Sunnyvale, Ca., USA - December 17, 2009, Sunnyvale, Ca., USA - NetApp, data storage devices company, announced that it has appointed Gerald Held and Michael Nevens to the company's board of directors.
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Dr. Held, CEO of Held Consulting LLC, provides strategic consulting to CEOs and senior executives of technology firms. In 1998, Dr. Held was "CEO-in-residence" at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Through 1997, he was senior vice president of Oracle Corporation's server product division, where he was responsible for Oracle's most important products during a period of rapid growth.
Prior to working at Oracle, he spent 18 years at Tandem Computers, where he was a member of the executive team that grew Tandem from a startup to $2 billion in annual revenues. During his tenure at Tandem, Dr. Held was appointed to several senior management positions, including chief technology officer, senior vice president of strategy, and vice president of new ventures. He led the initial development of Tandem's relational database products.
Dr. Held also serves on the board of Informatica Corporation and Openwave Systems. He is chairman of Vertica Systems, Bella Pictures, and Software Development Technologies. He served as lead independent director of Business Objects until its sale to SAP in 2008.
Dr. Held received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue, an MS in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where he led the initial development of the INGRES relational database management system.
Mr. Nevens serves as a senior advisor to Permira, an international private equity fund with 21 billion euros of funds under management. He also serves on the board of directors of Altera and ModelN Software. Mr. Nevens is also a member of the Advisory Council of the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame, where he has been an adjunct professor of Corporate Governance and Strategy.
Mr. Nevens retired as a director (senior partner) of McKinsey & Co. in 2002 after leading McKinsey's global technology practice. He also served on the board of the McKinsey Global Institute, which conducts research on economic and policy issues. ■