Leadership Team
Bill McCarthyChief Operating Officer
Bill has spent more than twenty years building technology enabled and service-oriented businesses. He joined Ocient in 2019 after ten years with ShopperTrak, an analytics vendor leveraging IoT for the retail industry, where he served as GM Americas, CEO EMEA, and CTO. Previously, Bill served as VP of Technology and then COO at ShopLocal, and he built business systems for CNA Insurance Company and Abbott Laboratories. Bill holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame.
Bill MinarchiDirector of Federal Sales
Bill Minarchi is a senior sales executive with more than 30 years of successful experience in developing and managing federal government sales teams, go-to-market strategies and technology partnerships. He served in sales leadership positions at Hewlett Packard, Network Appliance, Cisco, Oracle and Pure Storage. He's also a successful start-up executive who helped build NetApp Federal, Cisco Federal Wireless, CipherTrust Federal - Messaging Security, Cleversafe Federal and Ocient. Bill graduated from the State University of New York - Morrisville with an associate degree in business administration and from the State University of New York - Polytechnic Institute with a bachelor's degree.
Brian OberDirector of Engineering
With 25 years of expertise, Brian has devoted his career to the development and architecture of software and systems on a large scale. He has successfully built and led modern, efficient engineering organizations. Brian's impactful contributions have made a significant mark on major telecom solution providers, such as Motorola and Nokia, played a crucial role in shaping some of the world's largest datastores like IBM Cloud Object Storage, and spearheaded the development of contemporary Renewable Energy technology stacks. Notably, he served as the inaugural Chief Technology Officer at IHI Terrasun Solutions. Holding a degree in computer science from Southern Illinois University, Brian is also the proud holder of over 25 patents.
Chris GladwinCo-Founder & CEO
In 2004, Chris founded Cleversafe, which became the largest and most strategic object storage vendor in the world and generated over 1,000 patents granted or filed. After raising over $100M, Chris led the company to a $1.4B exit in 2015 when IBM acquired the company. Prior to Cleversafe, Chris founded startups MusicNow and Cruise Technologies and led product strategy for Zenith Data Systems. He started his career at Martin Marietta as a database developer and holds an engineering degree from MIT.
Chris MuellerRegional Sales Director, Central Region
Chris joins Ocient with extensive sales and sales leadership positions at several of the leading data warehouse & analytical data firms, including Teradata, MicroStrategy, Netezza / IBM and Pivotal. He was a significant contributor to Netezza’s IPO and success where he was VP, Communications across North America. Post-acquisition, Chris led the Midwest Region's Analytical Sales team at IBM. Chris holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from St. Louis University.
Dave BoutcherDistinguished Engineer
Dave is a seasoned computer scientist whose career began at IBM, where he worked on a wide range of technologies from DB2 to communication protocols and the Linux kernel. He then spent a decade developing low-latency financial trading systems, optimizing each line of code for nanosecond efficiencies. Dave holds patents in diverse areas, including banking security, distributed systems, and system virtualization. His academic contributions include publications in the IBM Journal of Research and Development and ACM SIGOPS proceedings. With a master's degree in computer science from the University of Minnesota, Dave melds his passion for programming with his love of travel. His professional journey has taken him to various countries, working as a programmer in Canada, the USA, China, Colombia, Panama, and the UK. This international exposure not only expands his cultural understanding but also enhances his professional outlook, allowing him to tackle problems with a distinctive mix of technical proficiency and global perspective.
Dylan MurphyVice President of Product Management
Dylan has spent over 15 years helping customers solve their most complex data analytics challenges. At IBM, Dylan supported technical sales of data products on the mainframe and became worldwide product manager of IBM’s data replication portfolio. Prior to joining Ocient, he was the CEO of a SaaS startup. Dylan holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and business from Pepperdine University and a master’s degree in software systems from the University of British Columbia.
Ethan WozniakDirector of Systems and Service
Ethan’s work spans the full software development lifecycle, from developing data storage software to optimizing large data storage systems and leading test/QA organizations. He has analyzed large-scale projects for efficiencies and opportunities, leading the scoping, sizing, and performance analysis of many 10–100 petabyte data storage systems. Ethan is an IBM Master Inventor, holds a master’s degree from Harvard University, and has a strong applied statistics and engineering background.
George KondilesCo-Founder & Chief Architect
George has been building software technology from the ground up his entire career. As a software architect and systems designer, he has extensive experience with low latency distributed systems, parallel programming, and database design. He has co-founded several companies including Acumence and WeGather, and holds a computer science and mathematics degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Greg DhuseDistinguished Engineer
Greg has over 14 years of experience architecting and building petabyte and exabyte-scale distributed systems. His work powers some of the world’s largest datastores, including IBM Cloud Object Storage. Greg holds a BS and MS in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and has over 400 issued patents.
Greg PapadopoulosDirector of Customer Operations and Product Support
Over the past 15 years in telecommunications, storage and databases, Greg has worked with top enterprise companies around the globe. He was a Level 2 and 3 Support Manager at Cleversafe/IBM, where he helped grow teams to meet the support challenges of over 100 on-premises solution customers and the IBM Cloud. Greg is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is deeply passionate about collaborating with deeply technical customers on large-scale distributed deployments.
Ian DruryChief Technology Officer
Over the past 30 years, Ian has led companies through everything from the Internet bubble burst to the Great Recession. After starting his career as a DB2 Database Administrator at Accenture, Ian took on roles like CTO at MVP.com and CIO for TransUnion, where he supported two sales of the $1billion+ revenue company. Ian holds an electrical engineering degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a two-time varsity letter winner in wrestling.
Jason ArnoldCo-Founder & Distinguished Engineer
Jason has worked with databases since 2006 and has a background with DB2 z/OS, Netezza, ETL/ELT, data replication, performance tuning, and database application development. After 10 years at IBM and working on a PhD on scaling high performance analytics databases, he joined Ocient in 2016. Jason has bachelor’s degrees in computer science and mathematics and a master’s degree in computer science. He loves enjoying Belgian beers and programming in assembler, sometimes at the same time.
Jenna BollerSenior Director of Marketing
Jenna started her career working with early-stage enterprise technology startups at Page One PR before leading digital and social media activations for Ogilvy’s largest tech clients, including Adobe, Intel, Lenovo, and VMware. Prior to joining Ocient, she led a high-performing campaign management team for YouTube’s in-house creator marketing platform at Google. Jenna holds a bachelor’s degree in cultural history from Stanford University.
Joe JablonskiCo-Founder & Chief Product Officer
Joe is a serial entrepreneur and founder of manufacturing software provider Acumence and online volunteering and fundraising platform WeGather. Joe serves on the board of directors of LPI and is an angel investor in several Chicago startups. He holds an MBA from Northwestern University and an electrical and computer engineering degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he judges the Cozad business plan competition.
Jonathan KelleyDirector of User Experience
Jonathan is a product person at heart with more than a decade of experience building technology startups. He was formerly CTO of MightyNest and has a breadth of experience in B2C and B2B business including advertising technology, ecommerce, SaaS applications, and electro-optical engineering. Jonathan holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering, a master’s degree in engineering design and innovation from Northwestern, and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management.
Kevin OndriezekDirector of Solutions Architecture
Kevin Ondriezek is a Technical Leader focused on helping teams meet business goals while inspiring individuals to meet their career goals. Kevin has over 3 decades of experience working with large workloads on Mainframe, Cloud and Distributed environments. Key Skills center around Team Development, Analytics, Machine Learning, Data Warehousing, Cloud and large workloads. Kevin achieved his Distinguished Architect Certification from the Open Group in 2019.
Kumar AbhijeetCo-Founder & VP of Global Sales and Marketing
Kumar holds over 30 patents and has deep experience selling cloud, software, systems, and services into the world’s largest and most complex enterprises. After growing Cleversafe from the pre-revenue stage to its successful acquisition, Kumar spent three years leading cloud object storage business for IBM. He holds a degree in electrical and computer engineering with a minor in entrepreneurship from Illinois Institute of Technology. Kumar lives in Chicago with his wife, Jenna, and three sons.
Laura TroutmanSenior Director of Finance
Laura has over 15 years of experience working with startup and multinational technology companies. She started her career at Ernst & Young’s audit practice. Before joining Ocient, Laura was the assistant controller of Cleversafe and led the integration efforts of the company’s accounting function into IBM. Laura is a licensed CPA in the state of Illinois and holds bachelor’s degrees in finance and accounting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Matthew BergmanDirector of Global Sales & Operations Strategy
Matt joins Ocient after nearly a decade in sales and sales operations leadership positions with IBM Cloud Object Storage and Cleversafe, where he served as the global director of sales operations. He has 17+ years of experience in sales operations within the high tech industry, which included stints with StorageTek, Sun Microsystems, and SunGard Availability Services. Matt holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from The Ohio State University and an MBA from DePaul University.
Niranjan MangaonkarDirector of Quality Assurance
Niranjan has more than 15 years of experience in database technologies like IBM-Netezza, and Vertica. He has extensive experience with software quality engineering, test automation, and infrastructure architecture and process improvements. He has a strong knowledge of database internals, aspects of testing a complex database system, and quality assurance. Niranjan holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a post-grad certification in advanced computing and programming
Shantan KethireddyCo-Founder & Vice President of Customer Solutions
Shantan started his career as a lead Db2 SQL query engine developer and IBM Master Inventor. He was subsequently named North America Chief Data Officer for IBM Systems Group, architecting emerging mainframe solutions that leveraged hybrid transactional and analytics processing, BI, ETL, and bi-directional replication. He joined Ocient in 2018 and has authored numerous technical publications and owned the course of study at many Db2 conferences.
Sophie KaneAssociate Director of Marketing
For nearly a decade, Sophie has lead brand and marketing programs on behalf of global organizations in the advertising, consulting, and technology industries—specializing in go-to-market strategy, brand identity, market expansion, and demand generation. She combines strategic thinking with a hands-on approach, effectively leading teams and delivering impactful outcomes. Sophie holds a bachelor's degree from the University of DePaul.
Todd O'BrienTechnical Director of Professional Services
Todd has more than 15 years of experience building and leading software development and delivery teams. At EMC, he led development for the cloud infrastructure group, working with customers to build solutions at massive scale. He is an advocate for agile development practices and has consulted for Boston area SaaS startups. Todd holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Northeastern University and a master’s degree in software engineering from Brandeis University.
Yvonne CookRegional Sales Director, UK and Ireland
Yvonne has led the EMEA presence in the early stage business cycles for some of the most successful data warehouse companies, including Teradata and Netezza. She helped drive the adoption of these technologies by major banks and telecommunications organizations in the UK and across EMEA. In 2015 she turned her attention to AI and machine learning, becoming the first on the ground in EMEA for DataRobot, which was adopted by many of the leading insurers and banks in the UK.
Board of Directors
Amy Francetic
Amy, co-founder of Buoyant Ventures, manages a Chicago-based female-owned venture fund with $81M AUM, focusing on digital climate solutions. With over 20 years in high-tech entrepreneurship, private equity, and research, Amy founded Energize Ventures and Evergreen Climate Innovations. She's led investments in 45+ clean energy startups in the Midwest. Amy serves on Evergreen Climate's board and the WISER Institute's Advisory Board at Illinois Institute of Technology. Recognized by Crain’s as a Top 50 Technology Leader in Chicago three times, she's also a lecturer at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.
Brentt Baltimore
Brentt invests in early stage software companies at Greycroft. Some of his active investments include 1build, Craft, Enkasa, Mapped, and Trullion. Previously, Brentt was a co-founder of TernPro, maker of the Slope tool, which was acquired by Smartsheet. He also led business development at Operator Inc. and worked on technology commercialization at Numenta. Brentt holds a BA in economics from Claremont McKenna College and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Brian Hand
Brian is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned venture and angel investor. He co-founded FireStarter Fund, an early-stage venture fund focused on web/social/mobile investments, and is a co-owner of industrial packaging manufacturer Skolnik Industries. Brian was co-founder & CEO of social media company Timelines and founder & CEO of ShopLocal. He received his BS and MS degrees in mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an MBA from Northwestern University.
Chris Girgenti
Chris has served as Managing Partner at Pritzker since 1998. He has led the organization and capital formation of nine technology venture funds and has led or overseen investments in more than 200 companies. Chris currently serves on the boards of Apprentice, Plus One Robotics, and Specright and is a board observer of Ocient, Freightwaves, and Augmentir. He received a ScB. degree in applied math-economics from Brown University and an MBA from Columbia Business School.
Chris Gladwin
In 2004, Chris founded Cleversafe, which became the largest and most strategic object storage vendor in the world and generated over 1,000 patents granted or filed. After raising over $100M, Chris led the company to a $1.4B exit in 2015 when IBM acquired the company. Prior to Cleversafe, Chris founded startups MusicNow and Cruise Technologies and led product strategy for Zenith Data Systems. He started his career at Martin Marietta as a database developer and holds an engineering degree from MIT.
Jim Dugan
Jim has over 25 years of corporate finance, capital markets, and venture capital investment experience. He is the Founding Managing Partner of OCA Ventures. Prior to forming OCA Ventures, Jim traded derivatives at the Chicago Board of Trade and worked in corporate finance with Continental Bank. He received a BA in Economics from the University of Rochester and earned his MBA from the JL Kellogg Graduate School of Management, where he is a frequent guest lecturer and panelist.
Mark Terbeek
Mark co-leads the enterprise software team and target investments in intelligent enterprise applications at Greycroft. Previously, Mark was a partner with MK Capital and co-founder of Jamcracker, an early SaaS pioneer. His investment and board experience includes Bladelogic (acquired by BMC), Kontiki (acquired by Verisign), and VPNet Technologies (acquired by Avaya). Mark holds a BA in Economics from DePauw University and an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business
Michael Seedman
Michael has been involved in the tech industry since the early 1980’s. He has operated everything from small startups to high-growth public companies, served on numerous private and public boards, and served as Senior VP and GM for U.S. Robotics. For the past two decades, Michael has been an active technology investor and in private equity as an executive partner for several firms working on projects with revenues ranging from 100 million to more than two billion.
Momei Qu
Momei is a Managing Director of PSP Growth, the venture and growth equity arm of PSP Partners. Prior to joining PSP, she was a venture capital investor at Baird Capital and Independence Equity. Before that, she worked as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. Momei earned a Bachelor of Science in computer engineering and a Bachelor of Science in finance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Steve Bowsher
Steve serves as President of IQT. Previously, he served as Managing General Partner and Executive Vice President at In-Q-Tel, where he led the company’s investment strategy. Steve joined In-Q-Tel from InterWest Partners, where he served as General Partner for eight years. Prior to that, he worked at E*TRADE, where he helped launch Destination E*TRADE, the company’s award-winning website. Steve graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and received his MBA from Stanford.
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Technical Advisory Board
Aaron Elmore
Aaron is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and the College of the University of Chicago. He was previously a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT working with Mike Stonebraker on elastic and multitenant database systems, and Sam Madden on the DataHub project. Aaron's thesis on Elasticity Primitives for Database-as-a-Service was completed at the University of California, Santa Barbara under the supervision of Divy Agrawal and Amr El Abbadi. Prior to receiving a PhD, Aaron spent several years in industry and completed an MS at the University of Chicago.
Boris Glavic
Boris Glavic is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology where he leads the IIT database group. Before coming to IIT, Boris spent two years as a Postdoctoral in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto working at the Database Research Group under Renée J. Miller. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Zurich in Switzerland, being advised by Michael Böhlen and Gustavo Alonso. Boris is a database researcher conducting systems research based on solid theoretical foundations.
Jennie Rogers
Jennie Rogers is the Lisa Wissner-Slivka and Benjamin Slivka Junior Professor in Computer Science and an assistant professor at Northwestern University. Before that she was a postdoctoral associate in the Database Group at MIT CSAIL where she worked with Mike Stonebraker and Sam Madden. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University under the guidance of Ugur Cetintemel. Her research interests include the management of science data, federated databases, cloud computing, secure data management, and database performance modeling. Her Erdös number is 3.
Mike Franklin
Michael is the Liew Family Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Chicago. He also serves as senior advisor to the provost on computation and data science. Previously, Michael was at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was the chair of the Computer Science Division of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Master of Software Engineering from the Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, and a B.S. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts.
Rebecca Taft
Rebecca is the Engineering Manager of the SQL Queries team at Cockroach Labs. Prior to joining Cockroach Labs, she was a graduate student at MIT, where she worked with Professor Michael Stonebraker researching distributed database elasticity and multi-tenancy. Rebecca holds a B.S. in Physics from Yale University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT. In her free time, she enjoys rowing on the Chicago River and enjoying the great outdoors.
Sales and Marketing Advisory Board
Anudit Vikram
Anudit is a business and tech leader in the advertising and marketing technologies space. As the CPO and GM, Digital for Intentsify, he is responsible for the strategy and roadmap of the entire suite of Intentsify’s product capabilities and also the execution of Intentsify’s Digital vision. Prior to Intentsify, he has worked at MediaMath, Dun & Bradstreet, Merkle, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other noteworthy organizations leading teams and – in his words – “building cool stuff, changing the world one release at a time!” Anudit holds a Masters in Technology Management from Columbia University and a BS in Engineering from the University of Pune(India).
Craig Mohan
Craig is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Sk3w Technologies, a startup that provides latency standardization hardware and services to global financial exchanges. Previously, he served as Chief Growth Officer at Trading Technologies, driving growth in their data and infrastructure businesses. He also served as Managing Director of Market Technology and Data Services at CME Group. Craig holds a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Eric Burger
Eric is Research Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, where he is lead researcher for communications and security at the NSF Cyber SMART Research Center. He served in government as the Assistant Director of the White House office of Science and Technology Policy for telecommunications and cybersecurity and as the CTO of the Federal Communications Commission. Prior to academia and public service, Eric was CTO of several public and private companies and has had five exits. He holds a SBEE, MBA, and PhD from MIT, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Illinois Tech.
Fran Landolf
Fran is the founder and Principal of Core Consulting, which matches private sector solutions with public sector problems. He was a senior executive in the U.S. Department of Defense and a Principal at Booz Allen Hamilton. Fran served as a member of the Technical Advisory Group for the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the State University of New York and a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Kentucky.
Harper Reed
Harper is a technologist who predicts the future for a living. He spends most of his life building big things, hacking things, and talking about doing both. As CTO of the Obama 2012 campaign, Harper was the first to bring the tech mentality to a political level. He has been lucky to pioneer crowdsourcing at Threadless.com, found Modest Inc, and guide the software team at PayPal. Harper is the CEO of General Galactic Corporation, where he leads a team building experiences for the new internet.
Jim O'Connor
Jim is the global head of William Blair’s Venture Capital Group. With deep experience and relationships in the technology and financial industries, he connects today’s most innovative companies with visionary sources of capital. He has also worked for MVC Capital, Motorola Ventures (Co-Founder), U.S. Treasury Department (White House Fellow), A.T. Kearney, Ariel Capital Management, and Sidley Austin. Jim serves on William Blair’s WillBlairCo Committee and Community Impact Steering Committee.
Marc Price
Marc is the CTO for MATRIXX Software. He is an industry leading subject matter expert in telecommunications systems, with nearly 30 years of experience helping customers define strategies and deploy world-class solutions for high volume processing of events. Marc has contributed to leading technology standards organizations and communities including 3GPP, Linux Foundation, and CableLabs. He holds honors degrees in engineering and international relations from the University of Pennsylvania.
Maso Konomi
Maso started his career as a tracking radar designer for a jet fighter, converted himself into a Morgan Stanley investment banker, and established his own international investment banking firm in Tokyo 38 years ago. My line of introducing high techs to Japan includes cyberattack identifier, ammonia fuel cells, protein production out of plants and Clean LNG. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the electrical department of the University of Tokyo and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Rob Gatto
Rob is a seasoned technology executive with more than 30 years of experience operating the go-to-market functions of technology companies ranging in size from initial stage startups to over $1 billion in annual revenue. He has served as Chief Operating Officer for programmatic video platform Tubemogul, SVP Global Sales for information services company NeuStar, and President for media analytics firm Aggregate Knowledge. He holds a BS in communications from Northern Illinois University.
Rob Grzywinski
Rob helps companies use data to grow their businesses on scalable technology platforms. He was the CTO of AdTech startup Aggregate Knowledge (acquired by Neustar), where he was the visionary behind burgeoning concepts of Big Data, stream-based analytics, and probabilistic counting. He has an extensive background in systems and software and holds patents in AdTech and modern data systems. Rob holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from Illinois Institute of Technology.
Taylor Rhodes
Taylor is Chief Executive Officer leading Team Applied, driving the company’s overall strategy and operational execution. Prior to joining Applied in 2019, he served as Chief Executive Officer for SMS Assist, the leading cloud-based software platform for multi-site property management. Taylor is a former U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer and holds an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves on the board of directors for Applied, Zenoss, and Liquid Web, LLC.
Teresa Smetzer
Ms. Teresa L. Smetzer’s career has spanned both the public and private sectors, focused on accelerating the identification and adoption of industry leading digital technologies with the goal of modernizing, advancing, and transforming national security missions. She served over 20 years at the CIA as a technical analyst, senior manager, and most recently as the Director of Digital Futures in the Directorate of Digital Innovation. She previously founded and led Jasmah Consulting until its acquisition by LMI. Earlier in her career, Ms. Smetzer served on the White House Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. She is also the former VP of National Security Programs for Salesforce.
Tim Mahlman
Tim started his digital career in 1995 as a founding member of CLIQNOW!, one of the first online advertising networks. He went on to be part of the leadership team at AOL in the $4.4B acquisition to Verizon and then part of the leadership team on Verizon’s $4.48B acquisition of Yahoo! With more than 20 years of entrepreneurial leadership experience throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States, Tim specializes in software management platforms, data analytics, and digital advertising platforms.
Toby Redshaw
Toby is a multilingual, multicultural, transformational global technology innovator, business executive, and board member/advisor. He has held executive roles at Verizon, Kevington Advisors, American Express, Aviva, Motorola, Zoho, and FedEx. Toby is one of only a handful of leaders who has led digital transformations at scale at four global high-growth, high-service enterprises. His impact reaches across Silicon Valley, Fortune 20 enterprises, and public, private, and government entities.
Wilfried Schobeiri
Wil is the Chief Technology Officer at Banyan, overseeing product development for the world's first global interchange for SKU-level receipt data. With over 15 years of experience in technology, product management, data science, and leadership, he’s spent the better part of the last decade building large-scale distributed systems and data products. Before joining Banyan, Will helped build the global real estate data platform that supports Blackstone’s real estate portfolio as CPO at Revantage.