Olympic shooter to head US IT firm in Korea

By Kang Seung-woo

Lee Eun-chul, Clustrix’s Korea Country Manager

Olympic gold medalist shooter Lee Eun-chul has been named chief of a U.S. database company’s Korea office.

According to Clustrix, Thursday, Lee, 50, will work as country manager for its branch office in Seoul. The San Francisco-based firm opened the office, Wednesday, to commit to the growing Korean and Asia-Pacific markets.

“Lee, well known to Korean Olympics fans as a gold medal winner in shooting, was named Korea Country Manager for Clustrix,” the company said in a press release.

“He joins Clustrix from Treasure Data where, as Korea General Manager, he established the company as a top brand in the data analysis market. Previously, he was CEO of DAS, and IoT module company Intelra where he worked with companies such as KT, Softbank, and Qualcomm.”

Lee studied computer science at Texas Lutheran University.

He was the first Korean athlete to compete at the Summer Olympic Games for the five straight times -- from 1984 to 2000 -- and he won the gold medal in the 50-meter rifle prone in Barcelona, Spain in 1992.

In addition to the Olympic gold medal, the shooter also claimed two golds at the world championships and five golds at the Asian Games.

After hanging up his gun in 2000, Lee began his career in the information technology industry the following year, working at mobile software company Wind River in Silicon Valley.

Along with Lee, Clustrix hired Jin Lim as vice president of technology. Lim has more than 17 years of research and development (R&D) experience in scale-out database, storage infrastructure, and information-sharing applications under his belt. Most recently he led an R&D team with Samsung Electronics.

Clustrix, which has high-profile customers including AOL, Nielsen, Rakuten and Symantec, is pinning high hopes on the Korean and other Asian markets.

“The Korean and Asia-Pacific markets are rich with the ad-tech, e-commerce social, and gaming applications at which our distributed database excels with its ability to process millions of transactions a second,” said CEO Mike Azevedo. “We are seeing huge growth for Clustrix in the Asia-Pacific region, so it was important to bring on a strong team with prior success in the market.”