Kickfire Appoints Richard Nieset Vice President of Sales & Services

(Marketwire Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) SANTA CLARA, CA, March 11 / MARKET WIRE/ -- Kickfire(TM), Inc., provider of the world's first high-performance MySQL data warehousing appliance, today announced the appointment of Richard Nieset as vice president of Sales and Services.

He brings over 25 years of sales and support experience in hardware, databases and software.

Nieset joins Kickfire from Helpstream, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider of an innovative, community-driven customer service application, where he served as executive vice president of Sales and Marketing.

Prior to Helpstream, Nieset was executive vice president of Worldwide Sales and Services for KNOVA, the premier supplier of service resolution software. He joined the company shortly after its founding and helped grow it into a global publically traded organization serving the Fortune 500.

"Rich has a wealth of sales and support experience gained at both hardware and software startups and large scale enterprises, and a proven ability to build high-performance, process-driven teams that support maximum customer acquisition and retention. He has the perfect set of skills for Kickfire as we begin our ramp into volume sales," commented Bruce Armstrong, chairman and chief executive officer of Kickfire.

At Agile Software, a leading provider of Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) solutions, Nieset helped develop the go-to-market strategies that led to Agile's dominance in the industry.

Previously he was executive vice president of Operations for Rexcom Systems, an early entrant into the Fourth Generation Language (4GL) and relational database systems market, and before that he held progressively senior sales positions at several high-tech companies.

"I believe Kickfire will prove to be a major disruptor in the data warehousing market -- there is nothing else like it," said Nieset. "Thanks to its patented SQL chip, it has already claimed world leadership in data warehousing price/performance. Now, Kickfire customers are seeing up to 600X performance improvements in their MySQL data warehousing installations. I am tremendously excited to join a company with such a compelling value proposition that also boasts world-class technical talent, management and brand-name investors." Nieset holds a degree in Physics from Loyola University of the South and a BA in Business from the University of Phoenix.

About Kickfire Kickfire provides the first high-performance, easy-to-use analytic appliance for the burgeoning MySQL market. Based on a patented SQL chip that packs the power of tens of CPUs into an exceptionally small, low-power form factor, Kickfire delivers a quantum leap in performance efficiency -- avoiding the hardware build out, power, and space costs of today's data warehouse and database offerings. By delivering astoundingly fast query performance out of the box, Kickfire's plug-and-play appliance enables organizations to use MySQL for demanding business intelligence, reporting, and analysis. Kickfire appliances scale from gigabytes to terabytes and are based on Linux and commodity hardware. They leverage the openness of MySQL and its entire ecosystem to ensure compatibility and rapid deployment.

Kickfire is backed by blue-chip venture capital firms: Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, The Mayfield Fund and Pinnacle Ventures. For more information, please visit www.kickfire.com.

Kickfire is a trademark of Kickfire, Inc.

All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

MEDIA CONTACTS: Beverley Bird Kickfire (408) 450-5430Email Contact Copyright ? 2009 Marketwire

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]