Solidware | Advisors

Bill Perry, co-founder of SoftBridge Advisors, serves as board member or senior advisor to 18 successful technology ventures. Previous to SoftBridge, Mr. Perry built Precision Visuals, Inc., a graphics software company, from a ten person garage shop into number 49 on the Top 100 Software Company list. He spent the early years of his career in large corporations, with key assignments as marketing manager for $1B line of industrial products, and as chief financial officer of a rapidly growing, overseas telecom group. Mr. Perry bring his principal strengths in general management, marketing, international business, and finance to the Solidware team. He holds an engineering degree from M.I.T. and an M.B.A. from Harvard.

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Jim Sherburne has over twenty years experience in the creation and execution of all aspects of global marketing, business development and international sales strategies for enterprise software products. He was co-founder of Nantucket Corporation, originators of Clipper, a successful software development environment for dBase language that was acquired by Computer Associates in 1991. His career includes working with such marquee companies as AOL, BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Rational Software, Maxtor and Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). Sherburne's credentials in the software testing and performance management space are exceptionally strong, with a number of published articles to his credit. He has had numerous consulting engagements in this arena, filling the role of Group Marketing Manager for the SunTest Group at Sun Microsystems, marketing a full suite of native Java unit testing products, as well as working with Agitar, a fast growing start-up in the Java unit testing space. He created and managed the first Product Marketing team for IBM Rational, flagship Rose Business Unit. Sherburne also served as Sr. Vice President of Marketing for Parasoft. Sherburne holds a BA in Political Science from University of California at Berkeley, specializing in International Relations.

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Ken Tallman has pioneered and refined subscription and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models over the last 5 years (as the market tried to figure out what these were) at thought leaders Sun Microsystems and salesforce.com. During Ken's 25 years in high tech, he has built teams and programs to bring dozens of cutting-edge products to market, and helped customers around the world figure out how to leverage each new innovation to drive real business results. Most recently, Ken introduced salesforce.com's new on-demand platform to CIOs across north America, driving initial interest and investment in the platform. Previously, Ken was instrumental in bringing Sun's utility computing model to compute-bound organizations around the globe, and was a key member of the core team that developed the innovative Java Enterprise System subscription model at Sun. Ken graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Idaho.

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Patrick Mantey is the founding Dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering. He is now the director of he Information Technology Institute (ITI) in the Baskin School of Engineering. Dr. Mantey is an IEEE Fellow and a member of American Society for Engineering Education. He is the UC Santa Cruz affiliate director of CITRIS, serves on the Steering Committee of the UC Industry University Cooperative Research Program, and is a scientific advisor to Rockliff. In 1984, he joined the UCSC faculty to start the engineering programs, coming from IBM where he was a senior manager in Computer Science at IBM Almaden Research Center. His extensive computer industry experience, especially in the design of computer systems for a variety of applications in government and industry, has influenced his research and professional activities. He taught at Stanford University in Electrical Engineering before and during his IBM employment. He received his BS (magna cum laude) from the University of Notre Dame, his MS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his PhD (with an NSF Fellowship) from Stanford University, all in electrical engineering. His extensive research interests include system architecture, design, and performance; simulation and modeling of complex systems; real-time data acquisition and control systems; and human-computer interaction. He has received research support from a number of sources including the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, NOAA, IBM, DEC, Sun, and Microsoft.

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Cormac Flanagan is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has 15 years of research experience in the area of software validation and verification, with a particular focus on software defect detection tools that improve program reliability and reduce development cost. He has invented several patents and has authored over 50 peer-reviewed research publications in this and related areas. This research has been supported by the University of California, the National Science Foundation, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He has also worked as a Principal Research Scientist for Digital Equipment, Compaq, and HP, and an outside consultant for Microsoft and Mozilla. He currently serves as an Invited Expert on the Ecma TC39-TG1 task group standardizing Javascript, and he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University in 1997.

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Penny Kosel is a career quality assurance professional with more than fifteen years of experience in a broad range of industries including aerospace, telecommunications, energy, government and network management. Her experience creating and leading test organizations is built on a strong commitment to quality assurance as a tool for all phases of the software development lifecycle and her innovations in QA solution design are driving improvements in QA programs all over the country. Her recent keynote speech to the Quality Assurance Institute - "Evolutions and Revolutions, the Changing Role of QA in the Global Marketplace" - garnered rave reviews and energized a wave of quality improvement programs in her region. Ms. Kosel believes in the power talented testers, the advantages of automation, and that project success is never an accident but the result of commitment to quality. Ms. Kosel is currently the Director of Quality Assurance for TEKsystems. While her region spans from Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, she makes her in Denver, Colorado.

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Steve Nathan is President and CEO of Exist Global, Inc. He is responsible for advancing Exist's vision for global software development optimization. Steve has more than 20 years of leadership experience in the enterprise software and application development industries, having held key positions at recognized technology innovators such as Sun Microsystems and Cray Research, as well as start-ups such as Celerity Computing and Alignent Software. Steve spent twelve years with Sun Microsystems in various roles, including general manager of messaging, portal, and web infrastructure in the iPlanet business unit; vice president of integrated enterprise middleware and emerging market solutions; and director of developer tools. Throughout his tenure with Sun, he worked on many parts of the business, with an emphasis on creating software infrastructure and applications to satisfy new customer requirements. Steve holds bachelors of science in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Psychology from the University of California at Riverside, and is a graduate of the Stanford Executive masters in business administration program.

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Rick Lytel starts and leads ventures that develop new technologies and bring them to market. Over a 25 year career, he has launched successful startups, divisions, and initiatives in optical communications, computer system design for high RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability), two-phase liquid cooled computers, dynamic system monitoring algorithms and software, predictive medicine using machine learning algorithms, high performance multithreaded system design, and exo-atmospheric imaging. Lytel was Vice President, Chief Technologist for physical and life sciences, and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Executive Vice President for Akzo Nobel Photonics, and Executive Director in other companies. Lytel brings to Solidware valuable experience in building facilities and labs, and assembling and leading engineering teams. He also brings analytical and quantitative skills in numerical methods, statistical analysis, and graphical networks to Solidware. He has published over 100 articles and is a frequent presenter at technical conferences. Lytel earned a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Arts in physics from the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

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Mary VanLeer has over 25 years' experience in defining, designing, and supporting IT solutions for high-end data center environments. Ms. VanLeer brings to Solidware Technologies her experience in the Systems Engineering disciplines supporting the full lifecycle activities from Requirements Management to Customer Acceptance and Support. At Sun Microsystems, VanLeer held the position of Director, Software Engineering in both the Chief Technologist's Office and the Enterprise Systems Software Organization. In those positions, VanLeer introduced new verification methods to test the robustness of the products' system recovery capabilities and led numerous initiatives in the quality efforts for Diagnosability, Serviceability, and Fault Management. As an active member of the International Council on Systems Engineering, Ms. VanLeer advocates an Agile Systems Engineering set of disciplines without sacrificing the innovation style of today's engineering. VanLeer holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Phoenix.

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Martin Chorich has over 20 years experience in technology industry media and analyst relations and marketing communications, working at leading companies such as Sun Microsystems, Siemens, VLSI Technology, Inc., Integrated Systems, Inc., and Wind River Systems. He has also performed similar work in the federal government, serving on the External Relations Staff of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and as a Foreign Service Officer with the US Information Agency. He holds a BA in Political Science from UC Santa Barbara and a MS in Sea Use: Economics, Law and Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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