Board
Virtualization and
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Embotics Board Members
Robert Gordon
Robert Gordon is an investor of early-stage technology companies. As well as Embotics Corporation, Robert serves on the boards of Futurestate IT Inc. and Symsure International Ltd.
Most recently he was the Chairman of PlateSpin Ltd. (acquired by Novell), was the CEO of Mindjet Corporation, and previously held the same role for Platform Computing. Prior to Platform, Robert was the European Venture Partner for the Internet Capital Group, Senior Vice President of Oracle Europe, Middle East and Africa, and President of Oracle Canada. He also held executive positions with Bell Atlantic Enterprises, Nortel and IBM. He is a Past Chairman of the Information Technology Association of Canada.
Jay Litkey
A serial entrepreneur with extensive experience launching, financing and growing software companies, Jay Litkey has been a pioneer in emerging high growth markets that include cloud computing, virtualization, systems management automation, and Internet video.
For more than a decade, Jay has been a virtualization evangelist and advocate, focusing on the strategic impacts of virtualization and automation within enterprise data centers. He is ITIL-certified and frequently spends his time serving as a trusted advisor for IT executives and speaking at industry events.
Prior to Embotics, Jay founded Symbium Corp., a venture-funded company focused on autonomic computing and the automated management of IT infrastructure, managing business development and product management. Before Symbium, he was the founding CEO of BlackholeTV, an Internet video content aggregation and distribution company. Jay started his career at Bell-Northern Research designing automated control systems for the telecommunications industry. He is a golf hack, won a Forty under 40 award, and holds an honors degree in Computer Science from Queen’s University.
Stephen Pollack
Stephen Pollack is a seasoned entrepreneur and industry expert with over 25 years of experience working in the high technology field. His most recent success started in 2003 with the founding of PlateSpin Ltd, a recognized industry leader in the virtualization market, and ranked 11th on the Deloitte North American Fast 500 list.
Stephen has held a variety of leadership roles across many aspects of technology including sales, marketing, services, support and product management. He has been instrumental throughout his career in growing successful ventures operating on a global basis, including Fulcrum Technologies, NCR, FloNetwork and most recently, the fast growth of PlateSpin, ranked 2nd on the Deloitte Fast 50 list for 2 consecutive years.
Phil Reddon
Phil Reddon joined Covington in 2002 and has close to 20 years of experience as an investment professional. As Managing Director, Phil’s responsibilities include analysis of new investment opportunities for the Fund and assisting in the management and monitoring of the Fund’s existing investments.
Prior to joining Covington, Phil spent six years at Bank of Montreal Capital Corporation as Managing Director for a $400 million private equity fund. Phil was head of the Technology Investment team, and sat on the investment committee, which was involved in the investment and approval process for over 60 companies. In his role at BMO Capital, he sat on the boards of eight companies. Prior to BMO Capital, Phil held various positions at the Business Development Bank of Canada.
In addition to Embotics, Phil currently sits on the Board of Directors of Ivey Fund I and Ivey Fund II, 1293551 Ontario Inc. (o/a Acura and Masstech Group), Agile Systems Inc., Diaphonics Inc., Simex Inc, and SXC Health Solutions Inc.
Howard Sutton
Howard Sutton has over 22 years of experience in the industry, holding senior level positions in technology companies and in investment banking. Howard brings application expertise and a wealth of investment experience to his portfolios.
Howard graduated with a degree in engineering and received his professional engineering designation in 1985. This was followed by an MBA and CFA.
For the first ten years of his career, he worked with a variety of high technology firms in North America and Europe responsible for engineering, marketing and management. Prior to starting Tera Capital, Howard worked in the high tech investment community for three years as an analyst and as a portfolio manager with a major investment management firm.
Jim Whitaker
Jim Whitaker is one of two Managing Partners of VL Advisors Inc., the Manager and Investment Advisor of VentureLink Innovation Fund Inc. (“the Fund”). The Fund has assets under management as at June 30, 2012, of approximately $130 million.
Since 2003, Jim has held senior investment positions with the VentureLink Group of Funds and previously, since 1994, Working Ventures Canadian Fund Inc. At VentureLink, Jim invests principally in the Information Technology and Cleantech sectors including highly successful investments in PlateSpin Ltd. (sold to Novell Inc. NASDAQ: NOVL), Curomax Inc. (sold to DealerTrack Holdings Inc. NASDAQ:TRAK) and Ecosynthetix Inc. (TSX :ECO).
While at Working Ventures, Jim led the Information Technology Team, was a member of the Management Investment Committee and led investments or acted as Board member on approximately twenty companies. Prior to joining Working Ventures, Jim worked in a number of practice areas at Ernst & Young providing financial advisory services to mid-market companies in a wide range of industries. Jim is a Chartered Accountant and a Chartered Business Valuator.
Advisory Board
John Armitage
John Armitage is Managing Director of Armitage Associates—one of Canada’s most respected boutique executive search firms. For over 35 years, John was a management consultant / senior search professional, both at KPMG and with his own firm. The firm specializes in building/rebuilding senior management teams for technology ventures as well as for angel/venture capital / private equity / institutional investor groups and has helped launch/accelerate a number of highly successful tech firms within and outside of Canada.
John is on the Advisory Board of ACE, the Association for Advancement of Canadian Entrepreneurship, as well as a Director of Talent Technology Corporation.
Duncan Hill
Duncan is a founding General Partner at Mantella Venture Partners. Duncan previously served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Ventures West, the Board of Directors of RapidMind (acquired by Intel in 2009), Executive Investor at Pushlife (acquired by Google in 2011), Executive Director at Brave Commerce (acquired by Rogers Media in 2012), and the Advisory Board of Opalis (acquired by Microsoft in 2009). Duncan currently serves on the Board of Chango, SurfEasy, CrowdCare and ShopCaster, and the Advisory Boards at Flixel, Unata, ServiceMesh, Cirba, and Embotics.
Duncan was the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Think Dynamics, a developer of data center automation software, which was acquired by IBM in May 2003. Think Dynamics has become an integral part of IBM’s Tivoli portfolio and Blue Cloud initiative. Duncan served as an IBM executive until June 2005, guiding market and technology strategy for Tivoli’s on-demand automation software portfolio.
Prior to founding Think Dynamics, Duncan established a data center consulting practice that delivered enterprise systems architecture and management services to customers that included Virgin, Norwich Union, one2one, Millipore, ADP and Teleglobe in the UK, USA and Canada.
Duncan holds a BMath in Computer Science and Combinatorics and Optimization from the University of Waterloo.
Neal Hill
Neal Hill has more than 30 years of experience in technology management and marketing, venture capital, and mergers and acquisitions. Most recently, Neal was the Founder and Senior Managing Director of Great Northern Capital, Canada’s first attempt to create a growth-stage venture capital fund of substantial size. Neal is currently working directly with young firms, advising them on operational growth and fundraising strategies.
Neal’s career history includes Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, for Cognos Incorporated, the Ottawa-based $1 billion worldwide leader in business intelligence and performance management software, which is now a unit of IBM Corporation. He also served as Managing Director, Investments of VIMAC Ventures, a Boston-based venture capital firm concentrating on early-stage software firms. Neal has served on the boards of 12 different early-stage companies, many of which are now strategic operating units contributing strongly to such firms as Motorola, Amazon.com, eBay, and Ciena.
Earlier in his career, Neal was CEO and co-founder of a leading New England advertising and marketing agency, COO of a startup software company, and a Senior Analyst covering database and operating system trends for Forrester Research. In addition, Neal served as Press Secretary and Legislative Aide for a US Senator in the initial stages of his professional life.
Neal appears regularly as a speaker at industry events and has been widely published in trade and business journals. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario, with his wife and two sons, and attended Washington University in St. Louis, majoring in physics and political science.
Ron Nordin
Ron Nordin brings over 20 years of executive-level experience in the software industry and serves as an advisor and board member to early-stage technology companies. Most recently, Ron was a senior partner at Atlas Venture in Boston where he invested in a number of software and Internet companies including eRoom Technologies, which was acquired by Documentum in 2000 in one of the largest private software transactions of the year.
Prior to Atlas, Ron was President and CEO of SQA Inc., a venture backed, enterprise software company. He led SQA from a startup to a dominant player in the software quality assurance sector. Under his leadership, SQA had a successful IPO and became a highly valued public company. SQA was acquired by Rational Software, which in turn was acquired by IBM.
Ron established his career early at Cognos, where as Senior Vice President he served on the executive team that developed the company from its startup through to its IPO, helping it become one of the major players in the software industry.
Jean-Marc Seguin
Jean-Marc Seguin brings more than 18 years of design and development experience to his advisory position. Previously he held a number of technical roles at Embotics, and prior to that Jean-Marc was Director of Engineering at Symbium, with broad-ranging management responsibilities spanning software applications through firmware and hardware development.
With numerous patents granted, Jean-Marc also worked at Mitel designing and building leading- edge, enterprise and telecommunications software applications.
Dr. James Serack
With more than 24 years of leadership, engineering and business experience, Dr. James Serack is the Director of Americas Architecture and Innovation for Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), a global information technology and services company. At CSC, he served as Ascension Health Account CTO and a solution executive in Business Development. Prior to CSC, Dr. Serack was Vice President of Information Services (CIO) for the R&D divisions of Nortel Networks.
Dr. Serack is currently the Chair of the Advisory Board of Western Engineering (ACWE) at the University of Western Ontario, and on the Executive Steering Committee of the American Nursing Time and Motion Research Project.
He is a professional engineer and holds a Bachelor in Engineering Physics (1983) from the University of Saskatchewan, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (1988) from Edinburgh University, Scotland. Dr. Serack presents numerous papers in microelectronics and is an active contributor to technology Wikis. He also holds a patent in the telecommunications field.
Dr. Tony White
Dr. Tony White has over 30 years of diverse software engineering experience in large corporations and startup environments. He previously served as CTO of Embotics before moving to a full-time research role at Carleton University. Prior to Embotics, Dr. White served as CTO of Symbium, setting the technology vision and serving as principal architect. At Texar, as Chief Scientist, he built and managed an R&D group of 35 engineers. While at Nortel Networks he was the principal architect for the Expert Advisor, a multi-agent diagnostic system for X.25 networks. He has published over 100 papers on subjects that include Network and System Management, Multi-agent systems, Swarm Intelligence, and Autonomic Computing.
Dr. White is a Full Professor of Computer Science at Carleton University, Ottawa, where he lectures on Distributed Computing, Programming Language Foundations and Swarm Intelligence. He has master’s degrees in Physics from Cambridge University, England, and Computer Science along with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Carleton University, Ottawa. He has been awarded 8 patents with several others pending. Dr. White’s current research areas include Autonomic Computing and Social Computing.
