This morning, sqrrl announced that Mark Terenzoni will be taking over as company’s chief executive officer. The newly appointed CEO brings twenty years of experience to the Cambridge-based startup, which was founded in 2012 by the team behind Apache Accumulo.

Terenzoni joins sqrrl from F5 Networks, where he served as the senior vice president of its Traffix unit. Before his stint at F5, the executive was the COO of Acopia Networks.

Sqrrl’s flagship offering is an Accumulo-based solution that delivers cell-based security controls in a way that makes sense for enterprise buyers. The company claims that its software can scale to tens of petabytes, which makes it ideal for Big Data clusters that are used to process massive amounts of sensitive information.

Wikibon co-founder and chief analyst Dave Vellante provided more details on the company’s product:

“The Accumulo project was developed at the NSA ostensibly because the agency needed big data scale, better security controls and the ability to analyze diverse data sets without sacrificing performance.  Sqrrl came about to fill the need for an application development and analytics platform on top of Accumulo. There are a couple of trends going on here:

1) the need for better security within NoSQL databases – meaning finer grained controls AND (importantly) the ability to deliver strong security without killing performance. Security is gaining much attention within the Big Data world.

2) The need to simplify application development. There are too few big data apps and sqrrl is designed to simplify and accelerate app dev on top of Accumulo. Many NoSQL database developers, particularly HBase developers complain about the complexity of developing apps.

3) Scale. Many initial big data projects have been experimental. As projects move from proof of concept to production organizations are looking for more scale, better performance. Accumulo seems to have great potential in this area specifically beyond government applications and into mainstream commercial areas.”

Sqrrl says that its database is being deployed at multiple client sites, thanks to this combination of security and simplicity. The system is also gaining traction in the Hadoop community, where intense competing is driving vendors to pursue new opportunities to get ahead of rivals.

A few months ago the startup announced that it has signed up for Hortonworks’ certification program, which enables solution providers to integrate their offerings with the Hortonworks Data Platform.