Bios

Daniel Crain

Chief Executive Officer

Dan has had the fortune of spending the past 25 years split between being both an IT executive and a Technology vendor and entrepreneur. He’s held executive technology jobs at such top tier firms as Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank, where he lived the exciting life of Wall Street IT. He’s bought nearly every kind of storage, server and network device made in the past quarter century, and claims to have gotten most of them to work. He’s also had executive jobs in the technology industry.

Daniel was an original founding member of the StorageApps team, where as Executive Vice President, he built and ran the engineering, manufacturing and services organizations, that created the first Storage Virtualization product. He was most recently at Brocade Communications, where he was Chief Technology Officer for many years. Dan has also consulted for many leading companies, such as VMware, TIAA CREF and Drobo.

Dan’s major interests in life include his family, state of the art video game computers, and skiing at ridiculous speeds down steep eastern mountains.

 

Cameron Pforr

President and Chief Financial Officer

Over the last thirteen years Cameron has worked with some of the most successful companies and teams in the storage industry. Prior to joining WhipTail in 2011, he most recently was a Managing Director running datacenter and telecommunications banking for Revolution Partners and storage banking for Deutsche Banc. His clients included EMC, Dell, McData, Pirus Networks, Nortel Networks, OTG Software, Lucent, Agere, Siemens, Internet Capital Group, and Motorola among others. He raised over $14 billion of capital for clients and executed over forty M&A transactions. Prior to joining Alex Brown to begin his banking career, he served as a Case Team Leader for Bain & Co. where in addition to strategy assignments he helped establish Bain’s technology practice, was active in the investment of the Partner Fund’s venture investments, and worked in the Private Equity Group. Earlier in his career Cameron worked for the US Secretary of Defense developing new analytic methodologies, including what is now commonly called data fusion, and the technologies to support these techniques. He also served as a Foreign Service Officer in Berlin, Germany for the US Department of State. He was graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from William & Mary, and received an MBA with distinction from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and an MA in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania.

When not talking IOPS and disk contention he enjoys time with his family and friends, supporting his children’s many interests, and restoring his constantly decaying transportation collection.

 

James Candelaria

Chief Technology Officer

James began his career in highschool as a C++ developer, developing SAT preparation software for a small firm in Princeton NJ. After graduation, James shifted his focus to consulting and spent the next 10 years working in large scale systems design for the Fortune 1000. James founded WhipTail in late 2008 in response to a growing customer demand for high-speed, low latency storage systems to complement large virtualization projects. James currently holds many industry certifications in and around both the storage and virtualization space.

James’ passion for all things fast spills over into his home life as well, it is not at all uncommon to see James under the hood of his late model supercharged Corvette or a late 60’s / early 70’s muscle car.

 

Brian Feller

Vice President & General Manager, EMEA

After double majoring in English and Education and planning on changing the world one elementary student at a time, Brian naturally dove headfirst into sales. Upon earning his sales and marketing stripes in the financial services market for both large and start-up enterprises, he segued to Information Technology where he worked for top integrators and software companies for the past 12+ years.

Beyond his overwhelming obsession with ice hockey, Brian’s focus is on his two young children, movies, books and how realistic is it for him to set the World Record for consumption of caffeine in a single day.

 

Andy Flesch

VP and General Manager of The Americas

Andy brings more than 15 years of high tech sales experience to WhipTail. He felt the pull of the technology sector early, leaving his beloved New York for Haas business school at Berkeley. Yes, he was the one on campus wearing Birkies and an HP 12C calculator. He has always focused on evangelizing early stage, cutting edge and paradigm shifting technologies, working to help establish Turbolinux, Citrix, VMware, and Riverbed where he built new sales territories into multi-million dollar regions. Andy also brings to WhipTail his passion for educating customers, channels and alliance partners on how to introduce and support these groundbreaking technologies. Aside from work, Andy loves spending time with his family and watching the Yankees and Jets win!!