Syndera has enlisted advisors who are recognized leaders in their field.

Cecilia Claudio, Chief Information Officer,
Mercury

 

Cecilia Claudio joined Mercury in October 2005 as chief information officer. She is responsible for the company's use of information technology worldwide. Ms. Claudio has over 20 years experience in IT working for companies such as Xerox, Farmers Insurance, The Gap, and Olivetti. In 2003, Ms. Claudio was promoted to Executive VP and CIO of Zurich Financial Services, the parent company of Farmers Insurance Group, Inc., where she served as Senior VP and CIO from 1998 to 2003.

Prior to joining Mercury, Ms. Claudio was the CIO and VP of Engineering for Align Technology, Inc. She has been responsible for a wide range of IT initiatives including development of business systems for customer operations, data center operations, technical services, voice/data communications, and office systems support.

Ms. Claudio graduated with a degree in Philosophy from the University of Lisbon in Portugal.

She was recognized in 2001 as a Premier 100 IT Leader by Computerworld and in 1996 as one of the Top 100 Women in Computing by McGraw Hill.

Evelyn Fuhrer, Managing Director,
Promontory Financial Group

 

Evelyn Fuhrer has over 25 years of experience working in the financial services industry, providing a wide range of business and technology advisory, strategy, management, and implementation services. Evelyn is a Managing Director at Promontory Financial Group specializing in technology risk evaluation and remediation. Prior to joining Promontory, Evelyn served as an IBM Executive and a Partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers where she built a $75 million practice and managed 300 practitioners. Clients spanned Capital Markets, Banking, and Insurance firms and included Fortune 500 companies, such as: JPMChase, Fidelity, MetLife, Credit Suisse First Boston, Goldman Sachs, and Citibank/Salomon Smith Barney.

At Merrill Lynch, Evelyn was the Vice President of the Trading Technology Department, providing leading edge technology services to their Global Capital Markets businesses. She was responsible for developing systems to support 24 hour trading for arbitrage, options, block, warrants, and convertible bonds. She designed and developed a fully functional disaster recovery environment to support Equities and Fixed Income traders. Evelyn Managed the Merrill Lynch Ticker Plant and Historical Pricing service which provides real time, end-of-day, and historical prices for all domestic and selected international instruments.

Evelyn interacts regularly with senior executives, participates in industry initiatives, and has lectured at conferences. She is a member of the CIO Collective and the Women's Bond Club.

Evelyn has an undergraduate degree in Mathematics, and a Masters degree in Computer Science, both from Brooklyn College.

Gary Gauba, Co-Founder, Co-Chairman and Co-CEO,
Systech Integrators, Inc.

 

Gary is a successful entrepreneur with extensive senior management experience with a remarkable ability to combine visionary leadership, business acumen, and strong execution in building and managing successful consulting organizations. Gary has a proven ability to develop and deploy a long term strategic vision, establish and nurture strong relationships with clients, business partners, and building strong talented teams. His strengths in channel management and understanding of the underlying technology and innovation trends have made Systech a leading integrator in the SAP enterprise market.

Prior to Systech, Gary was a partner at Bearing Point (formerly KPMG consulting). He was an Executive Vice President responsible for a joint venture between KPMG and Qwest - a managed solution provider for ERP, CRM, BI and SCM. He was also Senior Vice President responsible for the Global CRM practice.

Gary was a Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Softline Inc. Under his leadership Softline grew exponentially and was subsequently acquired by KPMG in 1999. Softline was ranked as the second fastest growing company by Entrepreneur Magazine in 1997 and was a "Go To" company for SAP consulting services between 1995 and 1999.

Gary is listed in the Nationwide Register's Who's Who in Executives and Businesses 1999-2000 edition.

David Luckham, Research Professor of Electrical Engineering (Emeritus),
Stanford University

 

Professor Luckham's research and consulting activities in software technology include multi-processing and business processing languages, event-driven systems, complex event processing, commercial middleware, program verification, systems architecture modelling and simulation, and artificial intelligence (automated deduction and reasoning systems).

Professor Luckham has held faculty and invited faculty positions in both mathematics and computer science at eight major universities in Europe and the United States including:

• Research Professor of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University, 1977-1999
• Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow, Harvard University, 1976
• Senior Research Associate, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 1972-1977
• Associate Professor, UCLA Computer Science Department, 1970-1972

He has been an invited lecturer, keynote speaker, panelist, and USA delegate at many international conferences and congresses. Until 1999 he was a member of the Computer Systems Laboratory, Stanford University and directed the Program Analysis and Verification Project. He taught courses on Artifical Intelligence and automated deduction, programming languages and program verification, the Anna verification system, systems prototyping and simulation languages, and Complex Event Processing. He was one of the founders of Rational Software, Inc. in 1981.

In the past he has served on review committees during the DoD Ada Language design competition, and was a Distinguished Reviewer on the DoD Ada9X design project. In 1993-94 he was a member of the TRW Independent Assessment Team tasked with reviewing the FAA's Advanced Automation System for the FAA, and in 1994-96 he was a distinguished reviewer for the DoD High Level Language for modelling and simulation. He has published four books and over 100 technical papers; two ACM/IEEE Best Paper Awards, several papers are now in historical anthologies and book collections. His latest book is an introduction to complex event processing, "The Power of Events".

 

Lars Rabbe, Senior Vice President/ Chief Information Officer,
Yahoo!

 

Lars Rabbe joined Yahoo! in June 2003 as Chief Information Officer, responsible for the overall strategic direction and execution of Yahoo!'s global information technology infrastructure. Prior to joining the company, Rabbe served as senior vice president and CIO of Redback Networks, and held a variety of vice president and CIO positions within four divisions at Lucent Technologies.

Reporting to Executive Vice President and CTO Farzad Nazem, Rabbe leads Yahoo!'s information technology professionals, overseeing the company's corporate enterprise applications, internal corporate networks, billing and desktops.

A seasoned IT executive with nearly 30 years of technology management experience in the financial services, retail and software/hardware sectors, Rabbe has held positions with Redback Networks, Lucent Technologies, Fidelity Investments and NeXT Computer, overseeing employees in 50 countries with budget responsibilities exceeding $1 billion.

Rabbe holds both a Master of Science and Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.