Management
An Experienced Management Team, a Track Record of Success, a Compelling Vision
From Fortune 500 companies to early stage ventures, Clearwell’s team brings extensive management and technology expertise. In previous roles, the team has successfully built and delivered industry-leading software solutions to the largest organizations around the world. The team also has extensive experience and working knowledge of the challenges facing today’s compliance, legal, customer management, and IT professionals.
Aaref
A. Hilaly — President & Chief Executive Officer
Aaref brings extensive technology, entrepreneurial management, and Fortune 500 consulting expertise to his position. He is an active contributor and thought leader in the e-discovery industry and has been published in several trade journals, including Law Technology News, E-Discovery Advisor, and ILTA Peer-to-Peer.
Prior to Clearwell, he was Co-Founder, President and CEO of CenterRun, which he led from inception in 2000 to its acquisition by Sun Microsystems in August 2003. CenterRun was a leading provider of application provisioning software and today forms the basis of Sun's data center automation product suite.
Prior to co-founding CenterRun, he worked in corporate and business development at Excite@Home Networks, which at that time was one of the largest internet companies. He joined Excite@Home from The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting company. At BCG, Aaref led projects advising Fortune 500 companies on a variety of sales, marketing and product development issues, with particular focus in the software and telecommunications industries.
Aaref earned an MBA from Harvard Business School with high distinction as a Baker Scholar. He holds a BA Honor's degree from Oxford University, and a Master's degree from McGill University, where he was awarded the Arthur Tagge Fellowship. While a full-time student, he completed internships at Linklaters, Slaughter and May, and the UN Center For Human Rights in Geneva.
To learn more about Aaref and his thoughts about E-Discovery, visit his blog at http://www.clearwellsystems.com/e-discovery-blog/.
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Venkat
Rangan — Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer
Venkat has more than 23 years of enterprise software development experience. He has lead technology innovation in the areas of search and e-discovery and is currently a member of several Sedona Conference working groups as well as holds leadership roles in the EDRM Project. He has also led innovation in information retrieval technology through his participation in TREC Legal Track, a research community responsible for advances in information retrieval as it pertains to legal community.
Prior to founding Clearwell Systems, he served as Vice President, Technology with Rhapsody Networks Inc. After its acquisition by Brocade Communications, he continued as Director of its award-winning Fabric Application Platform. Prior to Rhapsody, Venkat was Vice President and Chief Architect at VitalSigns Software, and was responsible for the architecture of VitalSuite, an enterprise application and network performance management solution. He continued in this role at Lucent Technologies, as a result of the acquisition of VitalSigns Software.
Venkat also served as a lead Program Manager at Microsoft, responsible for WEBM, WMI and CIM technologies of Microsoft, and as an R&D Manager at Hewlett Packard's NetMetrix division, after the acquisition of Metrix Network Systems. Additionally, he was part of the team that developed the PC NFS toolkit for Sun Microsystems, and was a member of Wang Laboratories Advanced Technologies team.
Venkat obtained his Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida, and an undergraduate degree in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India.
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Anup Singh
— Chief Financial Officer
Anup brings over 18 years of strong financial leadership in global companies to Clearwell. His responsibilities include finance and accounting, human resources, legal and information technology.
Prior to joining Clearwell, Anup was Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Warranty Corporation of America, an Asurion company, the leader in providing service plan solutions to the wireless, communications, and retail industries. Previously, he held the position of Vice President, Corporate Controller and Principal Accounting Officer at Trimble Navigation Limited, a leading provider of advanced positioning solutions, including GPS technology that maximize productivity and enhance profitability. During his tenure at Trimble, he managed a global team of 120 employees and oversaw a period of rapid growth at the company. In 2006, Trimble was listed in both Business Week's and Forbes's top 100 growth companies.
Prior to Trimble, Anup held the positions of Senior Director, Corporate Financial Planning and Analysis, and International Controller at Excite@Home. He also worked for 3Com Corporation and Ernst & Young LLP in San Jose, California and London, England. Anup holds BA and MA Honors degrees in Economics and Management Science from Cambridge University, where he was a Cambridge Commonwealth Trust scholar, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.
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Andy
Byrne – Vice President of Business Development
Andy has been with Clearwell since the inception of the company and is responsible for developing strategic relationships with key organizations in the e-discovery industry. Andy leverages his experience to identify partnerships that optimize the value offered to Clearwell customers, and has developed multiple channels to deliver end-to-end e-discovery processes to Fortune 50 enterprises, financial institutions, large telecommunications and high technology companies, energy giants, legal departments, and law firms.
Prior to joining Clearwell, Andy co-founded Timestock, Inc., which was acquired by Computer Associates (NYSE: CA) via the acquisition of Wily Technology, Inc. Timestock, Inc. delivered world class enterprise application management solutions to Fortune 500 companies including General Electric, Xerox, Cingular, ADP and E*TRADE Financial. Before Timestock, Andy was Vice President of Marketing at Desana Systems, responsible for both inbound product management and outbound corporate marketing.
Prior to Desana, Andy was Vice President of Product Management at the VitalSoft Division of Lucent Technologies, where he led the product management efforts for Lucent's award-wining VitalSuite, a market-share leader. Andy came to Lucent through the acquisition of VitalSigns Software. Andy held various senior product management and marketing roles during his tenure at VitalSigns and Lucent. Andy has also held sales and marketing roles at Bay Networks and at MiLAN Technologies, which was later acquired by Digi International.
Andy holds a BS in Economics and received his MBA with honors from San Jose State University.
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Trevor
Eddy – Vice President of Worldside Sales
Trevor brings over a decade of sales management and business development
experience to his position as Vice President of Sales at Clearwell Systems.
Prior to joining Clearwell, Trevor was responsible for the U.S. East
Coast, Canada and Caribbean sales teams for Juniper Networks, the leader
in IP networking and security. Trevor joined Juniper in 2005 through its $330M acquisition of Peribit Networks, where he was instrumental in developing early accounts, driving channel strategy,
and capturing customer feedback. His clients included Fortune 50 companies in financial services, high technology, manufacturing and healthcare.
Prior to Peribit, Trevor managed a team of 27 people at Lucent Technologies responsible for enterprise software products. Trevor came to Lucent via its acquisition of INS, where Trevor was promoted 3 times in 3 years, from an individual contributor to managing a team of 12 account executives. Earlier in his career, he worked for a systems integrator on Wall Street and for Arthur Andersen.
Trevor holds a Bachelor of Commerce from Queens University in Kingston,
Ontario, Canada.
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Dean Gonsowski – Vice President of E-Discovery Services
Dean brings over a decade of e-discovery consulting and legal practice experience to his position. He is a member of The Sedona Conference Working Group on Electronic Document Retention and Production (WG1), the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) and teaches a series of continuing legal education (CLE) courses on various e-discovery topics. He has contributed articles to a number of leading industry publications including: Business Week, Corporate Counsel, ILTA Peer to Peer, Inside Counsel and the Legal Tech Newsletter. Dean also has been invited to speak at eDiscovery Series, LegalTech New York 2010 and the Masters Conference.
Prior to joining Clearwell, Dean was the Managing Director of Xiotech, Inc.'s Business Consulting group. He has significant experience building and leading teams of consultants that help corporations develop records management and electronic information best practices, as well as managing large scale computer forensic and electronic discovery projects. Prior to joining Xiotech, Inc. Dean was a Director in the Discovery Services practice of Navigant Consulting, Inc. where he assisted law firms such as Fish & Richardson, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Cooley Godward, as well as corporations including Qwest Communications, Alcatel, and Ford Motor Company.
Prior to joining Navigant Consulting, Inc., Dean was Corporate Counsel & Director, Discovery Services at Fios, Inc., a full service electronic discovery services company. Prior to joining Fios, Mr. Gonsowski was a Founder and Managing Director with S3 Partners, LLC, a computer forensics consultancy. Before founding S3 Partners, Mr. Gonsowski, was a practicing attorney specializing in insurance coverage and bad faith litigation. Mr. Gonsowski worked for the Department of Justice and also served as General Counsel for an international manufacturing company.
Dean received his BS from the University of California, Santa Barbara and his JD from the University of San Diego School of Law. He is a licensed attorney in both California and Colorado.
To learn more about Dean and his thoughts about E-Discovery, visit the E-Discovery 2.0 blog at http://www.clearwellsystems.com/e-discovery-blog/.
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Kamal
Shah – Vice President of Products & Marketing
Kamal brings more than 12 years of experience defining, developing and marketing solutions to Global 2000 enterprises. He is a member of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) and The Sedona Conference, and frequently writes on the topic of e-discovery. Kamal's responsibilities include product management, product marketing and corporate marketing.
Prior to joining Clearwell Systems, Kamal was General Manager of the Customer Data Integration business unit at Siebel Systems, where he played a key role in growing the business from inception to more than $75 million in revenue over three years, capturing leading market share.
Prior to Siebel Systems, Kamal worked in product management at Asera, where he worked on defining the platform for composite applications development as well as solutions for customer relationship management. He has also held product management positions at Trilogy Software and Palm Inc. Kamal began his career at Federal Express Corporation, where he held several leadership and management positions, and led the team responsible for introducing new services and pricing strategies worldwide.
Kamal holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from University of Memphis and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
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Soumitro Tagore — Vice President of Engineering & Customer Care
Soumitro brings over 14 years of technical and leadership experience to his role at Clearwell, where he is responsible for product development, quality assurance, and customer care. Much of that time was spent working on search and e-discovery technologies, giving him a strong understanding of the e-discovery domain.
Soumitro joined Clearwell from IBM's Content Management Group (CM), where he headed the global development team charged with creating IBM's next generation e-mail archive and e-discovery products. IBM's CM product suite has over 10,000 customers, many of whom rely on its archiving and search technology to meet their e-discovery needs.
Prior to IBM, Soumitro was an architect and manager working on development tools and middleware at Informix where he drove the creation of an object persistence product that was the first such product to support object-relational databases. He started his career as the 3rd engineer at Centerview Software, a startup company building development tools for ActiveX/COM applications that was subsequently acquired by Informix.
Soumitro holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics Engineering from the University of Delhi, India, and Masters degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from LSU.
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