook, LinkedIn, Outlook, MacOS, Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, CSV, etc.) into one common, secure online address book.
Media Contacts:
Lauren Connelly
Schwartz MSL San Francisco for Schooner
(415) 512-0770
schooner@schwartzmsl.com
Cori Pasinetti
Plaxo, Inc.
(408) 900-8414
cori@plaxo.com