Nemertes Research

Robin Gareiss is Executive Vice President and Senior Founding Partner for Nemertes Research, where she oversees research projects and direction, conducts strategic seminars, develops cost models, and advises leading enterprises, vendors, and carriers. She currently serves as chief financial officer, as well. For the past 17 years, Robin Gareiss has worked closely with hundreds of senior IT executives, analyzing their use of technology and capturing best practices. Ms. Gareiss is a widely recognized expert in voice over IP, convergence, collaboration, carrier services, IP networking, and branch-office technologies. She is a sought-after speaker at conferences and trade shows, including Interop, where she serves as chairperson for the Branch Offices track, VoiceCon, Mobile Business Expo, Supercomm, Telecom, and CeBit America. She also writes the Branch Offices Best Practices column for Network World. Ms. Gareiss also has personal experience managing operations and developing new product offerings. Her entrepreneurial experience includes co-founding and overseeing marketing and business development for American Eco-Systems, a water-purification business in Illinois. She also served as president of Living Hope Lutheran Church, and ran several successful fundraisers for children's cancer and other charities. Before joining Nemertes, Ms. Gareiss shaped technology and business coverage as Senior News Editor of InformationWeek, a leading business-technology publication with 440,000 readers owned by the $359 million organization CMP Media. Prior to joining InformationWeek, Ms. Gareiss served in a variety of capacities at Data Communications magazine, where helped set strategic direction, oversaw reader surveys, and provided quantitative and statistical analysis. At these organizations Ms. Gareiss also helped develop, organize, and operate Web sites, TV, and print coverage of major trade shows. She has won numerous, prestigous awards for her in-depth analyses of business-technology issues.

Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a Senior Vice President and Founding Partner with Nemertes Research, where he develops and manages research projects, conducts strategic seminars and advises key clients. Andreas is a computer scientist, a master of data communications and distributed systems, a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and a self-professed geek, with an engineering, programming and consulting background. For the past 16 years, has advised a range of global industries on emerging technologies and trends, and developed business strategies for the efficient and effective use of technology. An early pioneer who saw the potential of the Internet in 1988, Mr. Antonopoulos helped many businesses harness new processes to take advantage of the rapid developments in telecommunications. In 1990, Mr. Antonopoulos started teaching on various IT topics in private, professional and academic environments. Mr. Antonopoulos honed his speaking skills in front of audiences ranging in size from five executives in a boardroom to hundreds of people in large conferences. In 1995 and 1996 Mr. Antonopoulos scored the highest instructor yearly average for attendee evaluations worldwide delivering more than 20 rounds of Learning Tree's intensive 4 day hands-on security workshops . With more than three hundred speaking engagements under his belt he is considered a world-class and charismatic public speaker and teacher. Mr. Antonopoulos is a true "generalist" who is well-versed in many diverse technology subjects. With experience ranging from hardware and electronics to high level business consulting, he combines authority and deep knowledge with an ability to make complex subjects easy to understand. He often brings a fresh perspective to a topic with surprising insights and his ability to identify underlying principles and connections between different topics. In 1991, he also became involved in cryptography, which at the time was considered a "suspicious" technology that was strictly controlled by government agencies. He became an expert in the area of computer security while the field was still in its infancy. Throughout his career, Mr. Antonopoulos has maintained an entrepreneurial spirit, creating and managing several companies as well as advising startups. As a consultant he has led large teams on multi-million dollar projects for Fortune 500 companies, designing large and complex secure networks. Advising clients at the board level, he is able to combine his deep technical knowledge with a solid grasp on business goals and objectives. Mr. Antonopoulos has years of experience working with CXOs, then translating their business goals into detailed designs for the technical teams he leads. Mr. Antonopoulos is also an early pioneer in the open source software space. Starting with 386BSD in 1991 and then Linux in 1992 (version 0.95), he participated in the launch of the open-source phenomenon into mainstream use. Two of the businesses he launched leveraged Linux both internally and for providing services to financial companies, before the emergence of "corporate" Linux distributions such as SUSE and RedHat. He has contributed code to and project managed a number of open source projects. Mr. Antonopoulos studied computer science at UCL in the UK and then earned his Master's degree in Data Communications, Networks and Distributed Systems. As part of his undergraduate thesis project, Mr. Antonopoulos designed and implemented a distributed whiteboard and desktop sharing P2P application for X-Windows on Unix, long before the emergence of Webex and collaborative applications in the mainstream. He then continued as a research fellow for the University of London, researching distributed systems and security and lecturing on electronic commerce. Later he founded Phaia Limited, a UK consulting firm, specializing in the use of Linux systems for security and small business networking when Linux was in its infancy (1995). Starting in...

Sara Christensen, Nemertes Administrative Manager and Executive Assistant, oversees daily administrative duties as well as providing support for Nemertes' partners. Ms. Christensen develops and manages internal operations in addition to organizing and overseeing special projects. Ms. Christensen also manages relationships between Nemertes' research analysts and the technology and communications industry.

John Dofter, Nemertes Senior Account Executive, has responsibility for business development within end-user IT organizations. For the past 10 years, Mr. Dofter has held sales and sales management positions with META Group and Gartner where he has both managed large client organizations and sold numerous new accounts. With over 25 years of experience selling to IT executives, Mr. Dofter brings an understanding of the IT research market and the needs of IT organizations. At META Group, Mr. Dofter had responsibility for a multi-state sales territory in the central U.S. that included 12 states from Texas to Ohio. He was the first sales person at META Group to exceed annual sales targets for five consecutive years, selling over thirty-five new accounts. In early 2005 he joined Gartner as part of the acquisition of META Group. Prior to META Group, Mr. Dofter held sales and sales management positions at Harris Computer, Prime Computer and other IT sales organizations.

John Burke, Principal Research Analyst, Management and Information Stewardship, has worked in academic IT since 1988. He has worked as an end-user support specialist, programmer, system administrator, database programmer and report writer, database administrator, network administrator, network architect, and systems architect. In various combinations with the above, he has also directed staffs ranging in size from 3 to over 30 in desktop support, voice and data networking, administrative applications support, and central systems management. As an analyst, John draws on his experiences as a practitioner and director of IT to better understand the needs of IT executives and the challenges facing vendors trying to sell to them. John's career began at The Johns Hopkins University, where he supported the engineering faculty in their use of computers in research and teaching. He moved on to systems and network administration at The College of St. Catherine, in St. Paul, Minnesota, and then to directing staff in voice, data, desktop, and systems management at the University of St. Thomas, also in St. Paul. He left his position there as IT Architect to join Nemertes as an analyst. Throughout his career, John has emphasized the importance of understanding the tools already available within an IT environment, the vital role free and open source software can play both in support of and as mission-critical systems, and on applying deep knowledge of current systems in innovative ways to expand user opportunities while controlling costs and improving uptime.

Kathy Cardinale, Nemertes Senior Account Executive, has responsibility for business development within vendor and service provider organizations. Ms. Cardinale coordinates Nemertes Research services to align with organizations' overall business and marketing strategies. For the past 15 years, Ms. Cardinale has held sales, sales management and sales training positions with R.H. Donnelley, one of the world's largest publishers of print and on-line yellow pages. Ms. Cardinale has over 20 years experience in media sales, with a Bachelor of Science in Advertising from the University of Illiniois at Urbana.