Executive Management

Geoff Hayward, Ph.D.
Serving as President and CEO of DataGardens since 2007 when he founded the company. Prior to this, Geoff served as President of Newance Solutions, a business and technology development company headquartered in Edmonton, Canada. While at Newance, Geoff helped his clients forge partnerships with major software and hardware system vendors such as VMware, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Google, and Juniper. Before Newance, Geoff served as Director of Product Management with the New Ventures Division of Platform Computing Inc.. While at Platform, Geoff led development of a new product, Enterprise Grid Orchestrator (EGO), through to launch and early customer adoption. Before joining Platform, Geoff held several leadership positions over the course of his six years at YottaYotta Inc. In particular, he led an advanced business and technology development team that developed and sold the world's first Gbps wide area storage network system. His team also developed a high-speed data transmission system that resulted in the first transcontinental disk-to-disk data transfer in excess of 10 Gbps (beating the previous world record by more than a factor of 17). Geoff holds eight awarded patents and has three patents pending.

Reg Joseph, M.B.A.
Serving as VP Corporate Development at DataGardens, and is responsible for finance, operations, and corporate partnerships. Before joining DataGardens, Reg was an equity research associate analyst with Leerink Swann & Co., where he was involved with the initiations on such companies as Caliper Life Sciences, Inc. Helicos BioSciences, Sequenom Inc., and Applied Biosystems. In 2002, Reg joined Invitrogen and served in a variety of roles with his most recent being the business area manager responsible for Invitrogen's bioproduction segment ($50MM P&L) with an emphasis on designing novel products and services targeted to the early stage process development market. In 2001, Reg joined YottaYotta as Manager, Strategic Aliances and played a leading role in securing the sale of YottaYotta's first Storage Wide Area Network system to the Capital Health Authority in Edmonton, Alberta. Prior to joining YottaYotta, Reg worked with University (Alberta) and federal technology transfer organizations out-licensing academic technologies and managing start-ups.

Advisory Board

Bart Shigemura is the President and CEO of YottaYotta Inc. Prior to YottaYotta, Bart was Chairman and CEO of Alidian Networks, a layer 2 grooming and aggregation platform in the metro optical market. Prior to Alidian, Bart was Vice President of worldwide Marketing for all data products at Lucent Technologies. He joined Lucent via their acquisition of Yurie Systems for $1.1b dollars in an all cash transaction. Bart served as Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, and was a member of their Board of Directors, helping to take Yurie public in 1997. Before joining Yurie, Bart was Vice President of Marketing and Services for Premisys Communications, joining that organization prior to their IPO. Earlier in his career, Bart held executive sales and marketing positions at Nortel Networks, General DataComm and IBM. Bart has been on the board of a number of public and private companies including Tellium, Yurie, Cibernet, and YottaYotta, Inc. Bart has a B.S. degree in Marketing and Finance from the University of Southern California.

Jim Godsell is CEO of Chartwell International. Jim has over 20 years of technology experience, specializing in taking new companies and technologies to market, and has been a co-founder and director of several international software ventures. Mr. Godsell is responsible for all commercial and business related functions in the Chartwell group including Sales, Marketing, Account Management and Support. Mr. Godsell is also responsible for all Chartwell's overseas operations. He holds a Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Computer Science and Mathematics, as well as Diplomas in Business and Operations. Most recently, Jim was Vice President - EMEA and Asia Pacific of DISC Storage Inc. of Santa Clara, CA., responsible for all aspects of international business and line management. He has also held the position of Chief Operating Officer with Rightsmarket Inc. and was responsible for technology, developing strategic business relationships, sales and marketing. Prior to this Mr. Godsell was Vice President and Storage Business Unit Manager for Beta Systems Software AG, of Berlin, Germany, responsible for worldwide Sales and Marketing. He was also Vice President of Sales and Marketing, member of the Board of Directors, and a founder of Harbor Systems Management Ltd., a Calgary, Alberta-based storage management software company. His career also includes senior-level responsibility for development and product management at several international technology companies including Digital Communications Associates (DCA) in Switzerland and Germany.

Paul Lu is Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Alberta and the Principal Investigator for the Trellis Project. The Trellis Project investigates techniques to create a single metacomputer from a collection of high-performance systems. In 2006, Paul Lu and collaborators were awarded second prize by VMware in the Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge for creating the Trellis NAS Bridge Appliance (TNBA). TNBA makes it easier to access files from one location even though the files may be stored on different computers and different operating systems. In September 2004, Paul spearheaded the CISS-3 Experiment (the Third Canadian Internetworked Scientific Supercomputer), which used Trellis technology to harness over 4,000 processors from across Canada into a virtual supercomputer or metacomputer.