Former CA Architect Joins DataDirect Technologies’ Research and Development Team

DataDirect Technologies, the unparalleled leader in data connectivity and mainframe integration and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS), today announced that Asher Aremband has joined the company as senior director of research and development for the DataDirect® Shadow® product. The DataDirect Shadow mainframe integration suite is the industry’s only single, unified platform for mainframe integration and the first to exploit IBM specialty engines to reduce costs and improve service-oriented architecture (SOA) performance. Aremband will be responsible for Shadow product direction, spearheading all phases of design, development and testing and will report directly to John Goodson, vice president of product operations.

As a member of the DataDirect product operations team, Aremband joins a who’s who of industry thought-leaders and data connectivity experts. The company’s executive team has been instrumental in the development of data connectivity standards like ODBC and JDBCTM and continues to participate on a number of expert panels, including JDBC 3.0/4.0, JDBC Rowsets, various W3C XML Working Groups, the ANSI SQL/XML committee, and Middleware Group Expert List.

Aremband, who is a recognized industry expert in the mainframe technologies market, joins DataDirect from CA where he held various titles including Architect and Chief Architect for OPS/MVS as well as Development Manager for multiple products. There he was responsible for the design and implementation of sophisticated product infrastructure for CA-OPS/MVS and provided development and support of the CA common REXX engine used by multiple products on z/OS, z/VM and z/VSE. During his time with the company, Aremband was a founding member of the CA Council for Technical Excellence and a featured speaker at numerous industry conferences, tradeshows and events.

Prior to his 18-year tenure with CA and its predecessor companies, Aremband held various software development and systems programming positions at Candle Corporation, Quotron Systems and Dataccount Corporation, gaining valuable working knowledge of the IBM mainframe operating systems MVS and VM and performance monitoring techniques.

In his capacity as Senior Director of Research and Development at DataDirect Technologies, Aremband will work closely with Gregg Willhoit, Shadow chief software architect. Willhoit has architected and developed a wide variety of commercially successful software products, including DBMS Catalog Management tools, MVS and DB2 performance monitors and is the co-developer of the ShadowDirect® ODBC-to-mainframe data product for DB2, IMS, VSAM, CICS, and Adabas. Together, Willhoit and Aremband will provide the technical leadership and expertise needed to ensure continued growth and success of the Shadow product.

“We are delighted to add an industry innovator like Asher Aremband to the product operations team and know his vast experience working with mainframe technologies will be a tremendous asset to the company, the more than 500 existing Shadow customers and our robust OEM channel,” said John Goodson, vice president of product operations at DataDirect Technologies. “Bringing on highly skilled professionals like Asher will help DataDirect extend its leadership in mainframe integration while continuing to bring new innovations to the industry.”

With a 20-year history and position as the world leader in data connectivity and mainframe integration, DataDirect has established strategic, development-level relationships with the leading database and platform vendors. As a member of the DataDirect product operations team, Aremband will continue this tradition of relationship building, gathering a deep understanding of vendor product direction, release schedules, and rich feature support to ensure the Shadow product continues to offer customers bleeding-edge mainframe integration functionality.

“DataDirect’s unwavering commitment to product innovation and customer service and success makes them an appealing organization for any IT professional,” said Asher Aremband. “I’m thrilled to be working with some of the world’s foremost experts on data connectivity and mainframe integration to produce first-rate software products that help other IT professionals build quality, high-performance applications.”