DataStax Appoints Lara Shackelford as Vice President of Marketing

DataStax, the commercial company behind Apache Cassandra™, the massively scalable NoSQL database, announced that legendary marketing executive Lara Shackelford has joined the company as Vice President of Marketing.

The company said Shackelford is responsible for leading all global marketing efforts for DataStax, defining the global market strategy and vision, branding, product positioning and segmentation, and demand creation.

Shackelford’s role marks DataStax’s commitment to bringing clarity to the industry and the big data space in a way that will help enterprise customers understand and solve their data management needs. This includes helping organizations capitalize on the exact right time and approach to replace or augment their traditional relational database systems with DataStax Enterprise. Additionally, Shackelford will spearhead DataStax support for the Apache Cassandra community, ensuring community members are recognized for their innovation, leadership and commitment to success.

DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth said, “Lara has been instrumental in the industry for helping B2B and B2C technology companies define their categories, drive growth and become market leaders. She consistently delivers game-changing results for the companies with which she has worked. This includes traditional relational database vendors that thrived in the late 90s; ERP and CRM applications vendors that grew their businesses; and cutting edge business intelligence vendors. We are thrilled that she has joined our team to help lead the next generation of true business value providers.”

Shackelford joins DataStax most recently from business intelligence software company QlikTech. As vice president of marketing she helped the company grow total revenue an average of 43 percent annually to $321 million, leading Gartner to call QlikTech a “marketing juggernaut.”

Before QlikTech, Shackelford worked for IBM as the Director of Global Marketing, where she managed solutions and demand marketing and successfully grew a several hundred million dollar global division. Prior to IBM, she served as Director for Global Product and Alliance Marketing for BearingPoint and, before that, led the midmarket business applications push for Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. Shackelford started her career in the high tech industry at Oracle Corporation.

“DataStax has built amazing momentum in the marketplace and has credible enterprise-class customers entrusting critical applications to their technology,” said John Vrionis, Managing Director of Lightspeed Venture Partners and DataStax investor. “We clearly see how the company is poised for its next phase of tremendous growth, and the addition of Lara is part of this growth strategy. I know her efforts will elevate how DataStax is perceived in the marketplace.”

Shackelford is a current member of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Business Marketing Association. She earned a BA from Stephens College and a Yale Executive Leadership Certificate from Yale School of Management.

About DataStax

DataStax offers products and services based on the popular open-source database, Apache Cassandra™, which solve today’s most challenging big data problems. DataStax Enterprise combines the performance of Cassandra with analytics powered by Apache Hadoop and enterprise search with Apache Solr, creating a smartly integrated, big data platform. With DataStax Enterprise, real-time, analytic, and search workloads never conflict, giving you maximum performance with the added benefit of only managing a single database.

The company has more than 200 customers including leaders such as Netflix, Pearson Education, Rackspace and Constant Contact, and spans verticals including web, financial services, telecommunications, logistics and government. DataStax is backed by industry leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Crosslink Capital, and is based in San Mateo, CA.