Bluzelle, the decentralized database provider, has appointed Daniel Saito and Colin Charles as strategic advisors to oversee Bluzelle’s Open Source strategy and development. They are both well-known for their efforts in building out the MySQL and MariaDB database developer communities.
Daniel Saito joins Bluzelle as an advisor to oversee Open Source initiatives and implementation. Having previously been Representative Director for MySQL K.K. He joined MySQL in 2005 as one of its first employees in the APAC region, where he was tasked with educating and expanding the open source business for the MySQL database in APAC. He has played a pivotal role in several startups globally and was also a cryptosecurity research engineer at NTT DoCoMo R&D. He is also an active developer and advisor for various cryptocurrencies.
In addition to these advisor appointments, a raft of new hires includes Andrew Mastracci, Edward Bruck, and Isabel Scroggin. These new hires reflect the company’s ongoing focus on building out its community of developers as it plans to release a new version of the product, which is named after Ada Lovelace, who is often cited as the first computer programmer.
“We’re extremely pleased to bring on these new additions to the team. Daniel and Colin’s past success with building out the open source communities for MySQL and MariaDB is exactly what we want to build in our own community. With Andrew, Isabel and Ed, we have made our product development team even stronger. A key area we wanted to bolster was pure research. With so many changes in this space, Isabel’s background and accomplishments were something we could not pass up.”
Colin Charles advises on open source implementation and best practices. He comes with a wealth of experience from MariaDB Corporation, where he had been the Chief Evangelist for MariaDB since 2009, with work ranging from speaking engagements to consultancy and engineering. In his role at MariaDB, he was responsible for almost single-handedly growth hacking the user base to 12 million users through constant evangelism. Colin was also an early employee at MySQL.
Andrew Mastracci joins Bluzelle as Director, Product Development. In 2011, he co-founded Pertino Networks, which built distributed routing and switching fabric on public cloud infrastructure with simplified management systems for network configuration and policy, before raising $35m and seeing the business acquired by Cradlepoint. At Pertino Networks, Andrew was in charge of technical roadmaps for Software Defined WAN/Perimeter and Internet of Things. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Victoria.
Edward Bruck joins the Bluzelle team as Senior C++ Developer. He is a senior software developer with over 18 years experience of developing solutions within the complex, multi-layered ecosystem of networking. He was the first employee at Pertino Networks, which was acquired by Cradlepoint, and led the development of its Cloud VPN Product. Ed also worked at Packeteer & Blue Coat System (Symantec) in the WAN optimization and traffic detection market.
Isabel Scroggin has been appointed to the position of Lead Researcher at Bluzelle. She holds a Master’s of Computer Science from Purdue as well as a Bachelor’s of Computer Science and a Bachelor’s of Mechanical Engineering from Rose-Hulman. Isabel has a wide breadth of knowledge in algorithms, data structures, and distributed systems. Her professional experience includes ground support for NASA’s Jason-3 satellite and two summers at Amazon.
