Wayne Rickard

Wayne Rickard is a senior technology leader, executive, and industry expert with extensive experience in multiple industries including Storage, SaaS, Consumer, Precision Manufacturing, Business Intelligence, and Semiconductor. Wayne is known for his track record of managing innovation and taking advanced technologies to market, with experience spanning Fortune 500, start-ups, and SMB.

Currently, Rickard serves as Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Jersey City, NJ-based Formulus Black, a leader in system software enabling In-Memory Compute (IMC) infrastructure, combining commodity hardware with patented data encoding to increase performance while simultaneously reducing system TCO.

Additionally, Rickard serves as an advisor to Radian Memory Systems, a startup developing next generation Storage Memory products for enterprise and cloud computing applications, and a member, Board of Directors, to Codelucida, a fabless semiconductor company developing error-correction technologies for next-generation applications in storage-class memories, as well as wireless, optical and satellite communications.

From August 2010 to May 2013, Rickard led an international team of sales and marketing professionals as Vice President, Global Sales & Marketing, for Singapore-based MMI Holdings Ltd., a portfolio company of KKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.).

From August 2002 to July 2009, Rickard served as Vice President Strategic Marketing, Advanced Storage Architectures, and Chief Technologist at Seagate Technology.  At Seagate, Rickard was responsible for defining and evangelizing new storage subsystems, and was selected to create and lead the retail Branded Solutions business unit, where he organized, managed and led a global staff accountable for strategy, engineering, business development, quality, customer support, user experience, and web services.

From April 1996 to January 2002, Rickard was a founding executive at Gadzoox Networks, Inc , where he last served as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer.  A pioneering company credited with first using the term “SAN” (Storage Area Network), Gadzoox became a leading provider of Fibre Channel infrastructure products, including the first managed hubs and the first 2Gbps Fibre Channel fabric switch.  Gadzoox went public in 1999 with a $516M Market Cap at IPO, becoming, at the time, one of NASDAQ’s Top Ten All Time First Day Gains.

He previously served 15 years at Emulex Corp., where he led the architecture, ASIC, system software, and PCB design of the industry’s first and most successful Host Bus Adapter, then managed the product strategy and go-to-market effort that established the company’s leading position in the Storage Area Network (SAN) market.

A recognized expert in storage networking and holder of three related US Patents, he has been active in developing and promoting open industry standards for both storage and networking, including the FC-PH (Fibre Channel Framing and Signaling), FC-AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop), and FC-BB (Fibre Channel LAN/WAN tunneling & bridging) standards.  Rickard has held industry positions such as the first working group chair for FC-BB, and chair and technical editor of the working group that developed the IETF draft “IP and ARP over Fibre Channel” (RFC 2625).  From July 1999 to October 2004 he was a founding member of the SNIA Technical Council, serving 4 consecutive years as chair.

As a speaker, tech-evangelist, and visionary, Rickard interacts regularly with a network of accomplished leaders in business, technology, finance, media, consulting, and academia.  He has been a featured speaker at Flash Memory Summit, Storage Networking World, the Server I/O conference, FCTC, HPWorld, Veritas VISION, TiEcon, Storage World Conference, DiskCon, and George Gilder’s StoreWidth.  Internationally he has been invited to speak at FCIA-E in Maastricht, the Netherlands and the Storage Networking Summit in Bangalore, India.  Named one of Enterprise Systems Journal’s “Power 100” in 2001, his articles and comments have appeared in EE Times, Storage Networking Word Online, ComputerWorld, Storage, Inc., Computer Technology Review, InfoStor, and FORTUNE Magazine.

Rickard currently holds several advisory board positions, and is active in private equity investing through Tech Coast Angels.  Former start-up boards with successful exits include Troika Networks (acquired by qLogic, October 2005,) Aarohi Communications (acquired by Emulex, April 2006,) InfiniCon Systems (renamed as SilverStorm Technologies, acquired by qLogic in November 2006,) Aristos Logic (acquired by Adaptec, August 2008,) Monosphere (acquired by Quest Software, January 2009,) Akorri (acquired by Network Appliance, January 2011,) InMage (acquired by Microsoft, June 2014,) and bDNA (acquired by Flexera, September 2017.)

Rickard received his MBA from Pepperdine University, as well as an undergraduate Civil/Mechanical/Electrical Engineering degree from California State University, Fullerton.