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It takes a meticulous mind-set to be an accomplished woodworker, or a standards-setting computer scientist. Mike Kilian, EMC Corp. veteran and new chief technology officer for Acton-based video storage company Blackwave Inc., is both.
Kilian carved out a niche in the computer science field right from the start, having earned all of his degrees — including a doctorate from Harvard University — in computer science. His first job out of the world of academia was with supercomputer company Kendall Square Research, a perfect fit with his concentration on massively parallel computing systems. Unfortunately, KSR in the early 1990s was at the tail end of the independent supercomputer company wave, and it shut its doors in 1994.
It wasn’t long before EMC came calling. Kilian came on board the Hopkinton-based storage giant with a fairly nebulous role and a job title he created. “When I first joined EMC I was called a ‘senior technologist,’ and I invented that role for EMC,” Kilian said.
Perhaps counterintuitively, it was at EMC that Kilian developed a taste for working in a startup environment. In 2000, EMC bought the technology that would become its Centera line of products, and Kilian was named CTO of that division.
“We were almost a company in a company, and we had a huge amount of latitude to do things,” Kilian said. That latitude allowed Kilian and the Centera team to develop the product line into a billion-dollar yearly operation for EMC.
His success led Kilian to be named as the new EMC distinguished engineer for the company’s cloud computing efforts. But the entrepreneurial spirit was not so prevalent in that operation as it was in Centera. “I was open to (other) opportunities, whereas in the past I would have said ‘I don’t need to talk to a headhunter’,” Kilian said. One headhunter presented the Blackwave opportunity.
Like any good carpenter, though, Kilian — who relaxes by building things in his woodworking shop at home — measured twice before he cut once. “I spent quite a lot of time before joining Blackwave looking at Blackwave,” he said. One of the things that drew his attention was the fact that, early on in the Centera development process, he had considered video storage and retrieval as a market for the product, but the team decided to stick to documents like e-mail and spreadsheets. Now here was Blackwave with a very similar technology, applied to the video market. He made that cut and is excited to be back in a startup environment.
“EMC is a great company, make no doubt about it,” Kilian said. “At Blackwave, however, I can make a significant difference in an entire product line almost instantly.”
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