Ahana, the SQL analytics company for Presto, has appointed David E. Simmen as its CTO. In his new role, Simmen will oversee the company’s technology strategy while driving product innovation.

His extensive database experience will further accelerate Ahana’s vision of simplifying ad hoc analytics for organizations of all shapes and sizes, the company said.

Simmen joined Ahana most recently from Apple where he engineered iCloud database services. Prior to Apple, he was Chief Architect with Splunk and named the first Fellow in the company’s history. There, he built Splunk’s multi-year technical roadmap and architecture in support of enterprise customers.

Prior to Splunk, Simmen was Engineering Fellow and CTO of Teradata Aster where he set the technical direction and led the architecture team that built advanced analytics engines and storage capabilities in support of big data discovery applications.

“Dave has a remarkable record of innovation in distributed databases, data federation and advanced analytics. That, coupled with his over 30 years of architecting and building in the field, is nothing short of impressive,” said Steven Mih, Co-founder & CEO of Ahana.

“His experience innovating distributed database technology with Splunk, Teradata and IBM provides Ahana the depth needed for truly groundbreaking development to achieve our vision of unified, federated analytics. I couldn’t be more thrilled to have Dave at the helm as CTO and Co-founder,” Mih added.

Simmen is also a named inventor on 37 U.S. patents and has 15 publications to his name including Fundamental Techniques for Order Optimization, Robust Query Processing through Progressive Optimization, and Accelerating Big Data Analytics With Collaborative Planning.