Narayan Laksham, Founder and CEO
Narayan Laksham founded Ultriva as eBots in 1999 with a vision of building a company that develops customer driven solutions which guarantee high value, quick deployment and measurable return on investment. During his 30-year career, Mr. Laksham has seen software companies repeatedly build applications with underpowered architectures, resulting in customers experiencing high cost of ownership, extensive implementation programs and complex integration projects. Mr. Laksham set out to turn this paradigm on its head by applying lean concepts to software development and deployment.
Over these years Mr. Laksham has visited over 150 factories worldwide to understand how IT solutions can sustain lean implementations across manufacturing value chains from Distribution to supply chain. The outcome is the Lean Execution Platform being offered by Ultriva. Mr. Laksham has written articles on several lean topics including "When Push comes to Pull Kanban wins". He is also a co-inventor of the patent pending “Lean Assessment Tool”.
Mr. Laksham is a big proponent for retaining manufacturing in USA. In his free time he participates in activities to promote this cause. He is a strong believer of "Manufacturing should be where the market is".
Earlier in his career, Mr. Laksham held a variety of executive, sales, product management, and technical marketing positions with Symantec, Computer Vision, Unisys and DEC. Mr. Laksham holds a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master's degree in Marketing Management.
Rao Kota, Cofounder and Chief Technology Officer
Rao Kota acts as both the chief architect and head of development for all Ultriva applications. Mr. Kota has over 26 years of experience in the fields of hardware, firmware and application infrastructure. During these years, he has been instrumental in the design and development of application development tools, database management tools, CRM applications and application middleware at both start-ups and major corporations. Mr. Kota joins Ultriva from Amdocs where he spent 9 years as one of the primary architects for their web-based CRM applications. These applications have set new standards in performance and scalability with some of the most demanding customers in the world. Prior to Amdocs, Mr. Kota worked as chief architect and development manager for Integra Technologies, New York, and holds a patent in the area of reusing database object identifiers. Mr. Kota graduated from Andhra University with a Bachelors degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering.
Jeanne Angelo-Pardo, Acting CFO
Ms. Angelo-Pardo has over 27 years of financial experience. Most recently, she was Chief Financial Officer of deCarta, Inc., a location-based services software company. At deCarta she assisted in raising over $52M in venture equity, and helped the company grow from $2.1M in revenue to over $14M. Ms. Angelo-Pardo also spent 10 years at Cadence Design Systems, Inc. and held a variety of financial management positions, most recently as Treasurer. Ms. Angelo-Pardo graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a Bachelors degree in Business Economics, and became a Certified Public Accountant in 1983.
Bill Swisher – Director of Business Development
Bill Swisher proven sales executive and engagement leader in the Lean consulting and software industries with 18+ years of industry relationships. Mr. Swisher previously held the Vice President Sales and Marketing at JCIT International (now DemandPoint Inc.) and management positions at TBM Consulting Group, Breakthrough Management Group. During his tenure at those firms, Swisher led lean engagements with many leading manufacturing corporations including GE, American Standard, Flextronics, Ingersoll Rand, Emerson, AstraZeneca and Nacco.
As Director of Business Development, Swisher will lead inbound and outbound marketing, managing partners and assist the sales team in cultivating enterprise accounts. Swisher will play a key role in accelerating Ultriva’s growth and entrenching its position as the market leader.