Donald Rippert joined IBM's Global Technology Services unit as part of its cloud development program in March 2014 and later became general manager of IBM cloud strategy. Prior to that , he was president and CEO of Basho Technologies, the supplier of the Riak NoSQL database system, from 2012-2014. He is the former CTO of Accenture from 2004-2011. He holds US patent no. 20040117759 on distributed development and a second patent on threat assessment. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia and resides in Northern Virginia with his wife and five sons.