About / Board
George Sollman
Chairman
Mr. Sollman is Chairman and founder of Arabesque Investments LLC, Atherton, CA. He is the former co-founder, president & CEO, of @Motion Inc., acquired by OpenWave, for about $400M in 2000. Begun in 1997, @Motion was a venture-backed startup, created to pioneer Internet voice portal servers. Lead venture capital was DCM (Doll Capital), and investors included Deutsche Telekom and Intel Capital.
Before founding @Motion, Mr. Sollman was the president and CEO of Centigram Communications Corporation, a leading voice messaging company, from 1985 through 1997. The company grew from a privately-held firm with revenues about $1M to more than $120M as a publicly-held company, with its IPO in 1991. Prior to joining Centigram, Mr. Sollman was VP/GM for Sales and Marketing at Shugart Corporation, a leading disk drive company in the period 1976-84. During this time, the company grew from about $6M to $240M, during which it was acquired by Xerox.
Mr. Sollman has served on a number of private and public company boards. Currently, he serves also on the Board of Advisors of the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University (Chairman from 2001-2004). He was active previously with the American Electronics Association (AEA), where he served on the National Board of Directors from 1993-1997, during which he was elected National Chairman, representing its 3,200 member companies. In 1994, Mr. Sollman received a Presidential appointment to ARPA's Semiconductor Technology Council.
He received his BSEE from Northwestern University and an MSEE from Northeastern University. In addition, he has received five patents.
Dr. Mark J.F. Allen
President, Chief Executive Officer, Founder
Prior to founding Corticon, Dr. Allen was CEO of Internet Health, a provider of rule-based systems to the clinical healthcare market. Dr. Allen's experiences with the shortcomings of traditional business rule engines led to the discovery of several key innovations, which make business rule engines significantly easier to use for business process automation. These innovations, provide the foundation for the Corticon solution, which is now applied across diverse industries such as financial services, government, manufacturing and insurance.
Dr. Allen has a B.S. in Applied Physics from Columbia University, and an M.D. from the University of California Los Angeles, where he resigned from an Emergency Medicine residency program to found and lead Corticon.
Mark Carges
Mr. Carges is a leading software technology executive and visionary. He is currently Senior Vice President and CTO at eBay. Prior to joining eBay in September 2008, Mr. Carges was Executive Vice President, Products and General Manager at BEA Systems, a middleware provider that was acquired by Oracle in April 2008. During more than a decade at BEA, Mark held a variety of senior technology leadership roles, including Chief Technology Officer, leading the technology vision for BEA's Tuxedo, WebLogic and AquaLogic product suites.
Mr. Carges began his career at Bell Labs as one of the original architects of Tuxedo, software for constructing highly scalable transaction processing applications. Prior to BEA, he designed and developed early versions of Tuxedo at Bell Labs, Unix System Labs and Novell.
Craig R. Johnson
Mr. Johnson is the President and executive committee member of JMP Securities LLC, which he joined in January 2002. He is also a member of the executive committee of JMP Group, JMP Securities' parent company, and serves on the board of directors of JMP Holdings.
Mr. Johnson is a founder of Saw Island Asset Management (SIAM), which manages investments in hedge funds and other alternative assets. SIAM was acquired by JMP Asset Management, a wholly owned subsidiary of JMP Group, in January 2003. Craig previously spent twenty years, from 1980 through 2000, at Montgomery Securities, now Banc of America Securities, where he was most recently Director of Global Institutional Sales and a member of the firm's executive committee.
Mr. Johnson also serves on the board of the San Francisco Zoo and is a trustee for the Woodside Priory School. Craig holds a B.A. in economics from Stanford University.
Jonathan G. Morgan
In October 2002, Mr. Morgan began serving as interim president and chief executive officer of First Virtual Communications. A year later, based on his nearly 30 years of experience and successes, Mr. Morgan was appointed the permanent president and CEO of the organization. Prior to joining First Virtual, Mr. Morgan served as founder and managing director at Rostrevor Partners, LLC, a strategic consulting services company, which provides services to early stage growth companies. Prior to founding Rostrevor, Mr. Morgan was Managing Director at Prudential Volpe Technology Group where he was involved in providing the overall direction and management to the Group's west coast corporate finance origination and transaction activities. Prior to the formation of the Prudential Volpe Technology Group, Mr. Morgan was the Group Head in charge of Prudential Securities' Technology and Internet practices.
In 1992, Mr. Morgan joined Sutro & Co. Incorporated where he served as a Managing Director and head of the firm's San Francisco investment banking operations. Prior to 1992, Mr. Morgan was with Montgomery Securities where he served as Managing Director and the firm's Director of Mergers and Acquisitions. He founded the M&A practice at Montgomery and was responsible for building the business; completing transactions having an aggregate value in excess of $7.0 billion. Mr. Morgan began his career in 1975 at A.E. Ames & Co. Limited, a major Canadian Investment Banking firm, and concentrated in the areas of equity finance and mergers and acquisitions. Mr. Morgan played a major role in managing and executing valuation and strategic alternative assignments for the government of Canada.
In 1980, Mr. Morgan joined Morgan Stanley & Co. Incorporated. His principal areas of responsibility were in mergers and acquisitions and private equity financing. Mr. Morgan was also responsible for Morgan Stanley's technology and M&A efforts in Canada as well as managing corporate finance and marketing programs. Mr. Morgan received his H.B.A. from the School of Business Administration at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario Canada. He was a member of the Dean's Honour's List.
Jim Thanos
Mr. Thanos has had 20 years of experience at the senior management level in enterprise software companies covering such areas of responsibility as Sales, Marketing, Professional Services, Customer Support, Business Development, and Alliances.
Mr. Thanos was most recently Executive Vice President and General Manager of Worldwide Field Operations at Broadvision. From the beginning of 1998 through 2000, revenues grew from $27M to $414M. Mr. Thanos' area of responsibility grew during that time period from less than 50 people to approximately 1000 people.
Prior to Broadvision, Mr. Thanos was Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Aurum Software, a leader in sales force automation business solutions. He played a role in leading Aurum to profitability and then going public before being acquired by Baan. Revenue grew from $6M to $74M during Mr. Thanos' tenure at Aurum. Before joining Aurum in 1995, Mr. Thanos served as Vice President of Sales at Harvest Software. Prior to Harvest Software, he was Vice President of Sales Operations and Professional Services at Metaphor, Inc., a pioneer in business decision support systems, where he grew annual sales to $37M before the company was acquired by IBM. Before Metaphor, Mr. Thanos worked as Executive Vice President of Worldwide Field Operations at Informix, where he was responsible for expanding the company's revenues from $24M in 1987 to $103M in 1988. Mr. Thanos was also the VP responsible for sales, marketing, and professional services at Dunn and Bradstreet Computing Services.
Mr. Thanos has a BA in Behavioral Sciences from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He is currently serving on two public boards and three private boards.
