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.
Arnie Wernick
Chief Scientist & Co-Founder
Before 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.
Eric Madison
Vice President of Marketing & Co-Founder
Eric is responsible for Abrevity's overall product strategy including product management, marketing and PR.
Before joining Abrevity, Eric was Director of Technical Marketing & Alliances at Fujitsu Softek (acquired by IBM), the former storage software division of Fujitsu Ltd. Prior to Softek, he held various management positions at Brocade Communications in solutions marketing and quality assurance. Prior to Brocade, Eric spent seven years working in the telecommunications industry holding various senior level positions at companies including USinternetworking (acquired by AT&T), and various early Internet Service Providers. Eric has been a member of many industry associations including SNIA, The ATM Forum, The Frame Relay Forum, and ARIN. He holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina.
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 North America Sales
Jonathan 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.
