Management Team
Richard Preston
Chief Executive Officer
Richard Preston brings a proven record of success in building profitable software and hardware companies. As CEO, he has taken two companies from concept to profitability and repositioned two other companies for sale to public companies. He has extensive experience in storage management, Internet infrastructure, enterprise software, and online services. Richard was a former accountant with PWC and a founder and director of Silicon Valley Bank. He has served as Chairman of the American Electronics Association (NorCal Council) and on various community Boards. He holds an MBA in Finance and a BS in Business Administration from UC Berkeley.
Joel Harrison
Chief Technical Officer & Co-Founder
Serial entrepreneur Joel Harrison has been at the leading edge of creating value in computer storage for several decades which has resulted in 19 US patents. As a co-founder of Quantum (1980 – hard disk drives – IPO) and Plus Development (1984 – Hardcard – consumer hard disk drives – acquired by Quantum), Joel was a key architectural innovator in evolving the hard disk drive from expensive “washing machine” size products into ubiquitous, small and inexpensive consumer products. After owning several small related businesses in the early 1990’s Joel returned to Quantum in the mid 1990’s and led Quantum into the NAS (Network Attached Storage) server business. During this NAS period, Joel had the epiphany that most storage management problems can be most easily solved through advanced metadata (data about data) management software.
Recently focusing directly on metadata management software, Joel co-founded Categoryware (2000 – Advanced metadata management), became CTO of Acirro (2002 – Global Distributed File Systems using a NAS Switch – acquired by Intel), and most recently co-founded Abrevity (2003). At Abrevity he has been able to fully implement this vision into a world class metadata management software engine which has become the technology foundation for Abrevity. Joel received his BSME from CalPoly in Pomona, CA and his MSME from Caltech.
Glenn Seidman, PhD.
Vice President of Engineering
Glenn Seidman has over 25 years of experience in software engineering including more than 18 years architecting and building enterprise applications and information systems. In his career, he has filed more than 20 patents that address topics ranging from enterprise workflow to data privacy and security.
Prior to joining Abrevity, Glenn was VP of Product Development at I-many, a compliance management solutions company where he oversaw development of multiple product lines. Prior to I-many, Glenn was the Chief Architect and inventor of FileNet’s eProcess workflow management system and an architect for their document management system. Other roles include Chief Architect at NetFish and multiple product architecture roles at Oracle, including Oracle’s Network Computing Architecture, Oracle Application Server, and Oracle Financials. Dr. Seidman received his PhD. & MS in Computer Science from UCLA and has a BS in Engineering and Applied Science from Caltech.
Jonathan Brill
Director of Business Development
Jonathan Brill brings a proven track record of building successful sales teams in customer-centric software companies. He was previously at Solid Information Systems where, as Director of Emerging Markets, he built a successful new account sales team and helped lead the initiative to build an open-source division. Jonathan has held sales leadership positions at Kazeon Systems, Oblix, and Confluent Software. He has extensive experience in selling storage management, security, and infrastructure management software to enterprises. He holds a BS in Business Administration from California State University East Bay.
Doug Levitt
Senior Director of Product Marketing
Doug Levitt is responsible for Product Management and Product Strategy. Doug brings more than 20 years of software and high technology experience. He has a proven record of developing high quality products that exceed customer expectations.
Previously, Doug served as Director of Program Management at I-many and led the successful introduction of I-many's Contract Management for Life Sciences product suite release. Prior to I-many, Doug had senior management roles at two enterprise software companies, Accruent and QUIQ. Before that, Doug was at Hewlett-Packard where he spent more than 12 years in Product and Service development. Doug holds an MBA from Santa Clara University and a BS in Information Systems from San Francisco State University.
