Advisory Boards
Sales & Marketing Advisory Board Members
Technology Advisory Board Members
- William Allcock
- Jamie Bellanca
- Pat Conroy
- Joe Jablonski
- Francis Landolf
- Gilman Louie
- Ray Martino
- Mike O'Dell
- Michael Spertus
- Alan Wade
Dean Bravos
Dean is a consummate entrepreneur, who currently is a strategic consultant, investor, or operator across organizations ranging from consumer electronics companies, such as global market share leader Shure Inc., to a Chicago Cubs Officially Endorsed rooftop venue located just outside of legendary Wrigley Field. Dean previously headed global sales efforts for highly successful technology companies, including Sierra On-line, Inc., an original consumer software publisher and market share leader in entertainment, as well as internet security and pioneer WatchGuard Technologies, Inc. Dean also advises on multiple boards.
Dean has a BA Communication and Marketing from the University of Arizona.
Scott Merkle
Scott is the Vice President of Sales for Fusion Risk Management, a leading provider of IT and Operational Risk Management software and advisory consulting services. Prior to joining Fusion, Scott served in various roles including Senior Vice President of National Account Sales and Operations for DBS Communications, a $70 million wireless MVNO on the AT&T and Sprint networks, Vice President and General Manager for NextiraOne, Scott’s 21 years in the high tech and communications industry also include senior sales, marketing and product management positions with Apropos Technology, Zenith Data Systems / Cruise Technologies, and Andersen Consulting (Accenture).
Scott holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley; and an Economics Degree from Northwestern University.
Fred Moore
Fred began a 21-year career with StorageTek as the first systems engineer and concluded as corporate vice president of Strategic Planning and Marketing. In 1998, Fred Moore founded Horison Information Strategies in Boulder, Colorado — a data storage industry analyst and consulting firm that specializes in executive briefings, marketing strategy, and business development for end-users and storage hardware and software suppliers. Fred has also served as Editor of Storage for Computer Technology Review magazine and has written numerous books, articles, reports and webcasts for the storage industry. At the University of Missouri, Columbia where he received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in computer applications in physical geography, he was a 1989 recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award and a 2004 recipient of the Arts and Science Scholar-In-Residence Award. A sought-after motivator and keynote speaker at IT events worldwide, Fred completed the Berkeley Executive Program in 1997. He currently serves on a few select boards in the storage networking industry.
Alex Kormushoff
Over the past 25 years, Alex has driven enterprise value for companies spanning all aspects of information technology including hardware, software and consulting. As a result, Alex Kormushoff is globally recognized for his results in building, leading and growing information technology businesses. In addition to holding Executive Operating Roles for IBM, SPSS, BroadVision, Sapient and Digital Equipment Corporation, Alex has been a pioneer in Electronic Commerce and Enterprise Predictive Analytics. Most recently, Alex was the Senior Vice President of Global Operations at SPSS where he established the Enterprise Predictive Analytics Business and was instrumental in the sale of SPSS to IBM for $1.2B.
Alex is the President and Founder of 376main Ltd., a firm specializing in helping to grow companies in the Big Data and Predictive Analytics space. In addition to Cleversafe, Alex holds board and advisory positions for Macedonia 2025 and the School of Business Administration at The Pennsylvania State University. He earned an MBA from Boston University and a Bachelors Degree from The Pennsylvania State University where he is a founder of their Program for Homeland Security and Cyber Studies.
Raghu Rau
Raghu is a creative, global management professional with strong operational, marketing and strategic leadership experience and relationships in the telecommunications industry. Raghu was a senior vice president at Motorola Inc. until 2008, holding positions of increasing responsibility since 1992 in the U.S., Europe and Asia, including chief strategy officer and chief marketing officer of the Networks business. Before joining Motorola, Raghu was the general manager and co-founder of a telecommunications services company in Qatar, and prior to that he was the general manager of a multinational in India. Raghu has served as the chairman of Quest Forum, the leading quality standards organization in the global telecommunications industry; the Board of the Center of Telecom Management at USC and the Motorola France Telecom partnership Board.
Raghu has a bachelor’s degree in engineering and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
Greg Rudin
Greg is the Senior Vice President and A|X Team Lead at MediaBank, LLC in Chicago. Prior to joining MediaBank, Greg served in various leadership roles for technology companies, including Chief Operating Officer for The Point, an Internet start-up, Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Cleversafe, Inc., an innovative data storage company, Vice President of Marketing/Business Development at MusicNow (sold to AOL in November 2005), and co-founder/President and General Counsel of ShopAround, Inc.
Greg earned a B.A. in History from U of I, Champaign/Urbana and a J.D. from UC Hastings in San Francisco. He is an attorney licensed in IL and CA and sits on the Boards of Directors of Neuros Technology, One Llama, and the charity, Smart Bet.
Christopher White
Christopher White is the Founder of Talus Partners, a strategic consulting firm specializing in emerging market access and new market business capture for innovative emerging technology companies. Prior to founding Talus Partners, Chris spent five and a half years on Capitol Hill, working as a professional staff member in both chambers of Congress. He directly managed an appropriations oversight portfolio for defense and intelligence programs totaling over $25 billion annually. As the driving force behind business and management transformation efforts in the Intelligence Community, Chris is a recognized thought leader in the national security sector, the defense policy areas of cyber security, Africom, defense financial management and national security reform. Chris started his professional career as a tactical intelligence officer in the United States Marine Corps, where he achieved the rank of Captain serving several emerging and developed countries, including Afghanistan, Japan, Burkina Faso, Mali, Uganda, Botswana, Djibouti, Thailand, China, Korea, UAE, the Seychelles, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Russia, Egypt, Jordan, Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Germany, England, Mexico and Canada.
Chris received his B.A. in Finance from the University of Notre Dame and his M.A in Liberal Studies for Social and Public Policy from Georgetown University. His public speaking engagements include multiple Inspector-General forums, as well as numerous legislative branch academic seminars.
William Allcock
William (Bill) Allcock is the Operations Director and Manager at the Advanced Integration Group for the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. For a 557 TeraFLOP Blue Gene/P supercomputer and its associated 100 node visualization cluster, storage systems, networks and tape facilities, his duties include overall responsibility for operational metrics (availability, utilization, power utilization efficiency, etc.), the systems administrators and the systems software developers. In 2012, he was also instrumental in the planning of the 10PF Blue Gene scheduled for installation. Bill also spent six years working on Grid computing and was the lead for the GridFTP team, a system for secure, high speed, and reliable movement of large datasets. Bill’s particular interests and expertise also includes high-speed data transport, data storage systems, and data analysis clusters.
Jamie Bellanca
Jamie is an Executive-in-Residence for Baird Private Equity. In this capacity, Jamie provides guidance on technology strategy and development, operational refinement and investment evaluation in the Business Services sector.
Prior to Baird Private Equity, Bellanca was the Vice President of Advanced Technology for Cleversafe, where he led the technology vision, and drove the architecture and development of their global storage platform.
Jamie was previously a regional principal/national director at Lante Corporation, a publicly-held software and technology consultancy. Lante purchased his award-winning internet design and development company ingenious, inc. in 1999.
Jamie holds a BS in Interdisciplinary Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and is based in Chicago.
Pat Conroy
As an attorney in San Antonio, Texas, Patrick Conroy has over a decade of experience in the storage industry in a variety of technical and marketing roles. At StorageWay, Patrick was a co-inventor on a Secured Shared Storage Architecture patent that enabled one of the industry's first Storage Service Providers. Previously, he was V.P. of Engineering and CTO at MTI Technology Corporation. Patrick holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Management from Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management. He earned his J.D. (HH) from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a member of the Order of the Coif.
Francis Landolf
For more than fifteen years Francis Landolf led public sector organizations responsible for delivering time critical services essential for informed military and National level decisions. The organizations he created and led performed analysis of signals, communications systems and computer networks. In recognition of his accomplishments he was awarded the Exceptional Civilian Service Award by the National Security Agency in 2005 and received the Meritorious Executive Presidential Rank Award in 2004. He retired from federal service in March 2005.
Mr. Landolf began his public service career at the National Security Agency in 1975 while working on a PhD in Mathematics at the University of Kentucky. He holds a BA, MS and MA in Mathematics. He completed an executive leadership program at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School and is a graduate of the National Security Leadership Course, a partnership between the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
He is also a member of the Technical Advisory Group for the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence and serves on the National Security Agency Advisory Board.
Gilman Louie
Gilman Louie is a partner of Alsop Louie, a venture capital firm focused on investing in entrepeneurs. Gilman is also the founder and former CEO of In-Q-Tel, a strategic venture fund created to help enhance national security by connecting the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. intelligence community with venture-backed entrepreneurial companies. Previously Gilman built a career as a pioneer in the interactive entertainment industry, with accomplishments that include the design and development of the Falcon F-16 flight simulator as well as being the person who licensed Tetris, the world’s most popular computer game, from its developers in the Soviet Union. During that career, Gilman founded and ran a company called Spectrum Holobyte which ultimately was acquired by Hasbro Corporation, where he served as chief creative officer of Hasbro Interactive and general manager of the Games.com group.
Ray Martino
Ray’s passion and experience is leading both the business and development of market creating technology products. Ray led the teams that created the first in the world WiFi (802.11) products, the world’s first mobile computer with a wireless local area network, the world’s first VoIP Wireless Phone and worlds first WLAN Switch. These accomplishments were made at Symbol Technologies where Ray held various positions including CTO, General Manager and VP Engineering. During this time Symbol grew from $20M in revenue to over $2B before being acquired by Motorola in 2007 for $3.9B.
Ray Martino is currently COO of Nanosense Technologies. Nanosense is developing at the crossroads of nanotechnology, biotechnology and neural computing creating a bio-nano-electronic device capable of olfaction.
Mike O'Dell
Mike O’Dell is a venture partner at NEA, a leading venture capital and growth equity firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors and geographies. Mike’s primary interest is the structure and behavioral dynamics of large, complex systems. He works with NEA's technology team to identify early stage information technology, communications, and energy opportunities.
Mike came to NEA from UUNET Technologies where he was Chief Scientist, responsible for network and product architecture during the emergence of the Commercial Internet. Prior to UUNET, Mike held positions at Bellcore (now Telcordia), a GaAs SPARC supercomputer startup, and a US Government contractor. His first startup created a revolutionary full-text search engine which was 20 years ahead of its time. In the halcyon days of the ARPAnet, he was "Liaison" for IMP-34 at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and spearheaded the transition from NCP to TCP/IP at Department of Energy National Laboratories.
Mike served for four years as Area Director for Operations and Management in the IETF, authored several IDs and RFCs, and helped birth RADIUS and SNMPv3. He was Founding Editor of Computing Systems, an international refereed scholarly journal.
Mike received his BS and MS in Computer Science from the University of Oklahoma.
Michael Spertus
Michael Spertus is currently a Distinguished Engineer at Symantec Corporation and an Adjunct Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Mr. Spertus has a long and distinguished career in the computer industry, starting with coauthoring one of the first commercial C compilers for the original IBM PC. He founded Geodesic Systems, a maker of self-healing software which was later acquired by VERITAS, where he was the chief designer of Great Circle, the 1997 Software Development Magazine Jolt Award winner in the Libraries, Frameworks, and Components category. At VERITAS, Mr. Spertus was Chief Technologist for VERITAS' Performance Management division.
Mr. Spertus is widely published in academic and trade journals and has spoken widely in both university and industry settings. He is a member of the board of directors of the Spertus Institute and the Visiting Committee for the Physical Sciences Division at the University of Chicago.
Alan Wade
Alan Wade retired from federal service at the end of 2006 after a thirty-five year career at the Central Intelligence Agency. He retired as the Chief Information Officer, a position he held since 2001.
Alan held a series of senior positions at the CIA including the Director of Communications, Director of Security, and Chief Information Officer. In his assignment as Chief Information officer, he was dual-hatter as the Chief Information Officer for the United States Intelligence Community.
During his career, Alan’s contributions were recognized several times. He is a recipient of the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, the Director’s Medal, and the Distinguished Intelligence Medal.
Since retirement, Alan has worked with several early stage companies. He served on the board of Safeboot, N.V. (acquired by McAfee in 2007) and Detica DFI (acquired by BAE Systems in 2008). Additionally, Alan serves on public sector advisory boards of several technology companies.
Alan graduated from Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Virginia in 1973, receiving a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. In 1978, he received his Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from the George Washington University in Washington, D.C.