Event-Native Data Platform Pioneer Appoints Seasoned Enterprise Technology CEO and Developer-Centric VP of Engineering to Scale Enterprise Business
Event Store, the event-native data platform company, today announced the appointment of industry veterans Kirk Dunn as CEO and David Wang as Vice President of Engineering to steer the company’s rapid expansion in the United States and internationally. Dunn has extensive operational experience with multiple prior CEO and senior executive roles at successful technology companies and served as the COO of Cloudera, scaling the company from near-inception through rapid growth stage. Wang joins with over two decades of engineering experience in distributed systems, storage and data streaming at leading tech innovators including Redpanda, Rubrik and Cloudera. Dunn and Wang are focused on building out Event Store’s enterprise go-to-market model, increasing investment in engineering to develop new commercial offerings while maintaining commitment to the Event Store community, and simplifying the user experience for new and existing customers.
Right Place, Right Time: A Once-in-a-generation Market Opportunity
“Data platforms are where enterprise value is created. As someone who’s been working at and investing in data platform companies for the better part of two decades, I was drawn to the opportunity to lead Event Store through its rapid growth phase. We’re addressing a long standing, massive business need and doing it with very differentiated technology,” Dunn explained. “At 60 million Event Store downloads and growing, the market demand for an event-native data platform is clear — and it’s only going to increase with the spread of AI. All of the data that feeds enterprise applications, AI systems, LLMs and analytics models originates in an operational database somewhere. Event Store is designed to be a massively more efficient and comprehensive way to feed business-critical data from origination to downstream use cases, such as data analytics platforms, which are growing rapidly in enterprise data infrastructures.”
The operational database market is huge — Gartner predicts that spending on these systems will clear $100 billion at a compound growth rate of 16.8% from 2022 to 2027. At this projected rate, Gartner expects the database management systems market to surpass a $203.6 billion total addressable market (TAM) in this five-year period. In addition, IDC predicts that the event stream processing market will grow at a rate of 21.5% from 2022 to 2028, while Fortune Business Insights projects the global data analytics market size to grow from $51.55 billion in 2023 to $279.31 billion by 2030.
Event Store is uniquely positioned to improve the data journey from origination to destination, enhancing advanced modern data analytics and AI outcomes. It’s purpose-built for the demands of modern data architectures, which rely on microservices application development environments that require significant flexibility in how applications are developed, deployed and integrated in both legacy and modern infrastructures. Event Store’s event-native technology marries the operational database and streaming, and is the only solution that provides the best of both worlds for a wide variety of use cases without the complexity and cost of many common approaches.
Today, every company is a real-time business constructed by the sequence of daily business events that occur every minute. Event Store is built on the premise that underlying data structure should reflect this fundamental truth. As Dunn explains, “The collection of events is the new data model, but traditional databases don’t capture the historical journey of the data. For decades, databases have done a great job of capturing ‘the what’ — the state — but ‘the when, how and the why’ are lost, handicapping an organization’s ability to analyze its data and make informed decisions quickly.”
He continued, “To meet the demand on all organizations to bring decision-making closer to real time, the data platform must address the requirement to put business events into motion for downstream applications, analytics and newly emerging AI use cases. Event Store offers a novel way to capture this data and continuously move it via its native streaming capability. With Event Store, enterprises can easily build and deploy event-rich solutions for countless high-stakes use cases in industries as diverse as finance, oil and gas, manufacturing, healthcare, aviation and retail.”
Dunn and Wang Rejoin Forces To Give Businesses the How and Why of Their Data, Not Just the What
Dunn’s decades of industry leadership experience bringing groundbreaking technology to market will be instrumental to mainstreaming Event Store’s event-native data platform. At Cloudera, Dunn employed his range of engineering, marketing, sales and management experience to guide business operations as the company grew from 50 employees to over 2,000 and went public, riding the wave from big data to AI. Prior, Dunn held CEO roles at both Bang Networks and Powerfile Corporation (acquired by Hitachi-LG Data Storage) and served as VP of North American Field Operations at Inktomi. Dunn is a serial investor, with investment and advisory positions at a variety of technology startups, including Synadia, Cerebra Technologies (acquired by Tydo) and AlgoLift (acquired by Vungle).
Having served in engineering leadership roles at HPE, Cisco, Cloudera, Rubrik and Redpanda, Wang brings 27 years of strategic experience in solving complex business problems with technology. At Cloudera, Wang was one of the first managers to oversee all of the storage teams (HDFS, HBase, Kudu, Kafka, etc.). Wang has since been the VP of Engineering at multiple data-focused startups, including Determined AI, where he led engineering efforts for a state-of-the-art deep learning training platform, and Redpanda. At Redpanda, Wang led the engineering organization toward building the future of event streaming and grew the team from 12 individuals to more than 80.
“I’m passionate about scaling early-stage companies. I was motivated to join Event Store both because of the opportunities presented to leverage my technical experience in event streaming and the chance to do something truly innovative with a team I’ve known and trusted for years,” said Wang. “My deep expertise in distributed systems, enterprise-grade solutions and data streaming will help our engineering team solve the myriad problems around data access facing our customers today. I am looking forward to supporting Event Store’s future growth as the company sets the standard for what it means to be an event-native data platform.”
Today, Event Store also announced the availability of Event Store Cloud on AWS Marketplace and extensive enhancements to Event Store Cloud to streamline management, significantly improve ease of use and increase time-to-value.