Daniel Kim, Chairman and CEO of Appro announced today that the Appro's board of directors has named Jim Ballew as Chief Technology Officer in a move to maintain technology management excellence in the High Performance and Enterprise Computing markets. Jim Ballew is an accomplished technology leader who brings over 25 years of experience and has played key roles in the design and development of high performance computing systems. As CTO, Jim Ballew will assume the role of Lead Technologist, responsible for ensuring that the company's technology focus supports the strategic direction set by Appro's Board of Directors. He will be responsible for the success of Appro's Next Generation HPC Cluster Management Program acting as a key member of the architecture team which involves planning and coordinating, pilot projects and for running compliance testing programs. Before joining Appro, Jim Ballew was Chief Architect for the design and development of high performance computing systems for Raytheon Systems. He was the principal architect for systems developed for NOAA, NASA, DOE, DOD, and classified applications. Most recently Mr. Ballew was responsible for Raytheon's multi-year IR&D program to develop fault tolerant architectures for scalable high performance computing systems based on commodity components. He led the development of a fault tolerant mesh architecture which included cluster management and fabric management software to support large scale applications. This work resulted in the filing of twelve patent applications based on the architecture and software. "Jim Ballew and his team are true innovators. Appro and our customers will greatly benefit from their experience," Daniel Kim, CEO of Appro said. "After working with Jim Ballew for years as a close Strategic Partner, it will be great to have him on our senior leadership team."