Industry & Technology Advisors

Sweetwater Partners utilizes its network of advisors to:

• Evaluate and provide due diligence on target investments.
• Provide ideas to form new start-ups.
• Refer external start-up ideas to Sweetwater.
• Provide access to operational and technical management in relevant domain areas.

Industry Advisors:
• C. William Cummings, Vice President of Business Development for Neoforma, Inc.
• David Gurle, EVP Messaging Reuters, Head of Real-Time Collaboration Group, Microsoft
• Jan Fandrianto, Vice President, Voice Engineering at Cisco Systems
• Jonathan Present
• Mark Zawacki, Founder Milestone Group, Partner Woodside Capital

Technology Advisors:
• Paul Emery, VP of Engineering, Visible Path, VP of Engineering, Oracle Collaboration, VP of Eng, FaceTime, V.P. of Engineering Vignette.
• Cullen Jennings, Distinguished Engineer, Cisco Systems.
• Lawrence Lu, Founder and CEO of Array Networks, Stratus, Cisco Systems.
• Rohan Mahy, Principal Engineer, Plantronics, Co-Chair SIP Foundry, Member, SIP and SIPPING Working Group IETF, Voice Engineer, Cisco Systems.
• Jason Fischl CTO of CounterPath Solutions
• Koen Vos, Voice engineer, Camino Networks, Sonorit.

If you are interested in joining our Industry or Technology Advisor network please send and e-mail to: christopher@sweetwaterpartners.com.

Detailed Advisor Biographies

C. William Cummings, Industry Advisor
Bill has 20 years of general management, business development and strategic marketing experience in the software, Internet, healthcare and entertainment sectors. Since September 2001, he has been the Vice President of Business Development for Neoforma, Inc. - a publicly traded e-commerce/supply chain solutions provider to almost a third of all the hospitals in the U.S. In this role, Bill leads all mergers and acquisition, strategic partnership and other business development activities for Neoforma, and serves as a member of the Executive Staff. Prior to assuming this position, he served as the company's Vice President of Content Services and General Manager of the Plan group.

Bill joined Neoforma in January 2000 after it acquired Pharos Technologies, Inc. - a company he had co-founded. As President and CEO of Pharos, Bill raised $1.5M in seed stage financing, built and lead a team of 20 employees that developed a customer-friendly content normalization/syndication platform that enabled comprehensive searches of parametrically-intensive product information, and negotiated the sale to Neoforma for $26M of pre-IPO stock (back in the hey-day of the dot.com madness).
Before founding Pharos, Bill held several executive positions at Autodesk's Data Publishing Group, an intrapreneurial online publishing venture that provided complex product information and CAD models to mechanical engineers and architectural designers. Bill also spent many years in the entertainment industry, where he served as president and founder of the Parallax Entertainment Corporation from 1988-1991, Vice President of the Xenon Entertainment Corporation from 1986-1988, and a producer for Roger Corman and New World Pictures from 1984-1986.
Bill earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Drama from Dartmouth College, where he was recognized as a Rufus Choate Scholar. He also received a Master of Management degree from the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management of Northwestern University with majors in Marketing and Finance. Bill is married, with three sons. In his spare time, he coaches lacrosse and soccer, skis, travels, renovates his house, watches movies, and fantasizes about owning a winery.

Paul Emery
Paul Emery is the Vice President of Engineering at Visible Path. He has 18 years of software engineering and technology management experience with a specialty in leading globally-distributed software engineering organizations. Prior to joining Visible Path, Mr. Emery was vice president of server technologies at Oracle Corporation, where he led the product development of the Oracle Workplace portal product and led teams in Redwood Shores, Calif. and Bangalore, India. Prior to Oracle, Mr. Emery ran engineering and client services at FaceTime Communications, Inc., where he managed organizations in California, West Virginia, and India. From 2002 to 2004, Mr. Emery was vice president of engineering at Vignette Corporation, where he led the successful product integration efforts of several of Vignette's strategic acquisitions. Emery was also vice president of engineering at enterprise portal pioneer Epicentric, Inc., where he grew the company's development organization from fewer than 20 to over 120 engineers before its acquisition by Vignette. Mr. Emery holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University.

Jan Fandrianto:
Jan has over 24 Years of High-Technology Industry Experience. He is currently Vice President, Voice Engineering at Cisco Systems. He was the Founder and CEO of Sipura Technology, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2005. He was the Founder and CEO of Komodo Technology, Inc., which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2000. He was the Founder and CEO of VideoCore Technology, Inc., which was acquired by ESS Technology in 1995. He was also CTO and VP of Engineering at 8x8, Inc. - formerly IIT.

Over the past 15 years, Mr. Fandrianto led the core development of media processing technology used in multimedia chips for voice, video and data applications. This important work has been the basis for a host of successful telecommunications and consumer electronics products including analog telephony adapters, IP Phones, videoconferencing systems and DVD players. Mr. Fandrianto's innovations in this area are the foundation for the majority of the principal low-density IP telephony gateway products on the market today.

Mr. Fandrianto has nine patents issued and several more patents pending in the areas of VoIP communication, video compression, DSP (Digital Signal Processor) and floating point arithmetic - including a key patent in fast algorithm for division and square-root computations commonly used in today's most popular micro processors.

He has an MS EE from Stanford University and a BS EECS from the University of California at Berkeley.

David Gurle

David Gurlé is currently Executive Vice President, Global Head of Collaboration Services at Reuters, where he leads a worldwide team responsible for the business and technical aspects of collaboration services including Reuters Messaging product development, deployment and service initiatives. Gurlé previously worked at Microsoft as Product Unit Manager and Director of Program Management, Real Time Communication where he was responsible for Greenwich, Microsoft's upcoming instant messaging solution and real-time communications platform. He also oversaw Exchange Instant Messaging, Windows Messenger, Exchange Conferencing Server, NetMeeting and TAPI. While at Microsoft, Gurlé led the product team that delivered the technology which is the foundation of Reuters Messaging service.

Jason Fischl
Jason Fischl is the CTO of CounterPath Solutions (formerly Xten Networks) - the leading provider of SIP softphones. Previously, Mr. Fischl was the co-founder and CTO of TelTel. Prior to TelTel he worked at PurpleComm. He was a founder and CTO of Cathay Networks, which developed a SIP-based IP Centrex system. Mr. Fischl is one of the founding members of the Board of Directors of both SIPfoundry and Vovida.org. In 2002, he helped found the reSIProcate open source SIP stack project and has been one of its key contributors. Currently, he is focusing his open source development efforts on a carrier-grade open source SIP proxy called “repro” and the dialog usage manager user agent library. Jason is an active member at the IETF and is working on a number of Internet Drafts in the areas of SIP security and payment mechanisms.

Cullen Jennings
Dr. Cullen Jennings is a Distinguished Engineer in the Voice Technology Group at Cisco. Cullen came to Cisco from Vovida Networks which developed an open-source toolkit for Voice-over-IP. He is also an author of O'Reilly's title "Practical VoIP" and the co-chair of the IETF IPTEL Working Group. Currently Cullen is focusing on conferencing, security, and firewall and NAT traversal. Still active in the SIP and open source communities,

Cullen recently contributed a prototype Instant Messaging and Presence client which integrates strong end-to-end security.

Lawrence Lu
Lawrence was most recently the CTO of FaceTime Communications. Lawrence is an entrepreneur who brings over 16 years of technical and management experience in the networking and security industries.

Prior to joining FaceTime, Mr. Lu was the founder, CTO and VP of Engineering of Array Networks, a profitable service provider class SSL VPN and Application Accelerator startup where, in addition to managing the engineering team, he architected many high-performance features and filed 3 patents on key technologies.
Before founding Array Networks, Mr. Lu was responsible for building the Layer 7 switching engineering team at Alteon Web Systems, where he dramatically improved the performance of the company's switches and developed advanced Layer 7 switching technology. Previously, Mr. Lu managed Cisco Systems' PIX firewall development team, the world's leading firewall product.

In addition, Mr. Lu has held positions at Auspex Systems and Stratus Computer. Mr. Lu earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of California of Davis and a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from San Jose State University.

Rohan Mahy
Rohan Mahy is a senior engineer at Plantronics. He technical specialties include: on SIP, VoIP, and NATs. Previously, Rohan was Chief Voice Architect at Airespace, working on location and real-time services there, and assisting partners with implementation of voice over wireless LANs. Prior to Airespace, Rohan worked for Cisco Systems for eleven years, most recently as a Network Architect in the Voice Technology Group, where he led initiatives in voice security, configuration and administration, distributed call control, and NAT and firewall traversal. A leader within the VoIP industry, he is the co-chair of the IETF SIP and SIPPING working groups, the chair of the SIP Forum Technical Working Group, and active in the design of SIPfoundry's reSIProcate open-source SIP stack.

Jonathan Present,
Jon Present brings 25 years of expertise to Sweetwater, having, matriculated at ITT (Alcatel), Digital Equipment Corp (HP), GE Information Services/Global Exchange Services (GEIS/GXS), Getronics N.V., and Cisco Systems.

He is considered an authority on the strategic sales process, proposals, and strategic alliances. Jon has been involved with the formation, operation, or turnaround of twelve start ups. Responsible for Cisco's Worldwide Major Opportunities in the Service Provider Line of Business for a period of five years, Jon was instrumental in driving early wins with all major RBOC, PTT, ILEC, CLEC, and NSP entities. Jon earned Bachelors degrees in Economics and Psychology at Antioch College, and was a Cisco honors exchange program scholar at the Stanford Graduate School of Engineering.

Mark Zawacki
Through Milestone Group, Mark has worked with more than 50 software companies on a myriad of growth and revenue-related issues, including strategic positioning, business and corporate development, alliances/partnering and international expansion. His clients have included SAP, Trend Micro, Vignette, PlaceWare (acquired by Microsoft), AvantGo (acquired by Sybase), Intraspect (acquired by Vignette), Artesia Technologies (acquired by Open Text), Authentica (acquired by EMC), Entercept (acquired by McAfee), NetGravity (acquired by DoubleClick), Kana, Tripwire, Xcalia and MX Logic.
Mark spent nearly a decade as a strategy consultant with CSC Index, the strategic management consulting division of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). Mark was variously based in Amsterdam, London, Sydney and San Francisco. Mark's consulting focused at the vortex of corporate strategy, organizational change, and leveraging technology for business advantage. His Fortune 500 and FT500 clients were in the financial services, manufacturing, energy, pharmaceuticals and retail sectors. Mark began his high tech career with Symantec, joining in 1987.
Educational Background

Mark holds a B.Sc. In Marketing from the University of Colorado and an MBA from the University of Rochester, William E. Simon Graduate School of Business.