Management Team

John Kealey, Chief Executive Officer

John Kealey is an experienced senior executive with over 25 years in the communications and information technology industries. He is the former President and CEO of iDirect Technologies, which he joined when the company was a pre-revenue turnaround and helped grow organically to over $120 million in annual revenue and a position of global leadership in satellite routing technology when it was acquired by Singapore Technologies (ST) in November, 2005. He was selected by Via Satellite magazine as the "2004 Satellite Executive of the Year", and The Ernst and Young Washington DC Area Communications "Entrepreneur of the Year" for 2005. Earlier he was CEO and founder of TenFold Communications Inc., an enterprise software company and subsidiary of TenFold Corporation. Kealey spent much of his early career at SBC Communications, holding a number of senior positions there, including President of its wireless messaging business. He was also a senior executive at The Continuous Learning Group, a premier boutique leadership consulting firm. He founded the firm's merger and acquisition integration practice and continues to maintain a relationship with the firm. He began his career at Coopers & Lybrand and holds an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis.

Kevin Calderwood, President

Kevin Calderwood was a founder and managing partner of Amp Capital Partners, a venture capital firm based in Reston, VA and Palo Alto, CA. In conjunction with Amp Capital's hands on investment philosophy, Kevin served in executive management for two Amp Capital portfolio companies. He was the Chairman of the Board of iDirect Technologies until the fall of 2005 when the company was sold to Vision Technologies Electronics, Inc. He also served as the CEO of Amp Resources, a renewable energy company, purchased by the Italian electric utility, ENEL. Prior to Amp and Until March 1999, he was responsible for the Baan Company's Global Customer Base, President of Baan's Global ERP Business Unit and also served as Executive Vice President of the Baan Company, N.V. He was also a member of the Management Board. Prior to this position, Kevin was President of the Baan Americas Business Unit consisting of North and South America, Australia and New Zealand. He joined Baan as Vice President of Sales and Marketing in 1993 when Baan's U.S. operation was in its infancy. He joined Baan from PRC, Inc where he served as Vice President of Sales. Prior to PRC, he held a number of sales management positions at Oracle, serving last as a regional sales manager. Kevin earned a Master of Management degree with an emphasis in marketing and finance from the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. As an undergraduate at Northwestern, Calderwood earned a B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering. He was also a member of the varsity football team and subsequently served as a graduate assistant coach.

Jerome Pesenti, Chief Scientist

Jerome is chief scientist and co-founder of Vivisimo. In this role, Jerome acts as the visionary for the company driving development and delivery of Vivisimo's products. He also plays a crucial role in the company's overall strategic vision and growth. Before Vivisimo, Jerome was a visiting scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's computer science department, carrying out research on document clustering, data mining and artificial intelligence. Jerome is a frequent presenter at industry conferences including Microsoft's US Public CIO Summit, ICIC 2006 Conference, Life Sciences Conference and ASIDIC. He is an alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. His academic degrees consist of a B.S. in philosophy from the Sorbonne, an M.S. in cognitive science from the University of Paris IV, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in pure mathematics from the University of Paris-Sud.

Christopher Palmer, Chief Technology Officer

Chris is the chief technology officer and co-founder of Vivisimo. Chris brings over 15 years of experience in research labs and academia to the company. In his role as CTO, Chris oversees the designing and building of its core enterprise search technology, which powers the search engines of worldwide organizations. Prior to Vivisimo, Chris was a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, working on database and data-mining problems. He has authored more than 20 papers in a variety of disciplines including text databases and information retrieval, distributed systems, relational databases, data mining, groupware and clustering. Chris received a M.Sc. degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.Math degree from the University of Waterloo.

Dennis Brestensky, Vice President of Operations

Dennis has led operations for Vivisimo since mid-2001. He's a veteran entrepreneur who brings over 17 years of experience in developing early-stage businesses and leading operations, most recently as a VP for Stars and Stripes Omnimedia, a venture-backed start-up where his skills were invaluable to the early success and growth of the company. He served as the President of a technology and inventory control start-up that exceeded a million dollars in revenue the first year. He was the Regional Director for Karrington Health where he developed four new regions, led a team of 140 employees and held overall responsibility for a $25M P&L that helped position the company through IPO to acquisition. Dennis holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University with concentrations in entrepreneurship and finance.

Jeff Hornung, Vice President of Strategic Alliances

Jeff Hornung has over 25 years of experience in companies covering a broad range of hardware and software businesses. Most recently he was chief executive officer of Scentric, an Atlanta distributed data classification startup. Prior to Scentric, Jeff was vice-president and general manager at Network Appliance, guiding the virtualization and gateway business unit to $50M in revenue via partnerships with IBM, HP, and EMC. Before joining Network Appliance, he was vice-president of marketing and business development at Spinnaker Networks, helping guide the company to a $300M acquisition by Network Appliance. Jeff has also held a variety of leadership positions at Dell Computer, Network General and HP. Jeff has an MBA from Santa Clara University and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Cornell.

Joe LeBas, Vice President of Sales

Joe LeBas brings to Vivisimo a proven record of generating customer demand and building market share across several industries and around the world. Joe most recently was managing director of North American sales at PolyServe, where he was instrumental in leading the infrastructure software company's growth in the U.S. commercial and federal government markets. Prior to PolyServe, Joe spent several years at PeopleSoft, Inc. where he helped pioneer the software leader's global accounts program. As director of global accounts, he led a worldwide team responsible for extending business relationships with a number of PeopleSoft's most visible international customers. Before joining PeopleSoft, Joe held the position of vice president of strategic accounts for Corporate Express, a $9B business-to-business services company. Earlier in his career, Joe held a variety of sales, key account and sales management positions with Revlon, Boston Scientific Corporation and AEI Music. He holds a B.S. in advertising from the University of Florida.