Active Endpoints

This podcast episode features our CEO, Mark Taber, detailing Active Endpoints' vision for making possible the mass adoption of services-based applications. Mark touches on the problems facing developers and project teams who struggle with today's overweight, expensive and hard-to-use tools. He also details how ActiveVOS is the most open and flexible solution to what has until now seemed like an intractable problem.

Management Team

Mark Taber, CEO

Mark brings to Active Endpoints more than 25 years of experience driving sales and operations results for businesses that provide cutting-edge middleware, security, networking, and storage technology.

Before joining Active Endpoints, Mark served as IBM's Worldwide Business Unit Executive for their SOA Appliance Division, a part of IBM's Application Infrastructure Middleware Group. He joined IBM through its 2005 acquisition of DataPower, where he was Vice President of Sales. While at IBM/DataPower (before and after the acquisition), Mark provided mission-critical web services infrastructure to more than 300 large enterprise and government customers around the world, helping them to simplify, manage and secure scalable web services communications in heterogeneous environments.

Before DataPower, Mark served as Vice President of Sales at AEP Systems, where he focused on increasing security in financial and government networks and enabling secure remote access for small and medium-sized businesses. Prior to AEP, Mark was Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Chrysalis-ITS, where he worked with computing and networking OEMs to remove security-related performance bottlenecks. Mark also served as Regional Vice President at Toshiba America Information Systems-Storage Division.

Mark holds a bachelor's degree in economics from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Chris Keller, Founder and Vice President - Product Development

In his career spanning over 25 years, Chris has led the development of award-winning software products. His expertise spans a broad spectrum of infrastructure technologies including integration brokers, transaction/messaging systems, and services-oriented computing models.

Prior to Active Endpoints, Chris was Vice President, Product Development of Novell, Inc.'s eBusiness Integration Products division. Chris was the co-founder of two prior software ventures - GemLogic, Inc. (acquired by Novell/SilverStream), and LexiBridge Corporation (acquired by Level3 Communications). Chris has also held senior level R&D positions at DataEase International, Reuters North America and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

He is a graduate of Long Island University with Bachelor of Science degrees in physics and mathematics.

Eric Egertson, Vice President - Sales

Eric joined Active Endpoints from DataDirect Technologies, an operating company of Progress Software Corporation. In his seven-year tenure as Vice President, Sales with DataDirect, Eric led the company's OEM partnerships with IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and other leading independent software vendors, with over 200 new OEM relationships with ISVs formed during the last three years. Eric also led DataDirect's move into new corporate and government markets with products ranging from XML query processors to mainframe integration. Eric was a member of the management team that spun off DataDirect from MERANT in the fall of 2001, during which time DataDirect sharpened its focus on its most profitable markets, positioning DataDirect for acquisition by Progress Software in December 2003.

Prior to Eric's Vice President responsibilities with DataDirect, Eric held OEM field sales and sales management positions at MERANT and INTERSOLV, was Director of Marketing and Business Development at TechGnosis, and held product marketing positions at Trinzic Corporation.

Eric received a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Middlebury College in Middlebury, VT.

Alex Neihaus, Vice President - Marketing

Prior to joining Active Endpoints, Alex was a marketing consultant to numerous venture-backed software start-ups. Before serving as a marketing consultant, Alex was VP of Marketing at Ipswitch, Inc., a leading developer of file transfer, network management and messaging products for small and medium businesses. He also led the marketing effort for AccuRev, Inc., a provider of software configuration management systems. At Revit Technology, the developer of a revolutionary system for the design of buildings, Alex was VP of Marketing from launch until the company was acquired by Autodesk, Inc.

Earlier in his career, Alex had multiple assignments at Lotus Development Corp. While on an overseas assignment in Singapore, Alex served as Director of Marketing for the 16-country Asia-Pacific region. Also at Lotus, Alex marketed the Notes and Domino application development environment, launched the LotusScript programming language, managed Lotus's database integration product line and led the company's entry into the distance learning market. Prior to Lotus, Alex was a systems engineer at IBM Corporation. Also at IBM, Alex was a technology architect in the IBM Consulting Group and a regional sales representative for database and application development software.

Alex graduated from the College of Communications at Boston University, magna cum laude, with a degree in Broadcasting and Film.

Luc Clement, Senior Director - Product Management

Luc has more than 20 years of experience driving product direction, with proven ability to develop and execute product plans, and releasing marking-leading products. Prior to Active Endpoints, Luc held the position of Director Product Management where he defined HP's SOA Governance product roadmap and steered product release iterations. At Systinet, acquired by Mercury Interactive and subsequently acquired by HP, Luc was a key contributor to the company's vision and success with its SOA Governance and Registry market-leading products, establishing SOA Governance as a newly defined market segment.

Before Systinet, Luc held a senior program management position in Microsoft's Windows Server group responsible for the Windows Server 2003 registry offering, driving cross-group product integration and representing Microsoft on UDDI standardization activities. During this period, Luc also held a number of external positions including Co-chair of the OASIS UDDI Spec Technical Committee, General Program Manager for UDDI.org, and Managing Director of the UDDI Business Registry. Prior to this, Luc directed the product development activities at Zoomit, producing the first and market-leading meta-directory product resulting in Microsoft's decision to acquire the company. Prior to joining the software industry, Luc was an officer of the Canadian Forces.

Luc holds a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master's in Computer Engineering from Royal Military College of Canada.

David Collard, Vice President - Finance & Administration

David provides a wealth of leadership experience in all aspects of Active Endpoints' financial management and administrative operations. His financial management experience spans thirty years and multiple public and private companies, including extensive senior level experience at a Fortune 150 NYSE-listed company, as VP Finance & Administration at Revit Technology, Oberon Software Inc., and World Wide Direct, and in senior-level financial management positions at Zymark Corporation, Interleaf, Inc. and Prime Computer. David has been involved in numerous financings and is very active in the Boston financial and VC community.

David holds an MBA from State University of New York (Buffalo) and a BA - Accounting from Syracuse University.

Active Endpoints is on a mission. A big one.

We want to make it possible for regular human beings to cost-effectively and flexibly use all of the web services infrastructure that has been installed in companies over the last few years to create composite applications. Think of all the "stuff" a project team is expected to absorb and integrate: ESBs, SOAP, SOA, BPM, ad infinitum. It's enough to make the typical project team lower their heads and stick to what they know. But we believe that's a mistake. And we know there's a better way...a lighter-weight way...to drive mass adoption of services-based applications.

First, standards are the basis of everything we do. That's why we are an important participant in OASIS's work developing and promoting the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and extensions like BPEL4People.

Next, we believe that visual orchestration systems are a "win-win-win" for project teams, line-of-business users and enterprise architects. Only a VOS works with any enterprise architecture, supports the detailed work a developer needs to do and delivers composite applications - inclusive of human task management - in a maintainable, scalable way to end users.

Finally, we believe ActiveVOS is the only VOS available that delivers on all these promises and does so at breakthrough pricing, making it not only the best VOS but also the most affordable VOS.

For all these reasons, and more, we believe Active Endpoints will achieve its mission.

ActiveVOS is the industry's first complete, integrated, standards-based visual orchestration system. With ActiveVOS, your project teams and individual developers working in a web services environment can create SOA applications in ways never before possible.

ActiveVOS revolutionizes the design, development, testing, deployment and maintenance of services-based applications. By delivering the best of open standards like the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), BPEL4People and WS-Human Task in a comprehensive, all-in-one environment, developers working in a services-oriented architecture environment can deliver applications applications flexibly, freeing their processes from proprietary software stacks and closed business process management (BPM) software.