PALO ALTO, CA (Marketwired - Mar 4, 2014) - Ayasdi (www.ayasdi.com) today announced that it continues to strengthen its executive bench, adding industry leaders Harnish Kanani, as Vice President of Customer Success, and Thomas Schaeffer, as Vice President of Human Resources, to its leadership team. Ayasdi enables organizations to automatically find insights in complex data and to discover answers to questions they did not know to ask. By eliminating the need to formulate initial hypothesis and write queries, Ayasdi's approach allows data scientists and domain experts to reveal breakthroughs in minutes. Kanani will report to Dr. Pek Lum, Chief Data Scientist and VP of Solutions and Schaeffer will report to Gurjeet Singh, Co-Founder and CEO of Ayasdi.

Kanani will help build and lead Ayasdi's Customer Success group. He is an entrepreneurial leader with 20-plus years of experience selling and delivering enterprise software products and services globally. Most recently, Kanani was the VP and GM within Oracle's Cloud Applications Consulting team. He has also previously overseen global customer success programs and services operations at Taleo (now part of Oracle), Cognizant Technology Solutions, SumTotal Systems, Emagia, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, and TATA. He holds a B.E. in Electronics and Electrical Engineering from India's Birla Institute of Technology and Science.

"It is a rare gift to work at a company where you can really make a difference in the world and Ayasdi is doing just that," said Harnish Kanani, Vice President of Customer Success, Ayasdi. "With Ayasdi's award-winning technology widely recognized as one of the most innovative platforms in Big Data and a team passionate about helping companies find breakthrough insights, we are going to build a world-class customer success team that will help solve our clients' most complex problems."

As Vice President of Human Resources, Schaeffer will manage the human resources function and continue to grow Ayasdi's team. Schaeffer has been a human resources executive in the high tech industry for more than 25 years. He has been a participant and strategist in five successful technology initial public offerings (IPOs), including YuMe, Juniper Networks, Megatest, Synopsys, and Daisy Systems. Schaeffer is also an expert in the human resource elements of corporate acquisition strategies, working on Cisco's acquisition of StrataCom, one of the largest technology acquisitions to date. Schaeffer holds a B.A. in Business Administration from the University of San Francisco and an M.A. in Organizational Development from Chapman University.