About us

Peter is CEO and a Co-founder of Instaclustr. He has more than 25 years of experience and expertise in information technology services, both as a business leader and implementer of customer solutions. Peter previously led Stratsec, a specialist cybersecurity business, as CEO from startup through growth and onto successful exit in 2011. At Stratsec, he had responsibility for all aspects of the business from its foundation in 2003, its growth across Australia, and into South East Asia culminating in the naming of Stratsec as Australian Business of the Year in 2010, along with several other cybersecurity awards. In 2011, Stratsec was acquired by BAE Systems with Peter taking on a senior cyber leadership role until the founding of Instaclustr in 2013. Peter is now applying his experience in growing great companies to building and scaling Instaclustr.

As Chief Revenue Officer & EVP GTM Operations, Steve is responsible for all go-to-market functions including Sales, Customer Success, Sales Engineering, Marketing, Consulting & Instaclustr Labs.

Steve has experience leading large sales teams with revenue responsibility in excess of $100M in markets including hybrid cloud, ERP, SDN virtualization, database, and middleware. Before joining Instaclustr he led US Commercial sales for SDN and Cloud Management at VMware.

Steve earned his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management where he was a Sloan Fellow. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Washington.

Steve lives in Seattle, Washington and is a lover of the outdoors and keen on boating in particular.

As Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder at Instaclustr, Ben sets the technical direction for the company. Ben is located in our California office and is active in the Apache Cassandra community.

Prior to Instaclustr, Ben had been working as an independent consultant developing NoSQL solutions for enterprises and was running a high-tech cryptographic and cybersecurity formal testing laboratory at BAE Systems and Stratsec.

As Chief Product Officer, Ben is charged with steering Instaclustr’s development roadmap and overseeing the product engineering, production support, open source, and consulting teams.

Ben has over 20 years experience in systems development, including previously being lead architect for the product that is now Oracle Policy Automation, and over 10 years as a solution architect and project manager for Accenture. He has extensive experience in managing development teams and implementing quality controlled engineering practices.

Doug is a Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder at Instaclustr. He also leads Instaclustr Labs, an initiative designed to grow and leverage our enabling services capabilities, capture new and innovative ideas, and extract value from our extensive deep technical experience and body of knowledge. Before this role, Doug led the marketing division at Instaclustr.

Prior to Instaclustr, Doug was a Co-founder of Stratsec, a world-class, highly awarded and recognized cybersecurity consulting, testing, and research firm, which was acquired by BAE Systems in 2011. Stratsec was awarded Telstra Business of the Year in 2010. Doug has also been recognized as a leading entrepreneur in the industry through the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Program in 2010.

Before becoming the CIO of Instaclustr, Michael founded and managed credativ and its Open Source Support Center. He bootstrapped the company to become a multi-national specialist for open source services. In the process, he helped numerous businesses improve their IT infrastructure by using pure open source solutions. On the community side, Michael has been a developer for nearly 30 years working on different open source projects, including well-known solutions like Debian and PostgreSQL. He has also engaged in significant open source evangelism and given related presentations at various events. Michael teaches open source infrastructure components at a local university as an adjunct professor.

Evita works with the Leadership and Operations team to deliver accounting, tax, and financial capability. Evita is a Chartered Accountant with over 15 years experience across a number of industries, working previously for the accounting and advisory firm PwC and at an ASX listed company. Evita is based at the Canberra, Australia office.