About

I founded the Elastic Brands blog in 2006 on a lark.  I was in search of an outlet for writing on topics that were orthogonal to my work as a CMO at a software company.  I also wanted to get up to speed on the tools which were fueling the explosion in user-generated content, and driving a complete transformation of media markets.  A year later, I had left the corporate world and Elastic Brands had become my very own marketing advisory firm.

How I Got Here

I grew up the son of a son of a bricklayer in New Jersey.  My father prioritized education above all else, and I had the good fortune to attend a couple of the finest schools in the East: Phillips Academy, Andover, and Connecticut College.  I also pursued post-graduate study, and worked as a teaching assistant, at Harvard, in their “night school.”

I was an early adopter of PC technology.  While I was on the faculty at Phillips, I took a couple of graduate classes in computer science in the evenings.  I was doing a demonstration of one project in a lecture hall at Harvard, which caught the attention of two engineers from Lotus Development Corporation.  I left teaching for the software industry in 1987, when Lotus was the largest PC software company on earth.

After a couple of years in development, I went overseas for my first assignment in Europe as a field sales engineer and jack of all technical trades.  I returned to Lotus in the states just as the Notes and cc:Mail businesses were taking off, and I worked my way through product management and marketing roles until I was the Director of Product Marketing for Lotus communication products.

IBM acquired Lotus in 1995, and Big Blue recruited me to take an assignment in the Software Group as Vice President, e-business Software Marketing, in 1997.  I wrapped up my Lotus / IBM career as Vice President of their business partner program, Partnerworld for Software.

In 1999, I became CMO at Bowstreet, a web services startup which was ultimately acquired by IBM after vaporizing when the internet bubble burst.

In 2001, I became VP of Marketing at Netegrity, which was acquired by Computer Associates.

In 2002, I moved to Sonic Software, the inventor of the Enterprise Service Bus.  At Sonic, we successfully established a new product category, gained Gartner’s endorsement of that category, and delivered top line revenue of: $16, $24, $26, and $34 million year over year, ‘02 through ‘05.  Sonic was acquired by Progress for over $50 million in 2005.

After the acquisition, I led marketing for Progress’ Enterprise Infrastructure Division, and participated in the completion of two additional Progress acquisitions: Actional and Pantero.

Elastic Brands helps companies deliver creative, clear, and compelling marketing.

We can help you:

• Establish the discipline and best practices necessary to define and occupy a clear position in complex and competitive technology markets.
• Design, budget, staff and manage product marketing, demand creation, and marketing communications teams to drive aggressive market growth.
• Establish shared marketing and sales objectives, define metrics, drive business strategy refinement with performance metrics as input.
• Implement disciplines necessary to assess changes in market conditions, and lead efforts to define new product categories and market strategies, and to reposition/redirect in-flight strategies, on the basis of those changes.
• Drive strategic planning process, establishing annual creation of three-year assessment of market and technology trends, product-specific strategies and roadmaps, and go-to-market plans.
• Align and excite teams to excel in achieving company goals and objectives.

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