Team

 

Annie Blandel

Annie BlandelEntrepreneurship, recognizing and driving forward innovative new products and services, and powering international expansion, have been the cornerstones of Annie Blandel’s 25 year career in technology marketing. Annie has successfully delivered international marketing and business development campaigns for numerous established leaders in their fields, including Nortel, Intel, Cisco, HP. She has also developed an impressive track record working with younger companies and start-ups. Since 2007, Annie has worked as a Senior Consultant and Professor in Marketing for Master’s in IT & Project Management at the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis (France).

Read more about Annie

Florian Effenberger

Florian EffenbergerFlorian Effenberger has been an Open Source evangelist for many years. He is lead of the international OpenOffice.org marketing project as well as a member of the management board of the non-profit OpenOffice.org Deutschland e.V. He has ten years' experience of designing enterprise and educational computer networks, including software deployment based on free software. Florian is also a frequent contributor to a variety of professional magazines worldwide on topics such as free software, open standards and legal matters.

Roberto Galoppini

Roberto GaloppiniRoberto is a computer industry insider of 15+ years standing. Up until 1994 Roberto had never heard of Linux, until he chanced to lead a group of geeks in starting up a mobile ISP with just a bunch of old PCs. Since then Roberto has worked in such hands-on roles as programmer and systems analyst, eventually founding an open source firm in 2001, and an open source consortium in 2004.

Roberto has taken an active interest in several free/open source software organizations. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the SourceForge Marketplace and acts as the Institutional Relationship Manager for the OpenOffice.org Italian Association. Since 2004 Roberto has researched the economics of OSS, collaborating with universities and EC funded research projects. Roberto is also a technical writer for IT and computer-related magazines.

Zak Greant

Zak GreantZak has solid experience building and managing online communities, developing electronic frontier business strategies and working with Free Software and Open Source licenses. Additionally, he has spoken at, organized or chaired over 60 FLOSS events between 2001 to 2008 and has edited several dozen books, ranging in topic from PHP and databases and regular expressions and FLOSS business strategy. Zak has also been the primary author of two technical books and helped set up the MySQL Press imprint. He has been an active participant in many Free Software/Open Source communities, from PHP and MySQL (where he worked as MySQL AB's community advocate) to volunteering with the Free Software Foundation's License Compliance Lab Team and acting as a board observer for the Open Source Initiative.

Sandro Groganz

Sandro GroganzSandro Groganz is founder and principal of Initmarketing. Prior to founding Initmarketing, he was the VP Marketing at Mindquarry, an Open Source startup financed by Hasso Plattner Ventures, and the VP Communication at eZ Systems, creator of the Open Source content management system eZ Publish. Sandro also has a background as a PHP developer, consultant and author contributing to various books covering LAMP programming.

Alexander Kempkens

Alexander KempkensAlex Kempkens is a passionate spokesperson for open source software and actively involved in the organization, marketing and management of the Joomla content management system. Starting in 2004 as a developer for the Mambo project he co-founded the Joomla CMS in 2005. He is also founder of Think Network GmbH, a consulting company specialized on the integration of innovative corporate strategies in combination with open standard solutions. Read more about Alex.

Rory MacDonald

Rory MacDonaldAn archetypically radical youngest child of three, Rory MacDonald is a leftfield thinker. He delights in challenging conservative thinking and the status quo in order to bring out its true strengths, cut away the fat and drive innovation. With a passion for business, technology and creative disruption, Rory has worked for over a decade within a variety of roles in marketing, communications and journalism. He has worked with the broadest imaginable spectrum of companies which stretch the term “technology” to its outermost relevance. Read more about Rory.

Dave Neary

Dave NearyWith many years understanding of the dynamics of consensus-based communities, and intimate knowledge of the concerns of businesses engaging with free software projects, Dave Neary is ideally positioned to advise you on optimising your return on investment in free software, whether the goal is to bootstrap a community, or to help your team work well with existing developer communities. He has served three terms as a member of the board of directors of the GNOME Foundation (2005 - 07). Dave served as OpenWengo Community Development Manager for the French company Wengo. He was a developer and release manager of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) from 1999 until 2006.

Shezmeen Prasad

shezShezmeen has been in the Sales and Marketing field for almost a decade, specializing in Open Source software for the past five years. Originally a Canadian, Shezmeen has spent the past 15 months in a small coastal town in Norway, working at the headquarters office of eZ Systems, an Open Source CMS company, in the positions of Events Manager, and Global Marketing & PR. Previously, she worked at ActiveState Software Inc., an Open Source tools and languages company based in Vancouver, British Columbia. With her passion for Open Source marketing, Shezmeen brings the Initmarketing team her expertise in event management, marketing campaign development and public relations strategies with a global focus. Now that she has traveled and worked internationally, Shezmeen has found her home in San Francisco, California.

Stefan Probst

Stefan ProbstStefan studied computer science with a focus on operating systems. He founded his first Linux company in 1993 and developed Linux systems at LST, Caldera, SCO, SUSE and Novell. He has business experience as a general manager and engineering director for more than 15 years and is dedicated to Open Source since its early beginning. Today he is completing his MBA studies until end of 2009 and as a board member of the Open Source Business Foundation he is involved in several Open Source and entrepreneurship activities.

Vikram Vaswani

Vikram Vaswani is the founder and CEO of Melonfire, a consulting services firm with special expertise in open-source tools. He is a Felix Scholar for the University of Oxford, a passionate proponent of the open-source movement and a frequent contributor articles and tutorials on open-source technologies to the community at large.

His previous books include PHP Programming Solutions, MySQL: The Complete Reference and How to do Everything with PHP and MySQL.

 

Stephen R. Walli

Stephen R. WalliStephen has worked in the IT industry since 1980 as both customer and vendor. He currently consults on software development business and Open Source strategy, and is the Open-Source-strategist-in-residence for Open Tuesday out of Finland. Stephen was VP Open Source Development Strategy at Optaros, a business manager at Microsoft on Open Source, and VP Research & Development and founder at Softway Systems, a venture-backed company that developed a UNIX portability environment for NT before being acquired by Microsoft. He was a long time participant and officer at the IEEE and ISO POSIX standards groups, representing both USENIX and EurOpen (E.U.U.G.) and a regular speaker and writer on open systems standards since 1991. Stephen has an essay in O'Reilly's "Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution".