10gen President Max Schireson is taking over as the NoSQL database company's CEO, replacing 10gen co-founder and current CEO Dwight Merriman, who will continue to serve as chairman.
10gen described the move as "a natural progression" for Schireson, who has managed all of 10gen's business functions since he joined the company in February 2011.
"Max has been an ideal partner for growing the company over the past two years and has been instrumental in helping us become the leading NoSQL database and real challenger to the relational model," said Merriman in a statement. "I look forward to my new role as we further execute on our long-term vision of providing the best database for how applications are written, scaled and managed today."
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10gen is the company behind MongoDB, a popular open-source, document-oriented database that's part of a new generation of NoSQL -- Not Only SQL -- database products developed as alternatives to traditional relational databases from Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. Backers of NoSQL databases such as MongoDB promote them as better able to handle the volume and variety of big data that businesses are increasingly wrestling with today.
During Schireson's tenure as president, 10gen increased its global community, employee headcount and customer base, according to a company statement. MongoDB also has made inroads in the enterprise market, counting a large number of Fortune 500 companies as customers including Disney, Forbes, LexisNexis and Salesforce.com.
In 2012 10gen recorded 3.8 million downloads of its software and raised $50 million in venture capital, bring its total financing to $81 million.
Before joining 10gen, Schireson was COO of MarkLogic, a developer of XML database software. Before that he held several posts at Oracle, including chief applications architect and vice president of e-commerce and self-service applications.
Merriman started the MongoDB project in 2007 with 10gen CTO Eliot Horowitz. That work grew out of their experiences at DoubleClick, the ad serving company Merriman co-founded. DoubleClick was bought by Google in 2007 for $3.1 billion.
PUBLISHED JAN. 29, 2013
