Zephyr

We are fortunate to be associated with some key industry leaders who help us shape our vision and build our business.

Lacy Edwards

Lacy is a seasoned executive with broad industry experience and has led various high technology businesses for 35 years. A successful 15-year veteran CEO, Lacy brings a wealth of experience in leading software technology startups to profitability and through successful IPOs. He is currently CEO of JME Software. In his previous role as CEO of Indicative Software, he successfully engineered a sale to Nimsoft. In his previous role as CEO of Evoke Software, he created the industry segment now known as Data Profiling and positioned it for an acquisition.

Lacy also served as president and COO of Unison Software, a dominant contender in the open systems market, which he led through a successful public offering, and subsequent acquisition by IBM/Tivoli. He was president and CEO of Servio Corporation, an object database vendor, and XA Systems Corporation, a vendor of software maintenance, application development, DBA, system software, and re-engineering software tools. He held sales management positions with Honeywell Communications, HBO & Company, and Informatics.

Edwards' outstanding achievements have been acknowledged through various industry and corporate recognitions including Insider Magazine "CEO of the Year," Harvard Business School Club of New York "Entrepreneur of The Year," Honeywell Division "Manager of the Year," and twice placing companies in the Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Companies. Edwards is a nationally known public speaker and has served in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Preetish Nijhawan

Preetish Nijhawan is Managing Director of Cervin Ventures, an early stage technology fund. Most recently, Preetish was Chief Financial Officer for Neon Enterprise Software. His previous roles included Vice President of Strategic Alliances at NeoEdge Networks, a video game advertising company, Vice President, Portfolio and Program Management at BMC Software, and Vice President, Operations at iVita Corporation, an asset management software startup he helped found.

Preetish has also counseled senior executives in hardware, software and telecommunications industries for McKinsey and Company. He co-founded Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) in 1998. He also worked in the Electronic Design Automation Division at Intel in various engineering roles. Preetish has a bachelors in electrical and electronics engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, a masters in computer engineering from The University of Southern California, and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.

He is passionate about research for Type 1 Diabetes and serves on the Board of the Houston Chapter of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) and also is a member of the IT Committee for JDRF.

Steve Gross

Steve has spent over 20 years leading business development and strategic partnering initiatives with early and mid-staged enterprise software companies. Today, he provides corporate and business development consulting services to emerging and established technology companies. Most recently, Steve served as Vice President of Corporate Business Development for Mercury Interactive (acquired by HP). Previously, he joined Asera, a Kleiner Perkins created company focused on collaborative business processes, as employee #21, leading business development efforts for them.

Prior to Asera, Steve led the North America launch efforts of Mercado Software, an Israel-based developer of catalog search technologies as vice president of business development. He has also led business development for New Moon Software, a developer of thin-client technologies, and Sqribe Technologies (acquired by Brio), a leading provider of production reporting solutions. Steve began his career with Infinium Software (formerly Software 2000), a leader in financial, human resources and manufacturing applications, where he spent nine years in a variety of sales, marketing and strategic partner management positions.

Neeraj Gupta

Neeraj Gupta is a successful technology entrepreneur, executive, and investor. He has extensive experience across technology products and services. He is a managing director at Cervin Ventures, an early stage technology fund. He currently leads one of the portfolio companies, Systems In Motion, in developing next generation technology services. Previously, he was a member of the executive team and global head of sales and marketing at Patni, a $700M Indian IT services company. He was CEO of Cymbal, an IT services company focused on the telecom sector, leading it from founding to its eventual acquisition by Patni.

He led various engineering, product management and marketing initiatives at Octel (acquired by Lucent), and Genesys (acquired by Alcatel). He was a member of the management team of a unified messaging start-up that was later acquired by Yahoo! He has a bachelors in electronics and electrical communications from Punjab University in India, and a masters in electrical engineering from The University of Alabama.