Percona, the open-source database vendor, has appointed Liz Warner to the position of Chief Technology Officer. She assumes responsibility from Vadim Tkachenko, who, as Co-Founder, has been the CTO for nearly 18 years. Tkachenko will no longer hold an executive position in the company, He will instead be the Technology Fellow and will focus on Percona’s involvement in the Linux Foundation’s Valkey Community, the growth of vector databases and other emerging technologies.
Warner will play an important part in developing and implementing the portfolio of solutions that Percona offers. It comes after Percona celebrated 19% growth in ARR. She will also take a role in Steering Percona Everest, which should be emerging from beta in 2024. Percona Everest is a new open-source cloud-native database platform.
The platform has an intuitive user interface (UI) and a command-line interface (CLI). Percona Everest offers advanced database provisioning and management features at no cost. While providing control over infrastructure expenses, thus eliminating vendor lock-in.
Ann Schlemmer, CEO of Percona, commented, “We’ve reached a pivotal moment in open source, and Percona is doubling down on its commitment to staying open through the expansion of our products and service offerings, as well as our involvement in industry-wide initiatives such as The Linux Foundation’s Valkey Community. Our accelerated growth will require a new level of strategic thinking, so I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Liz Warner to the team.
“Liz brings a wealth of experience and plenty of success, transforming organizations across a variety of industries. Her experience and leadership will prove invaluable to the Percona team as we continue to scale and build world-class open-source database solutions.”
Who is Liz Warner
Warner joins after spending the last two months as the technical strategy lead at Kooth Digital Health, after Weaveworks went into administration. She was CTO at Weaveworks for two and a half years. She is an experienced CTO working with several companies as an interim CTO. Driving organisational transformation across several organisations operating in different industries, including media, financial services, banking and manufacturing.
As VP of engineering at Toyota, she restructured teams across the UK and the US. She also worked at Clim8, 10x Future Technologies, Nationwide for Business, Motion Picture Solutions, LendInvest and Mettle.
Warner commented in a brief post on LinkedIn, saying, “I’m delighted to announce that I’m starting a new position as Chief Technology Officer at Percona!”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Warner is an experienced CTO. Having taken a large number of interim positions is used to fitting into an existing team. She will likely remain located in the UK, working remotely. It will be interesting to see how she steers Percona as CTO.
It will not be an easy task assuming the position following on from a co-founder. However with Tkachenko still able to offer advice, it will be interesting to see what changes she brings to the company over the next few months.
