Board of Advisors

Rick Cattell
Dr. R. G. G. “Rick” Cattell is a renowned expert in database systems and in engineering management. He has worked as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, mostly recently on open source database systems and proprietary innovations in database systems. Dr. Cattell served for 20+ years at Sun Microsystems in management and senior technical roles, and for 10+ years in research at Xerox PARC and at Carnegie-Mellon University. Dr. Cattell is best known for his contributions to middleware and database systems — particularly enterprise Java, object-oriented databases, object/relational mappings, and database interfaces. He is the author of several dozen papers and six books. He instigated Java DB and Java 2 Enterprise Edition, and was a contributor to a number of the Enterprise Java APIs and products. He previously led development of the Cedar DBMS at Xerox PARC, the Sun Simplify database GUI, and SunSoft’s ORB-database integration. He was a founder of SQL Access (a predecessor to ODBC), the founder and chair ofthe Object Data Management Group (ODMG), the co-creator of JDBC, the author of the world’s first monograph on object/relational and objec tdatabases, and a recipient of the ACM Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award.

Bruce Scott
Oracle co-founder Bruce Scott’s extensive background in developing databases, such as SQLBase, will aid Abrevity in refining its next generation of solutions. His experience includes serving as vice president of engineering at SenSage, as founder and CEO of Pointbase — a provider of Java-based embedded databases — and, before that, as a co-founder of Gupta Corporation, where he was vice president of Database and Connectivity Research and Development. At Gupta, Mr. Scott invented SQLBase, the first commercially available PC-oriented client/server database. He also developed the patented, software development design paradigm for SQL Windows. As one of the fourco-founders of Oracle Corporation, Mr. Scott was the Principle Engineer and Architect of the first three versions of the Oracle database. He holds a BS in computer science from California Polytechnic State University. 

Jennifer Widom
Stanford computer science professor Jennifer Widom has extensive experience in databases and information management. Her background in non-traditional data management is an excellent fit with Abrevity’s metadata database technologies. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1993, she was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center where she was involved in research covering many aspects of non-traditional data management. She is an ACM Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She was a Guggenheim Fellow, and has served on a variety of program committees, advisory boards, and editorial boards. Ms. Widom received a Bachelors degree from the Indiana University School of Music in 1982 and her Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University in 1987. 

Arnie Wernick
Before co-founding Abrevity, Arnie was VP of Engineering at Secorix, Inc. where he led the development of their suite of web-based enterprise risk assessment products, for physical and network security and government compliance. Prior to Secorix, Arnie was Principal Engineer of Metricom, Inc. where he was responsible for a 70 million dollar strategic technology transfer and outsourcing initiative for their Ricochet wireless Internet modems. He also designed their wireless network security and drove the standardization of the Ricochet network protocols through IEEE ISTO.

During his career, Arnie has held many key design and management positions in Fortune 500 and startup companies in several areas of computing, including data communications, databases, scientific instrumentation, machine vision, graphics and user interfaces. Arnie brings to Abrevity over 25 years of software engineering, system architecture and management experience in creating, integrating and delivering innovative first generation computer based products. He received his BSEE from Lehigh University.