Tom has spent the last 25 years as a senior architect, developer, and team lead in the computer software industry in Silicon Valley. Prior to co-founding BlueData, Tom spent 10 years at VMware as a senior architect and team lead in the core R&D Storage and Availability group. Most recently, Tom led one of the key projects – vFlash, focusing on integration of server-based Flash into the vSphere core hypervisor. Prior to VMware, Tom was part of the early team at Silicon Graphics that developed XFS, one of the most successful open source file systems. Earlier in his career, he was a key member of the Stratus team that ported the Unix operating system to their highly available computing platform. Tom received his Computer Science degree from the University of California, Berkeley.