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Former Sallie Mae CEO Larry Hough to Join Board of Directors: Appistry, a leading provider of highly-scalable application platform software, has announced the close of the first tranche of a Series C financing round lead by Stuart Mill Venture Partners. Lawrence A. Hough, managing director of Stuart Mill and former president and CEO of Sallie Mae, has been elected to the Appistry board of directors. Proceeds from this round will be used to finance an expansion of sales, marketing and product development in support of the company's leading grid-based application platform product, Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF). Appistry EAF dramatically simplifies the development, deployment and management of highly scalable and reliable software applications for extreme transaction processing (XTP), software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud computing, and other data- and CPU-intensive applications while substantially reducing data center energy consumption. "This round comes at an exciting time for Appistry," said Kevin Haar, Appistry chief executive officer. "So far this year we've already doubled last year's sales, delivered a significant new version of our core product, welcomed the first 1,000 members to our Peer2Peer Developer Community, signed a strategic relationship with an existing customer, and been recognized yet again by Gartner for the visionary role we play in our market. The additional capital we've raised will allow us to accelerate this momentum." "Moreover," continued Haar, "the deep experience Larry Hough brings to our board in the financial services and transportation sectors will be invaluable as we continue to grow our business." Mr. Hough is currently managing director of Stuart Mill Venture Partners and chairman of Stuart Mill Capital, Inc, a Virginia-based management firm that he founded. Prior to forming Stuart Mill Capital in 1997, Mr. Hough worked with Sallie Mae for 25 years, where he served as president and CEO from 1990 to 1997. Under his leadership, Sallie Mae became the first government-sponsored enterprise to relinquish its federal charter in return for full independence. "A challenge I've seen repeatedly in my career is the difficulty of creating highly-scalable software applications for processing large volumes of information or serving Internet-scale user communities," said Hough. "Appistry's products solve this increasingly pervasive problem, enabling enterprises to more easily build and manage large-scale, mission-critical software applications. The company has demonstrated remarkable vision and execution to date, and we're excited to help it achieve its next level of growth."