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New CEO, CTO for Riak database upstart Basho emerge from the cloud

Don't Riak the boat, baby

Exclusive Basho's new chief executive and chief technology officers are said to be Adam Wray, formerly of Tier 3, and Dave McCrory of Warner Music Group, respectively.

Basho is the company which stewards the development of the distributed database Riak. The Register exclusively reported that the company lost its chief architect, chief technology officer, and chief executive, in the past three months.

Now, thanks to a combination of inadvertent tweets and multiple confirmations from reliable sources close to the company, El Reg has learned who is apparently in line to the throne at the database upstart.

First up is Adam Wray, who was the chief executive of managed services provider and Cloud Foundry dabbler Tier 3 until January 2013. Tier 3 was slurped up by CenturyLink in November 2013.

Wray partially revealed his new role in a tweet, since deleted from Twitter, that read: "Got it. No drinks tonight and will send over rough w comments. Is he ok now w us saying under embargo your CTO?"

This message was posted to the social network late on Wednesday afternoon. Shortly after that, The Reg was contacted by multiple people familiar with the company confirming Wray's installation as new CEO.

After a bit of digging we were told that the company's new chief technology officer is expected to be Dave McCrory, a senior vice-president of engineering for Warner Music Group. McCrory had helped the media giant implement a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud based on Pivotal's Cloud Foundry, and before that had worked on the same PaaS tech at VMware.

If he does take the CTO's office, McCrory will replace outgoing tech boss Justin Sheehy, who will run VMware's office in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Multiple Basho insiders were cagey about the moves, stating to El Reg that as long as the company's engineering organization suffers no further losses, Riak will continue to be a well-supported database.

However, others outside the company were more hesitant pointing out that neither McCrory nor Wray have a huge amount of experience with the complex world of distributed NoSQL databases.

Either way, the changes represent a dramatic shift for the company. With Riak, Basho has a widely used database that has multiple enterprise deployments, including the UK's NHS. The onus on the executives will be to maintain confidence in the database, lest customers look elsewhere to other modern systems from MongoDB or perhaps DataStax.

At the time of writing neither Wray nor McCrory could be reached for comment. ®

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