In this new role, Stolz will leverage his expertise in targeting, developing and delivering innovative technology solutions to expand GemStones' global financial services offering and cultivate its growing capital markets division.

A prominent member of the financial technology community for over 15 years, Stolz served during the last nine years as director and chief architect of Merrill Lynch's global markets and investment banking debt division. In this role, Stolz was responsible for the design and development of trading systems and trading support systems for interest rate, credit and asset backed derivatives, as well as FX, repos and fixed income products. He was instrumental in the design and integration of Merrill's debt and FX e-commerce/electronic trading solutions, and also helped to devise an ultra-low-latency store-and-forward messaging mechanism to support Merrill's time-sensitive business functions.

Prior to his role at Merrill Lynch, Stolz was the co-founder, EVP and CIO of Ignite Technologies, a firm that specialized in the creation of Java related software development products. Throughout his career he has held a series of leadership positions at companies including Investment Management Services, Inc., and MegaData Corporation. His professional highlights include engineering dynamic data infrastructures for United Airlines, Moore Capital, American Airlines and other global corporations that rely on real-time distributed architectures. Stolz brings extensive industry expertise in trading, risk management and quantitative analysis and has a proven track record of delivering order management, equity trading, and fixed income trading systems and solutions to leading financial organizations.

"As we continue to penetrate the global financial services industry, we are committed to providing highly-optimized solutions in response to client needs," said Dan J. Ware, executive vice president, worldwide sales, GemStone Systems. "Mike's proven experrtise and diverse industry background will help us to deliver innovative solutions that meet the evolving challenges faced by the world's leading financial institutions."