John Goodson
Vice President and General Manager
John Goodson is the executive leader of DataDirect Technologies. He is responsible for daily operations, business development, product direction and long-term corporate strategy.

John brings significant technical and business leadership to the company. Joining DataDirect in 1992 as an engineer, he has since held positions of increasing responsibility in research and development, technical support and marketing. John is a well known and respected industry luminary and data connectivity expert. For more than 10 years, he has worked closely with Sun and Microsoft on the development and evolution of database connectivity standards including J2EE, JDBC, .NET, ODBC and ADO. John has been involved with the ANSI H2 Committee, which is responsible for building the SQL standard and the SQL Access Group, which has been responsible for building call level interfaces into relational databases. He is now actively involved in Java standards committees, including the JDBC Expert Group and Java Rowsets. This active leadership has helped his team develop the most technically advanced data connectivity technologies.

John holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Virginia Tech.

Rob Steward
Vice President of Research and Development
As vice president of research and development for DataDirect Technologies, Rob is responsible for the development, strategy and oversight of the company's data connectivity products including the Shadow mainframe integration suite client software and the industry-leading Connect family of database drivers and data providers: Connect for ODBC, Connect for JDBC and Connect for ADO.NET. Additional product development responsibilities include DataDirect Sequelink, and DataDirect XQuery, as well as the management of DataDirect's Custom Engineering Development group.

Rob has spent more than 14 years developing database access middleware, including .NET data providers, ODBC drivers, JDBC drivers, and OLE DB providers. He has held a number of management and technical positions at DataDirect Technologies and serves on various standard committees. Earlier in his career, he worked as lead software engineer at Marconi Commerce Systems Inc.

Rob holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from North Carolina State University, Raleigh.

Lindsey Anderson
Vice President of Sales, the Americas
Lindsey Anderson leads DataDirect's OEM and corporate sales efforts, encompassing telesales, field sales and field sales engineering in the Americas. She also oversees legal and finance operations in support of sales operations and works closely with product marketing and development on pricing, packaging and new product areas.

Lindsey joined DataDirect in 1998 as a west coast OEM sales account manager and was instrumental in helping establish a solid presence in Silicon Valley, building key OEM relationships with BEA, Sun Microsystems, Hyperion, Oracle and many others, which helped solidify DataDirect's position as the true market leader for data connectivity. Prior to DataDirect, Lindsey was the vice president of Sales and Marketing for Pragmatica and held sales and marketing management positions at Sun Microsystems and Digital Equipment Corporation.

Lindsey studied mechanical engineering at San Jose State University.

Terence Cooke
Vice President of International Sales
Terence Cooke spearheads DataDirect Technologies' corporate and OEM sales efforts, encompassing telesales, field sales and field sales engineering in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia territories.

During his time with the company, Terence has led DataDirect's development of new and high-level corporate business resulting in a significant number of wins with international enterprise-class customers such as IBM, CSFB, and Barclays Capital, in addition to dozens of new business relationships.

Prior to DataDirect Technologies, Terence was vice president and general manager EMEA at S2 Systems International. Earlier in his career, Terence held director of sales and marketing positions at Siemens Nixdorf, Pyramid Technology and Acer/Altos.

Terence received a Master of Business Administration and marketing degrees from L.S.E. (London University).

Charles Gold
Vice President of Worldwide Marketing
As vice president of worldwide marketing, Charles is responsible for leading DataDirect's global marketing strategy, overseeing direct and product marketing initiatives and marketing communications activities.

Charles has more than 12 years of executive marketing experience in both startup and established software companies in both the commercial and open source domains. Prior to DataDirect Technologies, Charles served as the vice president of marketing at Appfluent Technology, and also held senior marketing positions at Red Hat and CyberCash.

Charles holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia and a Master of Business Administration in finance from Wake Forest University.

Carol Esau
Vice President Worldwide SupportLink and Custom Engineering
Carol Esau leads the technical support team for all of the DataDirect products. She brings more than 20 years of experience working directly with customers providing project management and technical support. Under her direction, DataDirect has been honored for its superior customer service receiving the prestigious Northface Award for Customer Service Excellence for six consecutive years.

Prior to joining DataDirect in 2002, Carol held positions at Nortel Networks responsible for a group of major accounts in the telecom industry.

Carol received a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Virginia Tech. She also earned a Master of Business Administration and is a certified PMP (Project Management Professional).

Eric Samson
Chief Technology Officer, Data Services
As chief technology officer of data services at DataDirect Technologies, Eric provides technical leadership for the company’s data services strategy and product development efforts. Considered one of the world’s foremost experts on data access, Eric serves on several international standardization committees including JSR 317 (JPA2) and JSR 235 (SDO 3 for Java™) within the Java Community Process (JCP) and is also an active member of the OASIS and Open SOA consortiums contributing to the Service Data Objects (SDO 1, 2 and 3) and Data Access Service (DAS) specifications.

Prior to joining DataDirect Technologies, Eric co-founded and served as chief technology officer at Xcalia (acquired by DataDirect in 2008), a pioneer in the burgeoning data services market dedicated to solving the business problem surrounding the gap between a sophisticated object oriented development approach and a simple database structure. Prior to co-founding Xcalia, Eric served as the technical director at ODBMS vendor Versant. There he was responsible for managing the pre-sales, support, consulting and training technical teams in South EMEA where he worked with marquee clients including France Telecom, Alcatel, Nortel, Lucent and BNP Paribas. Earlier in his career, Eric steered his own company, Allware Concept, a high-level consulting company focusing on object-oriented programming, relational databases, Corba, rich-user interfaces and object-oriented design and analysis which was later acquired by the business intelligence consulting company, Business & Decision.

Eric holds a Master of Science in computer science specializing in operating systems, computer graphics algorithms and artificial intelligence and a doctorate in computer science specializing in distributed artificial intelligence from Paris 6th University.

Gregg Willhoit
Chief Architect
As chief architect at DataDirect Technologies, Gregg provides technical leadership for DataDirect's mainframe-based Shadow products, including z/Services, z/Direct and z/Events.

During his career, Gregg has architected and developed a wide variety of commercially successful system software products including; DBMS Catalog Management tools, MVS and DB2 performance monitors (the first XA/DTP product for mainframe data.). Gregg is also the co-developer of the Shadow Direct ODBC-to-mainframe data product for DB2, IMS, VSAM, CICS and Adabas – used daily in many of the largest and most active mainframe database environments in the world.

Prior to joining DataDirect, Gregg served as chief software architect for Neon Systems (acquired by DataDirect in 2006) as well as various senior development positions at Candle Corporation and Boole & Babbage.

Gregg holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Barry University and a Master of Computer Science from Webster University.

Asher Arembandd
Senior Director Shadow Development
As senior director Shadow development, Asher is responsible for product direction, spearheading all phases of design, development and testing of the Shadow mainframe integration product.

A recognized industry expert in the mainframe technologies market, Asher joined DataDirect from CA, where he held various titles including Architect and Chief Architect for OPS/MVS as well as Development Manager for multiple products. There he was responsible for the design and implementation of sophisticated product infrastructure for CA-OPS/MVS and provided development and support of the CA common REXX engine used by multiple products on z/OS, z/VM and z/VSE. During his time with the company, Asher was a founding member of the CA Council for Technical Excellence and a featured speaker at numerous industry conferences, tradeshows and events.

Prior to his 18-year tenure with CA and its predecessor companies, Asher held various software development and systems programming positions at Candle Corporation, Quotron Systems and Dataccount Corporation, gaining valuable working knowledge of the IBM mainframe operating systems MVS and VM and performance monitoring techniques.

He holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel where he graduated Cum Laude and a Master of Science in computer science from the University of London Imperial College of Science and Technology.

Dr. Carlo Innocenti
Senior XML Program Manager
As senior XML program manager at DataDirect, Dr. Carlo Innocenti (Minollo) is responsible for the overall strategy and direction of the XML products group including DataDirect XQuery, DataDirect XML Converters and Stylus Studio.

Prior to joining DataDirect Technologies, Minollo served as principal software architect of Stylus Studio at Progress Software and eXcelon Corporation. While at eXcelon Corporation, Minollo managed an engineering group responsible for the overall tools strategy of the XML database division, overseeing product design and development. Prior to that, he served as development manager for tools at Object Design, Inc., an object database company. Minollo began his software development career at ViVi Software, an Italian company he co-founded.

Minollo holds a Master of Science in computer science and a doctorate in Robotics from the University of Genoa (DIST).