Press Release

Kiva Systems Expands Management Team to Support Rapid Growth

Industry Veterans Will Further Drive Sales, Marketing and Product Development for Game-Changing Material Handling System

Woburn, MA – September 23, 2008Kiva Systems, a developer of breakthrough picking, sortation and shipping systems for distribution center automation, today announced that three industry veterans have joined its management team to fill newly created positions, further expanding sales, marketing and product development. Chris Reisig, vice president of sales, joins Kiva to grow worldwide sales and business development, Mitch Rosenberg, vice president of marketing, will drive marketing, lead-generation and product management, while Benge Ambrogi, vice president of product development, will lead the hardware and software engineering teams.

“Literally every single customer deployment we've done has shattered industry metrics for productivity, cycle-time, quality and ramp up,” said Mick Mountz, founder and CEO of Kiva Systems. “Our rapid commercial growth is directly attributable to the value created by this simple yet powerful technology, and to the talented professionals at Kiva who are passionate about our customers’ fulfillment challenges. Benge, Mitch and Chris are models in this regard, and will help expand their organizations to accelerate prospects through the Kiva customer engagement process.”

The Kiva Mobile Fulfillment System (MFS) effectively enables inventory to manage itself and transforms the distribution center (DC) from a serial-process operation to a massively parallel-processing order fulfillment engine. As a result, the Kiva MFS enables breakthrough improvements over generally accepted material handling benchmarks, including order picking speed, order accuracy, volume scalability and flexibility in reconfiguring operations or responding to market changes.

Reisig will lead Kiva's worldwide sales and business development teams, driving all aspects of Kiva's global customer acquisition and market expansion efforts. He brings more than 15 years of U.S. and international enterprise sales leadership experience to Kiva, and most recently led Worldwide Sales at Endeca Technologies. Reisig holds a B.A. in English from Saint Bonaventure University. "In today's challenging economy, our customers need competitive advantages. The Kiva MFS provides them with improved productivity, greater flexibility and reduced cost," said Reisig. "I look forward to bringing this unique offering to DCs worldwide, further enhancing Kiva's track record of customer wins and rapid growth."

Rosenberg is responsible for marketing and product management, including creating clear messages, expanding market awareness of Kiva, and matching product strategy to customer priorities. For 25 years, he has focused on bringing innovative technologies to market at companies such as Rivulet Communications, Imaging Automation, MultiLink, PictureTel, Kurzweil Computer Products and Automatix. Rosenberg earned both S.B. and Master of Science degrees in electrical engineering from MIT, and an M.B.A. from Boston University. “Kiva Systems is the most disruptive technology I have encountered in my career,” said Rosenberg. “Since the Kiva MFS is deployed in warehouses that distribute everything from lipsticks to hockey sticks, we’ll drive expansion by refining messages to specific markets while broadening market awareness of Kiva’s unique benefits.”

A seasoned veteran with 22 years of experience in the product development world, Ambrogi leads the Kiva hardware and software engineering teams. He is responsible for the overall systems architecture and the product development processes. Ambrogi came to Kiva after 13 years at Deka Research and Development, where he contributed to the design, architecture and leadership of a number of products. Ambrogi has S.B. and Master of Science degrees in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and holds 27 patents. “The Kiva MFS can be used to move cases or entire pallets of product in a distribution center,” said Ambrogi. “The wide range of products that fulfillment centers need to pick- pack and ship are driving us to develop exciting new material handling solutions that are simply not possible with conventional, bolted-down automation.”

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