Advisory Board

 

Alberto Giovanni Unifortune SGR SpA

Alberto Giovannini is Chief Executive Officer and a founding shareholder of Unifortune SGR SpA, an asset management company based in Milano, Italy. He has also been Principal Policy Advisor of the Commission’s Clearing and Settlement Advisory and Monitoring Group (CESAME).
Mr. Giovannini started his professional career as an academic. He was the Jerome A. Chazen Professor of International Business at Columbia University, where he taught and conducted research from 1983 to 1995. He has held a number of positions in the public and private sector, including Co-Chairman of the Council of Experts at the Ministry of the Treasury in Rome, Italy (in charge of the Republic of Italy’s international debt program), Senior Strategist at Long-Term Capital Management and Deputy General Manager of Banca di Roma.

Mr. Giovannini graduated from the University of Bologna, and holds a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alberto and his wife reside in Milan, Italy.

Ron Lachman CenterGate Research Group, LLC

A specialist in OEM/ISV software licensing business models, Ron’s track record and history of success in technology companies between startup and mid-life (<$20M) is invaluable.

At heart, Ron is a networking and systems software entrepreneur who began his life as a “Technology Angel” about 10 years ago following the sale of his consulting group Lachman Associates to Eastman Kodak’s Interactive Systems subsidiary in 1989 (deal value roughly $20M). This was resultant to his role as a joint developer of NFS™ with Sun Microsystems, and the creation of Lachman Streams TCP™ that became bundled with the Unix™ operating system.

Following the sale of Lachman Associates to Kodak, he served as the Executive Vice President at Interactive Systems Corp., heading that business unit for Kodak for four years. He is a cofounder of Praxsys, the developers of the WABI product which emulates Windows on Unix, and sold Praxsys to Sun Microsystems in 1992.

Ron reincarnated Lachman Technology to pursue new product ideas in networking products, data archival and storage management. Lachman Technology/Associates licensed roughly 4 million copies of networking protocols (mostly in the UNIX OEM marketplace), and was a technology leader in hierarchical storage management. Legent Corporation acquired Lachman Technology in 1994 (deal value $30M gain), and Ron became vice president for Open Systems strategy before leaving in 1995 to co-found, co-fund and build the management team of a number of networking or software related companies. Computer Associates acquired Legent in 1995.

Ron currently serves as a senior advisor/board member capacity to many different technology companies in the fields of distributed computing and Internet commerce.

He resides with his wife and family in Chicago, enjoying life in the Midwest and supporting many charitable organizations and special programs .

Jon Adler Tek Novare

Jon specializes in developing decision-support systems and solving complex supply chain problems for his clients. Jon helped design and engineer the first global online and relational database front-office systems for Morgan Stanley.  Jon went to work at Charles Schwab as they went from a small regional brokerage firm to a nationally recognized financial services organization with a market cap greater than that of Merrill Lynch.

As the SVP infrastructure Operations at Schwab, Jon introduced and led the implementation of the first Internet Protocol network infrastructure in the brokerage industry in 1994.  In 1996 and forward, as Sr. Director of Global Corporate Systems at Cisco, he partnered with the Finance, Marketing, Human Resources, Sales, Finance, eLearning, and Corporate Acquisitions and Integration to deploy leading edge Internet applications.

Jon has a BSc. in Physiological Psychology from McGill University in Montreal and lives in Denver as CEO of Aramas Technologies.

Dr. Sebastien Gay University of Chicago

Dr. Sebastien Gay
Sebastien, an expert in financial markets, is a Principal at Berkeley Research Group, LLC., a leading consulting firm, and is on the faculty at the University of Chicago Department of Economics. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics at the University of Chicago, where he specialized in Microeconomics and Industrial Organization Theory. He has extensive consulting experience, having worked on internal and litigation-related projects including wage dispute resolution, diversification and performance, business strategy, and company valuation. Dr. Gay is currently conducting research at the University of Chicago on behavioral economics, health economics and pricing theory.

Sebastien and his wife reside in Chicago. He blogs on current economic issues at: blog.sebastiengay.com

Jordan Firfer  - Healthcare IT Consultant                                                                                                                        Jordan Firfer JD, is a National Health Plan, TPA, Vendor and Clearinghouse Consultant for many of the largest health plan entities in the country. He is formerly the Executive Vice President of SecureEDI and was previously the Director of Product Management for Emdeon / WebMD. Jordan served as CIO and Chief Security Officer for Affiliated Network Services in Chicago, where he directed technology development and the ANS HIPAA consulting division. Jordan led the (EHNAC) accreditation effort at SecureEDI, Emdeon Dental and ANS.

Jordan has worked the integration of medical and dental EDI into current and new processes to achieve regulatory compliance for Rush Health Plans (now WellPoint) and AAOMS National Ins. Co. Jordan sits on advisory boards of Hospital Recovery Systems, RealDice Mobile Technology Systems.

Jordan has a B.A from DePaul University and a JD Degree from The John Marshall Law School. He currently resides in San Francisco, CA.