About TierFleet

TierFleet, Inc. located in Irvine California, was founded in 2001 by a group of industry and academic experts with the vision of providing transparent scalability to database systems. The group consisted of world-class experts of information technology focused on storage networking, database systems, and communication networking segments. TierFleet is privately held and is completely debt free.


Founding and Executive Team
Business Advisory Board
Technical Advisory Board

Founding and Executive Team

  • Dr. Homayoun Yousefi'zadeh is the founder and chairman of TierFleet. He has more than sixteen years of academic, hands-on, consulting, technical management, and business development experience in different branches of computer industry. He is a senior member of IEEE, has published thirty five journal and conference papers, is the inventor of three patents, is the technical editor of two IEEE journals, and has served as the chair or the member of the technical program committee of various IEEE/ACM conferences. From 1999 to 2001, Dr. Yousefi'zadeh served as the chairperson of Systems' Management workgroup of SNIA. He was also a member of scientific advisory board of Integrated Media Services Center (MSC) at USC. He carries a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California and holds an Adjunct Professor position with the EECS Department of University of California, Irvine.


  • Safa V. Hodges is the CEO of TierFleet. She brings a wealth of legal experience to TierFleet. She has been practicing law for over 14 years with an emphasis on corporation and civil litigation. She has practiced both in US and Europe broadening her specialty to International and Comparative law as well. Ms. Hodges carries a Bachelor of Arts from California State University, Fullerton in Business with an emphasis Information Management Systems. She also holds a Juris Doctorate degree from Whittier Law School.


  • Matt Thompson is with the founding team of TierFleet. He has over 30 years of experience in software industry during which he has been involved in compilers, generative programming, operating systems, databases, and telecommunications. He has worked for US army, Unisys, and Teradata among others. Mr. Thompson holds an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and a masters degree in Computing Science both from Texas A&M University.


    • Business Advisory Board

  • Dr. David K. Schrader is currently director of strategy and marketing, e-business programs at Teradata Solutions Group, NCR. He is the lead Strategist and one of the marketing managers for NCR's e-business program. Prior to taking this position in June 1998, Schrader was the Teradata Object Relational (TOR) marketing manager and the Teradata multimedia database advanced development engineering manager. From 1985 to 1991, he was with the database engineering group of DEC, and from 1983-85 he worked at Servio Corporation on the GemStone object-oriented database product. Dr. Schrader holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Purdue University.


  • James Staten is currently strategy director of network storage division of Sun  Microsystems. Prior to the present time, James was the Chief Development Officer of ApplianceWare Inc. With over a decade of market examination and analysis experience, James pioneered the quantitative and qualitative analysis of trends and technologies of the server appliance market space at Gartner's Dataquest. For Dataquest he spoke regularly about the emerging technologies in media such as ABC television, CNBC, and ZDTV. Prior to Dataquest, Staten served as editor of the Internet and networking sections of MacWEEK and editor of MacWEEK online. James holds an MA from the University of Southern California, and a BA in Psychology from the University of North Texas.


  • Carl Engstrom has over 14 years experience in sales and marketing. Carl is currently a senior sales manager at EMC. Since 1995, Carl held several positions with a publicly held high-tech company, Procom Technology. As Technology Manager, Carl was responsible for negotiating major OEM contracts as well as developing industry partnerships. In this role, he was a lead for promoting the concept of network-attached appliances to Fortune 100 accounts. During his tenure as National Sales Manager he developed a team of 35 outside sales representatives across the U.S. Carl's previous experience includes Operations Manager for a start-up training company, Soft-Train, as well as marketing for Music Choice, a venture-funded cable programming service. Carl holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of California at Los Angeles.


  • Joe Federer has many years of database industry experience. He is currently with the Teradata Group, NCR. In the past, he was the VP of professional services for Teradata. In this capacity, he led the strategy and operations of over 1400 consultants in pursuit of Teradata's data warehouse division. He worked for two years with a small strategic management consulting firm based in St. Louis, Missouri in Information Technology consulting and CRM consulting. Prior to that, he spent 15 years with NCR in a variety of assignments in Professional Services, Sales, and Information Technology Services. Joe has background in Financial systems, accounting systems, and credit card processing. Mr. Federer holds an MBA specializing in Marketing, from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

    Technical Advisory Board

  • Dr. Richard Muntz is a professor and the former chair of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is the world-class recognized name of database community. He has had many years of academic and industry experience in the areas of database, multimedia, and storage systems. He is a member of the Board of Directors for SIGMETRICS and is the former chair of IFIP Working Group 7.3. He is a past associate editor for the journal of the ACM and was editor-in-chief of ACM Computing Surveys from 1992 to 1995. He is a member of Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and a Fellow of the IEEE. Dr. Muntz received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1969.


  • Dr. John Silvester is a professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). He is the world-recognized name in the field of computer communication networks. He has been the Vice-Provost for Scholarly Technology of USC since 1997 and was the Vice-Provost of Academic Computing from 1994 until 1997. He has many years of academic and industry experience in the areas broadband communication networks, distributed systems, and packet radio networks. He is the author of more than 100 journal and conference papers. He has been Program Chairman of various IEEE Computer Communications symposia including the IEEE Infocom. Dr. Silvester received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, Los Angeles in 1980.


  • Dr. Cyrus Shahabi is currently an associate professor and the director of the distributed information management laboratory at the Computer Science department of the University of Southern California. Dr. Shahabi's current interests include Multimedia Databases and Storage Servers, Internet and Distributed databases, data mining, and query optimization. He has served as a referee for prestigious database conferences (e.g., SIGMOD, VLDB) and journals (e.g., IEEE TKDE). He was the program committee chair of ACM WIDM'99 workshop and is serving as a program committee member for DEXA 1997-99, ACM WIDM 98-99, SPIE'98-99 and ACM CIKM'99 conferences. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at the University of Southern California in August 1996.