Dr Shaun Ryan | Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder
Shaun has over 10 years of experience in search technologies. As a co-founder of SLI Systems, he was one of the developers of the company's unique "Learning Search" site search technology. Shaun was also an original founder of GlobalBrain (in 1998), his first site search technology company bought by one of the world's leading portals Snap/NBCi.com in 2000, which he and his fellow founders bought back and later renamed SLI Systems. Prior to GlobalBrain, his background includes consulting with organizations such as international health technology company Invacare. Shaun is a frequent speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conferences in the U.S. and UK, and posts regular insights on site search trends to SLI's blog: http://blog.sli-systems.com/. In addition, his retail search bylines have published in Chief Marketer and Multichannel Merchant magazines. Shaun has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Canterbury.
Dr Wayne Munro | CTO and Co-Founder
Wayne Munro oversees SLI Systems' engineering team and is the company's lead site search technology architect. Prior to joining SLI, he held senior technical positions with NBCi and GlobalBrain, specializing in software development and theoretical research. Wayne also worked as a research scientist for the Wool Research Organization of New Zealand. He has a PhD in engineering for developing new numerical models for structural simulation (for which he received a medal) from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and has published numerous papers in international journals.
Geoff Brash | VP of Business Intelligence and Co-Founder
Driving growth and managing customer perception are key areas of responsibility for Geoff. A co-founder of SLI Systems, he has considerable expertise in search and nearly two decades of strategic and operations experience in the technology market. Under Geoff's direction, SLI won the New Zealand Hi-Tech Awards Marketer of the Year in 2005, placed 100 in the 2005 "Deloitte Technology Fast 500" ranking in Asia Pacific, and placed 12th in the 2005 "Deloitte/Unlimited Fast 50" in New Zealand. Prior to SLI, he was an engineering manager at leading Internet portal Snap/NBCi.com, and has served in various technical and managerial positions in the public and banking sectors. Geoff is an active member of several New Zealand software associations, and holds an MBA from Massey University.
Ed Hoffman | VP of Global Sales and Business Development
Ed has over 20 years of experience in the software industry with a deep experience of the search technology sector. Ed was Senior Director for Infoseek's software unit Ultraseek, which eventually was acquired by Inktomi, then Verity, then Autonomy. In that role growing revenues of Infoseek Software / Ultraseek Corporation from the initial deal in 1997 to US$25 million annual sales into 2,500+ accounts in over 40 countries. Ed has been contributing to SLI's growth and customer satisfaction since 2004. He is currently responsible for business development, channel programs and alliances globally.
Thierry Costa | VP of Marketing
As VP of marketing, Thierry Costa is responsible for SLI Systems’ global marketing efforts as well as driving growth of SLI’s search technology and services in the e-commerce and publishing industries. He is an experienced marketing veteran with strong marketing, product marketing and product management experience, and has served in senior marketing positions for several leading technology companies, including InQuira, a provider of natural language search and knowledge management software, and e-commerce platform provider BroadVision. Before joining SLI, Thierry was VP of marketing for Exaprotect, a security software company, and VP of marketing for Reportive. He started his career at Hewlett-Packard, where he was responsible for bringing to market HP’s security products and Data Warehousing solutions. Thierry holds M.B.A. and B.S. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University.
Christopher Riland | VP of Customer Success
As vice president of customer success, Chris manages the growth and direction of SLI’s customer success group, and works closely with the team to ensure the continual delivery of the company’s unique high quality service and customer care. Chris’ responsibilities include building a team to handle tactical customer support, rolling out new customer implementations and increasing customer retention. Prior to joining SLI’s executive team, Chris was director of customer success at SLI, where he transformed the customer success team in to a worldwide support organization. Before SLI, he was director of technical support at Actiance (formerly FaceTime Communications). As one of the original employees of FaceTime, Chris built the service/support group from scratch and played a key role in building the successful start-up. Chris has been building, leading and driving customer satisfaction in the software and technology industry for the last 15 years.
Dr Blair Cassidy | VP of Product Management
Blair is responsible for product development and ongoing product management. He has extensive experience leading high performance technical teams, focusing on the design, implementation and usage of highly scalable IT systems. Previously he was VP of Engineering at Eurekster, the pioneering social search company. Earlier he spent several years at PA Consulting Group, an international management consultancy, living and working throughout Asia and the USA. He also worked as the data engineer for the search product at NBCi. Blair has held research positions within New Zealand and Japanese institutions, and holds a PhD in Computational Modeling from Lincoln University.
Rod Garrett | CFO
Rod has 20 years of experience in Finance and related roles. Rod worked for Price Waterhouse in New Zealand and London working mainly on Insolvency / Corporate Recovery assignments before moving into the commercial sector. Prior to joining SLI in 2006 he was CFO of Christchurch electronics developer and manufacturer Eaton Power Quality Ltd. Rod originally worked for New Zealand owned Swichtec which was acquired by British company Invensys and ultimately acquired by the Eaton group.He has an honours degree in Accounting and Finance from Otago University and is a New Zealand Chartered Accountant.
Michael Grantham | Operations Manager and Co-Founder
Michael is responsible for SLI’s global technology systems. As a co-founder of SLI Systems, he has helped design and implement many of SLI Systems products and infrastructure. Prior to SLI, he gained valuable experience in search and systems design at NBCi and GlobalBrain where he was a lead developer and systems engineer. Michael has also held lead developer positions at Australia and New Zealand’s largest banks. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Canterbury.
