ZEDEDA Hires Open-Source Pioneer Donald Becker

Joins Team Of Open-Source Veterans Aiming To Deliver On Its Vision Of An ‘Open-Edge’ Economy

ZEDEDA, a startup powering the real-time enterprise, today announced the strategic hire of Donald Becker as Chief System Engineer, adding deep open-source heritage and domain knowledge to the team on the heels of a $3.06 million seed investment round.

Becker joins a team of open-source and open standards veterans including founders Roman Shaposhnik, recently elected to the Board of Directors of the Apache Foundation, Erik Nordmark, member of the Internet Architecture Board and author of more than a dozen IoT networking standards, and Dino Farinacci, a 28-year IETF contributor, currently driving the IETF working group on the Location Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP – RFC 6830) critical to creating open standards-based overlay networks.

ZEDEDA continues to build a company from the ground up with expertise in the core technologies required to build a platform for large scale deployment and operations of edge systems. Attracting top talent that shares ZEDEDA’s open source values is critical to executing on the company’s vision of delivering a secure, cloud-native platform for scaling out real-time edge applications.

The sheer size of the Internet of Things, a market surpassing an estimated $1 trillion by 2020, guarantees the edge of the network will be an extraordinarily diverse hardware environment. With solutions from self-driving cars to industrial robots already going live in manufacturing and logistics environments, ZEDEDA is enabling the IoT to meet its true potential by democratizing access to the cyber-physical edge and IoT data with an open platform on which they can build, deploy, and manage apps and devices.

“The edge economy is going to be as large and more diverse than the internet itself. It is imperative that edge computing not be locked into a single, proprietary scheme for app development and deployment, controlled by a small number of large companies,” said Said Ouissal, CEO and Founder of ZEDEDA. “Such a platform can only be built by a team whose ethos is that the edge should be open, secure, without special controls and distributed with inherent trust. Becker is a critical leader within this ecosystem, and his talent exemplifies our shared ideals.”

Prior to joining ZEDEDA, Becker was an early primary contributor to the Linux kernel, focusing on high-performance networking and distributed computing. He founded and led the Beowulf Project at NASA, which directly led to Linux becoming the OS of choice for high performance distributed computing. Along with researchers at other centers, he received the Gordon Bell P**** in 1997 for his work using Beowulf clustering software on PCs to solve math problems previously run on purpose-built supercomputers.

Becker was a founder of and served in various executive roles at Scyld Computer Corporation, and later as CTO of Penguin Computing, a developer and supplier of Beowulf Clusters.

“ZEDEDA represents the right approach to a new challenge,” said Becker. “The diversity of the environment at the edge will require an open-source approach to ensure security and scalability over the wide variety of edge systems and ZEDEDA’s DNA prioritizes a system designed to do just that—open, distributed and trusted, from the ground up.”

Founded in 2016, ZEDEDA is pioneering a cloud-native approach to the deployment, management and security of real-time edge applications at hyperscale for solutions ranging from self-driving cars to industrial robots. ZEDEDA is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA with engineering and market development teams based in India, UK, Germany and Korea.