Our Founders

Bill Woo, CEO, has worked in the computer industry for over 30 years in a variety of engineering development, product management, and executive positions with NCR, Hewlett Packard, Tandem, Metaphor (IBM), Sun Microsystems, Stratus, nCUBE (Oracle), Compaq, and Alltel. Much of Bill's focus has been on critical business applications that are deployed on fault-tolerant and extreme-scale systems. Bill has a rich background in operating systems, networking, transaction systems, databases and network-centric distributed applications.

Bill served for five years as the Director for Distributed Systems and became the Chief Technical Architect for Alltel's Systematics Healthcare Division, which provides very large sub-second transaction clinical systems on IBM mainframes and RS/6000s and Windows NT servers, integrating distributed applications with Oracle database servers.

Bill rejoined Tandem in the late 1990s with the Microsoft Fault Tolerant NT group. He has served in a variety of roles within the HP NonStop Enterprise Storage and Servers Group. As Product Strategist, he evangelized NonStop Computing and consulted with customers implementing mission-critical applications. He has helped numerous large enterprises in the healthcare, telecommunications, and financial services domains to design and deploy continuously operating and extreme-scale applications.

Bill has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Ronald Mak, CTO, designed and implemented enterprise software systems at various startups and established companies in Silicon Valley. At Allel's Systematics Healthcare Division, he developed data access technologies for a distributed medical information system. At Caresoft, he designed and led the development of an enterprise-class healthcare system that enabled medical personnel to use the web to monitor and communicate with patients in clinical trials. He was the architect of server-side infrastructure software at Broadvision, Inc., which was a pioneer in web-based e-commerce.

Recently, Ron designed and developed enterprise systems on contract to NASA. For the ongoing Mars Exploration Rover Mission, he was the architect and lead developer of the middleware services for the Collaborative Information Portal (CIP). Mission managers, scientists, and researchers rely on CIP to download and view data and images generated by the rovers, to access event and personnel schedules, and to obtain the current time in various Mars and Earth time zones. After over two years of continuous operation, CIP has maintained better than a 99.9% uptime record. The photograph shows Ron inside mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Half of the large wall screens are displaying data provided by CIP.

Ron has been a frequently sought-after speaker about the Mars Rover Mission and the software engineering principles for building reliable enterprise systems. He has given presentations to both industry and academia. The photograph shows him presenting a keynote address to an enthusiastic audience of several thousands at the BEA eWorld Conference in San Francisco.

After working on the Mars Rover Mission, Ron designed the Systems Health Information Portal (SHIP) to monitor the health of NASA space vehicles. The initial deployment was on the International Space Station. SHIP will warn onboard astronauts of any vehicle anomalies and provide pertinent information to assist in fault detection and recovery. Out in space, astronauts' lives depend on the reliability of such software systems.

Ron has a B.S. in the Mathematical Sciences and an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University. He has written books on software engineering principles for enterprise systems, numerical computing, and compiler writing. He has taught software courses at Stanford and Santa Clara University, and he held an academic appointment at the University of California at Santa Cruz.