Executive Management:

Naeem Zafar, Co-founder, President & CEO

Naeem joined Bitzer Mobile as President and CEO in late 2010. In his 25 years of professional experience he has led three venture-backed high-tech companies in Silicon Valley and served on the Boards of several companies. For the past 4 years Naeem has been helping young entrepreneurs start companies. Naeem is a faculty member at the Haas Business School at the University of California Berkeley, where he teaches Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Naeem was the president and CEO of Pyxis Technology Inc., Silicon Design Systems and Veridicom, a Bell Labs spin-off that invented the silicon fingerprint sensors today found on most laptops. Naeem has held VP positions in marketing and engineering at both private and publicly traded companies. Naeem has authored multiple books on the subject of entrepreneurship. He is a frequent speaker and sought-after advisor on the topic of starting companies and building scalable businesses around the world. Naeem obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Brown University (magna cum laude), Rhode Island, and a Master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota.

Ali Ahmed, Founder & CTO

Ali is an Enterprise Architect with over 18 years of experience in the IT industry. Prior to founding Bitzer Mobile Ali had a successful consulting career working with large enterprises doing architecture, design and implementation of enterprise applications that ranged from web applications, mobile applications, portals, content management, enterprise reporting, business intelligence, data warehouses, SOA and middleware integration. Ali has extensive experience building scalable applications using Java, various web based and open source technologies on linux and unix platforms. He also has strong background in building large scale database applications using Oracle and MySQL databases. Ali has a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan. He started his career as a programmer for IBM and then worked for ICL/Fujitsu and ABN-AMRO Bank.

Indus Khaitan, Co-founder, VP Product Marketing & Alliances

Most recently, Indus was the Founding Partner at The Morpheus, a seed stage venture accelerator based in India, where he raised it’s first fund and invested in more than two dozen companies. Prior to Morpheus, Indus was the CTO & Head of India operations for SezWho, a social media infrastructure company specializing in distributed content discovery and user profiles. Earlier, he founded Tejit, a discovery engine for user-generated content, which was later acquired by SezWho. Indus has held senior management and technology positions at both startups and large corporations. He has a BE in Computer Science from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra. You can follow him @1ndus.

John Tingleff, Chief Financial Officer

John is an experienced financial executive for technology companies and brings over 20 years of experience in both company financial management and in venture capital. John has been the CFO of Sensor Platforms, a fabless semiconductor company; OnSite Systems, a telecommunications equipment company; Ceon Corporation, a telecom software company; and Mayan Networks, a telecom equipment company. Earlier, John was a Partner at Technology Funding, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm for which he invested in a range of early stage technology companies. John has an BA and MA in Economics from San Francisco State University.

John Boyer, VP of Engineering

John is an accomplished technology executive with significant success building and leading productive and agile teams, most recently as Senior Vice President of Engineering and Chief Architect for ActivIdentity. During his tenure at ActivIdentity he held a number of senior engineering management roles and was instrumental in designing and delivering many of that company’s industry-leading security products. Prior to that, he worked at a number of technology companies including American Biometric Company, Chrysalis-ITS, Unibex, and Bell-Northern Research.John has broad experience in engineering management, product and technology strategy, information security, advanced research, project management, large-scale enterprise software deployment, and software architecture. John holds Ph.D and M.A.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering, as well as a B.Eng. degree in Computer System Engineering, from Carleton University, Canada. He has published extensively in international journals and conferences in the field of wireless communications, and holds a number of patents granted and pending in the fields of information security and authentication.

Andy Smith, VP of Product Management

Andy joined Bitzer Mobile in mid 2011. Andy is a veteran of over 20 years in the high tech industry in Silicon Valley. Recently Andy was VP of Product Management for clean-tech startup Purfresh as well as software provider Apexon. Prior to that he spent seven years in network security and compliance with Virsa Systems (acquired by SAP), ActivCard and Veridicom. Andy has extensive experience working to deliver superior solutions with small, outsourced teams and is a frequent speaker on technology and security at industry events around the globe. Andy has a MBA from Santa Clara University and Bachelor’s in Mathematics from Occidental College. He started his career at Raychem Corporation working for 10 years in both large divisions as well as small subsidiaries.

Advisory Board:

Simon Bramfitt, Founder and Research Director, Entelechy Associates

Simon is founder and research director of Entelechy Associates, an independent industry analysis company that provides focused, vendor neutral, IT research and advisory services on desktop virtualization and workspace mobility technologies. Simon is also an analyst for The Virtualization Practice, covering desktop virtualization and application delivery technologies with a sideline in data center power management. Previously Simon served as an analyst at both Gartner and Burton Group. He is an experienced solutions architect with unmatched insight into the challenges of designing large (200,000 seat plus) high availability presentation and desktop virtualization systems. Simon spent over a decade with Kaiser Permanente implementing their virtualization solution. He also worked for IBM Global Services and has extensive experience in the healthcare industry. Simon was invited to join the Citrix Technology Professionals (CTP) group in May 2010.

Peter L. DeNagy, Principal Consultant, Enterprise Mobility Strategies

Peter is currently a mobility industry consultant focused on mHealth, mEducation & mBusiness as well as mobile payment/commerce and M2M strategies. Formerly, Peter was the US General Manager for Enterprise Mobility Enablement for Samsung Telecommunications America, where he developed Samsung’s US GTM enterprise strategy, ran enterprise pre and post sales support and engineering as well as handled strategic alliances. Previously at Accenture, he was responsible for North and South American Business Development & Alliances in the Mobile Application Solutions Practice. Pete led Accenture’s Mobility Alliance relationships with Microsoft, AT&T, Sybase, ClickSoftware, Pyxis, Syclo, Motorola, and many others while managing the group’s new business pipeline and opportunity generation efforts.Overall, Peter has more than 29 years of telecommunications experience and recently collaborated on the book, “Managing the Mobile Workforce”, by David Clemons and Michael Kroth, Ph.D. (11/2010, McGraw Hill).

Hadi Nahari, Chief Security Architect, NVIDIA

Hadi Nahari is a software security professional with over 19 years of experience in software development, including extensive work in design and architecture, verification, proof-of-concept, and implementation of secure systems. Hadi has worked on large scale, high-end enterprise solutions, as well as resource-constrained embedded systems, with primary focus on security, cryptography, complex systems design, and vulnerability assessment & threat analysis. Author of the book: “Web Commerce Security: Design & Development”, published by John Wiley & Sons, Hadi is a frequent speaker in U.S. and international security, risk mitigation, and mobile events and has led various security projects for Netscape Communications, Sun Microsystems, United States Government, Motorola, MontaVista, eBay, PayPal, and NVIDIA, among others. Hadi is currently in charge of the security architecture and strategy of Mobile and Software Solutions at NVIDIA as Chief Security Architect.Hadi is also technical representative of NVIDIA in main standardization bodies such as NFC Forum and GlobalPlatform.

Larry Slotnick, CEO, Slotnick Systems

Larry Slotnick is the CEO of Slotnick Systems, an open source and mobile centric software consulting company founded under the premise that mobile software must be simple and flexible, but remain at least as powerful as more familiar desktop software, and often more powerful by harnessing mobility. Mobile software is often derived from open source. Slotnick Systems manages the transition of engineering methodologies, processes, tools and even company culture to the open source, mobile landscape. Prior to his current role, Larry was Vice President of Engineering at Motorola in the Mobile Devices Business Unit, where he led the worldwide engineering teams that designed, developed, documented, tested and supported Motorola’s strategic Linux based handset software platforms including the versions of the Android platform used in the Motorola/Google/Verizon Droid phones and for many other carriers worldwide. Prior to Motorola, Larry held engineering executive leadership positions MontaVista, PalmSource, Apple and Octel. Larry holds an MS degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Greg Taffet, CIO, US Gas & Electric

Greg Taffet has over 30 years of industry experience. He is currently the CIO of US Gas and Electric where oversees the management and development of all business and information technology. He has been responsible for the USG&E technology transformation that has matched the company’s growth as it has doubled in size for each of the last 5 years.Prior to joining US Gas and Electric he was the VP and CTO for MxEnergy for 9 years where he was one of the original employees and helped grow the business to annual revenues over one billion dollars. Greg has a Bachelor’s degree from Franklin and Marshall College and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology. Greg Taffet serves on the board of Goodwill Industries of Western CT and as membership director of the Miami Broadband Coalition. In the past he has served as Technology Advisor to the Stamford School System.

Nathan Clevenger

With more than a decade of experience, Nathan Clevenger is an expert in the design and execution of enterprise mobility strategy and solutions. As chief software architect at ITR Mobility, Clevenger works with Fortune 500 enterprises to help realize his personal vision of “mobile apps in the hands of every worker.” He is the author of iPad in the Enterprise from Wiley, the enterprise editor for iPhone Life magazine, and a featured speaker at mobile and IT conferences, where he shares his passion for capturing the unrealized potential for mobile technology within the enterprise. He has consulted with clients including 3M, Ameriprise Financial, Best Buy, Boston Scientific, Ecolab, General Mills, Medtronic, St. Jude Medical, Target, Thomson Reuters, UnitedHealth Group, and Wells Fargo.