Jerry Held

Dr. Gerald Held was appointed to the NetApp board in December 2009. Dr. Held, CEO of Held Consulting LLC, provides strategic consulting to CEOs and senior executives of technology firms.

In 1998, Dr. Held was "CEO-in-residence" at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Through 1997, he was senior vice president of Oracle Corporation's server product division, where he was responsible for Oracle's most important products during a period of rapid growth, from $1.5 billion to $6 billion in annual revenues. Prior to working at Oracle, he spent 18 years at Tandem Computers, where he was a member of the executive team that grew Tandem from a startup to $2 billion in annual revenues. During his tenure at Tandem, Dr. Held was appointed to several senior management positions, including chief technology officer, senior vice president of strategy, and vice president of new ventures. He led the initial development of Tandem's relational database products.

From 2006 to 2010, he was the Executive Chairman of Vertica Systems, an analytic database company that was acquired by Hewlett-Packard Company. Dr. Held served in director and executive roles at a variety of technology companies, including Business Objects SA, Tandem Computers, Inc., Oracle Corporation, Microplace, Inc., and Bella Pictures, Inc. Dr. Held also serves on the board of several private companies, including Tamr Inc., Madaket Inc. and Informatica Corporation, a formerly public technology company.

Dr. Held received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue, an MS in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where he led the initial development of the INGRES relational database management system.