Team
Deepak Kamlani
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Deepak’s experience is in P & L management, marketing, product development, and management, and corporate and business development with leading US, European, and Japanese high tech companies.
He founded Global Inventures as Interprise Ventures after the company he worked for, Centex Telemanagement, Inc. was acquired by MFS Communications. Prior to Centex, he was responsible for business development, technology transfer, and strategic ventures for NTT America, Inc, and served as Vice President of Marketing and Sales for Votrax, Inc., a supplier of integrated CTI equipment. Earlier assignments were with Toshiba America’s telecommunications systems division, where he led the marketing team, Fujitsu GTE Business Systems, where he was responsible for developing networked voice/data products, and GTE Corporation, where, among other projects, he participated in a corporate development team involved in the acquisition of Sprint Communications. He began his career with a division of ITT Corporation in the U.K. (STC, later ICL and Northern Telecom).
Deepak was educated at The Doon School in India. He graduated with an Honors degree in Physical Chemistry from University College, University of London, and a M.S. in Management from The Imperial College, also in the University of London.. He serves on the advisory board of start-ups, provides advisory services to venture capital firms, and is a frequent speaker at technology events around the world.
Joan Jacobs
Vice President, Market and Business Development
Joan brings over 30 years of management experience in global marketing, alliance and program management focused on software and channel partners, software services and new business development. Her career spans many years in the technology sector as an executive with Hewlett Packard (HP), Compaq, Digital Equipment Corporation. Raytheon and Data General Corporation. She has run programs to help technology entrepreneurs around the globe increase their success and has been recognized in the media for her work with emerging technology companies. In addition to her responsibilities at Inventures, Joan is currently serving as President and Executive Director of the Itanium Solutions Alliance which recently won an award for long term Alliance excellence. Prior to her position with the Alliance, Jacobs led partner development for HP Integrity Servers at Hewlett-Packard, which included working with global software vendors to port applications to the Itanium-based platforms. She lives in the Boston area and is a member of the eCoast Angels and with the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals. She holds a Bachelors degree in Industrial Management from Purdue University in West Lafayette Indiana and an MBA from Pepperdine University in Los Angeles.
Lory Yeakle
Vice President, Operations and Client Services
Lory has a broad management background across all aspects of product development; strategy, business planning, quality assurance, internal and 3rd party technology development, marketing, brand and customer service. She holds a bachelors degree in Computer Science from University of Florida. She spent 17 years at IBM developing software systems and applications, working hand in hand with the global sales team to promote the value and capability of these solutions to consumers and corporations. Lory left IBM to accept a new opportunity at Visa International to establish a global customer support division. She spent 13 years at Visa as a Sr. Vice President, developing B2B and e-commerce payment solutions, providing customer and member support, and growing acceptance of Visa payment technologies through strategic merchant partnerships. She holds a patent for the development of an electronic B2B payment solution to support invoice driven payments.
Bill Chase
Vice President, Executive Director
As Vice President for Global Inventures, Bill works with several technology communities, and provides a wide variety of strategic responsibilities leveraging his more than 20 years of experience in financial services and technology. Bill regularly consults at the highest levels of consortia leadership. He offers leadership and expertise on strategic planning, program and project management, financial oversight, sales and membership recruitment, product certification, interoperability programs, and board of director operations.
Prior to joining Global Inventures, Bill was involved in a variety of start-up organizations and established enterprises. Bill was President and Chief Operating Officer of BANK UP Business Recovery Services, providing business continuation services to financial institutions. Bill was responsible for account relationship management as well as facilities and vendor administration. He was also responsible for oversight of partner relations and for implementing technology solutions enabling new products.
Bill managed technology offerings for Bank of San Francisco and was a consultant with a variety of financial institutions. Bill also spent time at Information Technology Incorporated (ITI) installing and supporting turnkey enterprise software and hardware solutions for financial institutions including commercial banks, savings banks and credit unions. ITI is now wholly-owned by Fiserv, Inc.
Bill holds a bachelor's degree in business administration and a MBA in finance from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
Steve Crumb
Vice President, Executive Director
Steve joined Global Inventures after serving as the Executive Director and VP of Operations of the Open Grid Forum (formerly the Global Grid Forum) for five years. Steve provided strategic and tactical leadership including facilitation of Board, Advisory and Management Steering Committees. He managed Alliance revenue generation including a membership program, grants and sponsorships. Steve has spent over 20 years in various high technology companies often applying leading-edge technologies to their businesses. As a Senior Systems Engineer at Convergys Corporation, he provided leadership to systems engineering and development teams exploring component-based development techniques. While at Motorola he worked in the Corporate networking lab, serving as a test engineer for internetworking equipment and architecting many of Motorola’s first internetworks. At the National Center for Supercomputing Applications he installed and managed industrial and academic networks and was involved in the Internet Engineering Task Force. Steve holds a degree in Computer Science from Western Kentucky University.
Jim Polizotto
Vice President, Executive Director
Jim has extensive experience in networking, video streaming and standards based systems technology.
From 1994 until November 2000, Jim held several engineering director level positions for CLI and VTEL. His primary focus was to ensure the timely release and interoperability of videoconferencing products. In January 2000 Jim was appointed Director of Operations of Onscreen24, a wholly owned subsidiary of VTEL, created to focus on Internet based software development.
Prior to 1994, Jim helped create a multimedia development laboratory for IBM in the heart of Silicon Valley, and he was responsible for delivering many successful products to the marketplace. Among his more significant multimedia accomplishments at IBM, Jim's organization developed an Internet based multimedia video streaming server in 1993 that was voted Best New Product at Spring COMDEX 1993 by Byte Magazine. Jim was also responsible for introducing several OSI products to the marketplace. Jim has been a strong advocate of international standards throughout his career. He served on the IMTC Board of Directors from 1995 to 2000 and has a BS from the University of Rochester in New York.
Paul Ritchie
Vice President, Executive Director
Paul has over 20 years of experience in Telecommunications and Business Management with emphasis in Marketing, Product Development and Financial Analysis. Prior to joining Global Inventures, Paul worked for SBC Communications on CTI projects and Interactive Voice Response systems for large, blue chip clients. From 1984 to 1995 he was Director of Marketing for Centex Telemanagement, through their initial IPO and rapid growth until their acquisition by MFS Communications. Prior to that, he worked for MCI.
Paul holds both BS and MBA degrees and enjoys continuing his education with courses from the UC Berkeley program for telecommunications certification.
Rolf Bienert
Executive Director
As an Executive Director at Global Inventures, Rolf works with several technology communities, and provides a wide variety of operational and strategic responsibilities leveraging his more than 15 years of experience in technology companies. Rolf regularly consults at the highest levels of consortia leadership. He offers leadership and expertise on strategic planning, program and project management, financial oversight, sales and membership recruitment, product certification, interoperability programs, and board of director operations. Currently, Rolf is involved with the OSGi Alliance, the ZigBee Alliance, HomePNA, and the ClimateTalk Alliance and is being consulted for specific projects of other groups.
Prior to joining Global Inventures, Rolf was involved in a variety of international technology organizations. Rolf was Vice President at KTL, Inc. and before that Division Manager at TUV Rheinland of North America, Inc., providing technology and certification services to many international clients. Rolf started his career at Deutsche Telekom in Germany where he was responsible for the implementation of new central office systems. Rolf holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University in Saarbruecken, Germany.
Susan Lowe
Executive Director
Susan Lowe brings over twenty years experience in technology and telecommunications including twelve years in product marketing and marketing communications for Mitsubishi Electronics where she focused on developing product market share in computer hardware, consumer electronics, telecom and networking applications. Susan then joined a talented team in a start-up division of SBC (now ATT) where she was responsible for managed data security services and was a key contributor to launching the network security operations center in California. She also led a marketing team for a start-up group at a mobile and wireless security software company, Certicom Corporation (now RIM). Susan holds a MBA from the University of San Francisco and a BS from the University of Illinois, Urbana.
Kevin Schader
Executive Director
As an Executive Director at Inventures, Kevin works with a variety of consortia focused on technology, consumer electronics and green power initiatives. He works side-by-side with consortia leadership, offering direction and counsel on a variety of strategic and operational issues.
Kevin has more than 20 years of technology experience and has an international public relations background where he supported a variety of industries including broadcast media, healthcare, security, telecommunication, travel and oriented organizations. Past clients include EDS, Sabre Holdings, Fujitsu Network Communications, ADC, Narus, RCN, PHNS, JPS Healthcare System, GTE, ABS-CBN Global, DFW International Airport and T-Mobile Hot Spots.
Kevin graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications and International Studies from Southern Methodist University. He is also accredited in Public Relations by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA).