Barry is an accomplished software CEO with over 25 years of industry experience in the USA and Europe, running private and public companies ranging in scale from early startup phase to 1,000+ employees. He loves to build companies around industry-changing paradigm-shifts in technology.
Barry joined IONA Technologies (NASDAQ:IONA) in the very early days and ultimately as CEO led Ireland's most successful software company through its strongest period of growth. He built the company to over 10,000 customers, over 270 technology partners, over $180m in revenues and over 70% marketshare. IONA's Orbix became the most widely deployed strategic middleware product in the world. Under Barry's leadership IONA introduced the industry's first middleware microkernel now incorporated in the popular open source FUSE ESB product. IONA laid the groundwork for modern SOA-based systems, and was influential in the rapid growth of the Irish technology industry during the Celtic Tiger era.
As Chairman and CEO of StreamBase Systems Barry took an MIT project led by Dr Michael Stonebraker and built it into the market pioneer and leader in Complex Event Processing (CEP). StreamBase uses advanced database technologies to correlate, analyse and respond to hundreds-of-thousands of events per second. StreamBase is widely used today in financial services, ecommerce, multi-user online games, and intelligence applications. As connected devices, RFID, sensor networks and real-time systems continue their explosive growth CEP is set to become a pervasive part of computing everywhere.
Barry's early career included technical, management and business development roles in London-based companies PROTEK and Metrica, and Lotus Development and DEC in Ireland. In addition to great deal of consulting work over the years he has served on the boards of many startup companies in Boston, Ireland and South Africa, as well as on the board of the International School of Boston, the Sugan Theater Company and the Boston advisory board of GOAL, the well known Irish NGO.
Barry was born in South Africa and has lived for extended periods in England, Ireland and Boston, MA. He has a Degree in Engineering from New College Oxford University, and an Honorary Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) from the IMCA.
Jim Starkey's career as an entrepreneur, architect, and innovator spans more than three decades of database history from the Datacomputer project on the fledgling ARPAnet to his most recent startup, NuoDB, Inc. Through the period, he has been responsible for many database innovations from the date data type to the BLOB to multi-version concurrency control (MVCC). Starkey has extensive experience in proprietary and open source software.
Starkey joined Digital Equipment Corporation in 1975, where he created the Datatrieve family of products, the DEC Standard Relational Interface architecture, and the first of the Rdb products, Rdb/ELN. Starkey was also software architect for DEC's database machine group.
Leaving DEC in 1984, Starkey founded Interbase Software to develop relational database software for the engineering workstation market. Interbase was a technical leader in the database industry producing the first commercial implementations of heterogeneous networking, blobs, triggers, two phase commit, database events, etc. Ashton-Tate acquired Interbase Software in 1991, and was, in turn, acquired by Borland International a few months later. The Interbase database engine was released open source by Borland in 2000 and became the basis for the Firebird open source database project.
In 2000, Starkey founded Netfrastructure, Inc., to build a unified platform for distributable, high quality Web applications. The Netfrastructure platform included a relational database engine, an integrated search engine, an integrated Java virtual machine, and a high performance page generator.
MySQL, AB, acquired Netfrastructure, Inc. in 2006 to be the kernel of a wholly owned transactional storage engine for the MySQL server, later known as Falcon. Starkey led the Falcon project through the acquisition of MySQL by Sun Microsystems.
Jim has a degree in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin. For amusement, Jim codes on weekends, while sailing, but not while flying his plane.
Adam has been building and managing world-class engineering teams and products for almost two decades. His passion is around building and delivering high-performance core infrastructure products that companies depend on to build their businesses.
Adam started his career at MIT Lincoln Laboratory where he developed a distributed platform and image processing algorithms for detecting dangerous weather patterns in radar images. The system was deployed at several airports around the country.
From there, Adam joined Object Design and held various senior management positions where he was responsible for managing several major releases of ObjectStore (an Object database) along with spearheading the development team building XML products that included: Stylus Studio, an XML database, and a Business Process Manager.
Adam joined Pantero Corporation as VP of Development where he developed a revolutionary Semantic Data Integration product. Pantero was eventually sold to Progress Software.
From Pantero, Adam joined m-Qube to manage and build the team creating its Mobile Messaging Gateway platform. The m-Qube platform is a carrier grade product that has become the leading Mobile Messaging Gateway in North America and generated billions of dollars in revenue. Adam continued managing the mQube platform along with expanded roles after acquisitions of the technology from VeriSign and Mobile Messenger.
He has a dog named Leo and another one named Nala. Can you spell Lion King fan anyone?
Mitchell Kertzman is a Managing Director at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. He has over 30 years of experience as a CEO of public and private software companies. Most recently, Mitchell was Chairman and CEO of Liberate Technologies, a provider of platform software for the delivery of digital services by cable television companies. Before joining Liberate, he was chairman of the board and CEO of Sybase, Inc. Mitchell was founder and CEO of Powersoft, which merged with Sybase in February 1995.
A former programmer, Mitchell founded Powersoft in 1974 as Computer Solutions. He renamed the company and became a member of the Hummer Winblad family in 1991 when Hummer Winblad invested in the company, which became the leading provider of client-server development tools with its flagship product, PowerBuilder. The merger with Sybase in 1995 was, at the time, the most valuable in the history of the software industry.
Mitchell served as President of the Massachusetts Software Council from 1994 to 1996 and was 1990 chairman of the American Electronics Association. He is founder and former chairman of the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth (MassINC), a think tank focused on issues related to the standard of living and quality of life of America's middle class. He served on the New York State Commission on Industrial Competitiveness and chaired its task force on industrial policy.
Mitchell was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Currently on the board of NuoDB he also sits on the Boards of Five9, Palamida, VKernel, WaveMaker, Flite and Hubpages.
Nilanjana joined Longworth in 2003 and focuses on infrastructure, software and mobile investments. As a current board member of NuoDB she also serves on the boards of Cellufun, Viewfinity, VKernel, and Symform. Her other investments and prior portfolio involvements include Scanbuy, Marathon Technologies, Tizor (acquired by Netezza), Softricity (aquired by Microsoft) and Thor Technologies (acquired by Oracle).
Prior to joining Longworth, Nilanjana was a Vice President, Mergers & Acquisitions, at Broadview (now Jefferies), an investment banking firm where she led buy and sell side transactions for several hi-tech companies in software, an object-oriented database and B2B software vendor. At Object Design, she held several positions through the company's fast growth from a venture backed, Inc. #1 Private Company in 1994 to a successful IPO in 1996 and beyond, including running the professional services organization for the Americas, in which role she was in charge of delivering a third of the company's annual revenues.
She received a Bachelor in Engineering in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, an MS in Computer Science From the University of South Carolina, and an MBA from INSEAD. She is a charter member and serves on the board of the Boston chapter of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE).