Leadership with a Track Record of Innovation

The leadership of Gridstore brings together expertise in highly available systems, distributed computing, cloud computing and the business experience of building technology businesses from idea to IPO. The team brings a proven track record of seeing and realizing innovative new technology markets.

Dr. Chris Horn, Chairman

Prior to co-founding IONA Technologies, Dr. Horn was a faculty member of the Computer Science Department of Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland) until 1991 when he co-founded and became CEO and Chairman of IONA. In 1991, IONA pioneered the emerging area of distributed computing and played a lead role in the development of the distributed computing standards known as CORBA. Without any venture capital, IONA went on to become the 5th largest IPO in the history of the NASDAQ in 1997. During this period, IONA was one of the largest top ten software companies by revenue in the world. IONA customers included the largest telco, financial and manufacturing companies in the world and its products continue to form the backbone of many of their high performance, mission critical systems. In June 2008, IONA was acquired by Progress Software NASDAQ (PRGS).

Dr. Sean Baker, Director

Prior to co-founding IONA Technologies, Dr. Baker was also a faculty member in the Distributed Systems Group, Department of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin where he collaborated with Dr. Horn on distributed computing research. In 1991, Dr. Baker left to commercialize that research in IONA and held the positions of Chief Technology Office, Chief Scientist and SVP Consultancy while building IONA from a research project into one of the worlds largest software companies. He is the author of a number of books and articles in the area of distributed computing and application integration. He is also the Chairman of the Irish Software Association.

Kelly Murphy, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer

Murphy is a serial entrepreneur with a track record of spotting and developing emerging technology markets. In 1998, Murphy founded Marrakech, the first on-demand software company that offered on-demand procurement and supply chain systems to some of the worlds largest retailers, consumer food producers, packaging companies and utilities - as well as the thousands of trading partners they collaborated with.

Murphy lead Marrakech as CEO and grew the business to over 250 employees operating on three continents and raised over $75m in venture capital from leading US and UK venture firms prior to selling the business in June 2006 to then partner AMT-Sybex. Marrakech continues to operate today as a profitable stand alone business within the AMT-Sybex group serving customers that started over ten years ago. Ten years after the founding of Marrakech, Software as a Service and Cloud Computing have become a mainstream way to deliver software applications.

Antoni Sawicki, co-founder and Vice President Product Development

Sawicki brings extensive experience in the design and implementation of high availability clusters and storage systems. The expertise goes deep into system and network management, storage area networks, kernel level of operating systems, virtualization and the line level of network protocols.

Sawicki is a co-founder of Gridstore and has worked with Kelly Murphy for the past ten years. Prior to Gridstore, Sawicki was responsible for the design and operations of the Marrakech on-demand production systems that ran 24x7 to support the supply chains of some of the worlds largest retailers.