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As Senior Consultant with Ramius Corporation, Simon helps clients to design and deploy the company’s online community and social networking solutions. During his six years at Ramius, Simon has helped launch knowledge, customer and partner networks for organizations like the American Marketing Association, Compuware, the IEEE, Juniper Networks, NASA and SAP.

A spokesperson for Ramius and active contributor to the social computing community, Simon is interested in how social technologies can help people connect and communicate to work, learn and innovate.

Simon is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario’s Administrative Commercial Studies Program, specializing in Finance and Economics. He remains active with the university’s Alumni Board of Directors and is a former president of the alumni’s Ottawa branch.

In his spare time, Simon tries to travel more, take better photos, ski tougher runs and hit a tennis ball around more often.

As Chief Operating Officer for Ramius, Philippe steers the technology direction for the company and is responsible for developing and managing Ramius’ technology partnerships.

Philippe joined Ramius in 1999 as Vice President and Director of Marketing overseeing key operational activities and leading the company’s marketing strategy and business development initiatives. A vital contributor to Ramius’ growth, Philippe played an integral role in the design and development of theprototype of Ramius’ first product, CommunityZero.

In his current role, Philippe leads the company’s technology division. In this capacity, Philippe is responsible for product planning and architectural design of the company’s Sixent social networking platform. He also manages the quality assurance and the customer support teams to lead the successful implementation of Sixent and CommunityZero worldwide.

Prior to joining Ramius, Phil was the design director for Magma Communications where he managed the company’s Web development department. Under his guidance, Philippe’s team built database-driven Web sites for e-commerce and Web applications and opened new revenue opportunities for the company.

Philippe is a graduate of the University of Ottawa’s School of Management.

Alfred founded Ramius in January 1998 after recognizing the market potential for social software. As President and CEO, Alfred leads the strategic direction for Ramius, mapping out new opportunities and positioning the company for continued growth and innovation.

Prior to founding Ramius Corporation, Alfred was President of Jayson Corporation, an investment company focused on early-stage financing of private software companies. Alfred began his career in technology as a software developer with Jayson Data Systems Inc., a developer of accounting, administration and evaluation systems for various federal government departments and healthcare institutions.

Alfred sits on the Board of Directors for iLOOKAbout Corp., a public imaging technology company, and is a member of the Board of Advisors for Progeny Group, a Toronto-based investment-banking boutique. An active member of his community, Alfred is a past President of the Hong Kong-Canada Business Association (Ottawa Section) and has also served as Chair of the organization’s National IT Committee. One of the co-founders of the Ottawa Dragon Boat Race Festival, Alfred has helped shape one of the region’s largest annual charitable events.

A graduate of the Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario, the Ottawa Business Journal named Alfred as one of Ottawa’s Top Forty Under 40 in 2000.

Marc is the Director of Product Management for InsideView, a pioneer in on-demand business search and intelligence. He is responsible for InsideView’s product strategy, evangelism, and execution.

Marc has been in technology for 10+ years with experience in product strategy, product management, product marketing, consulting, and sales engineering.  Prior to joining InsideView, he served as Director of Product Management at Convergys, Senior Solution Architect at DigitalThink, and Project Manager at Lifescape, LLC.

Mark Levitt is responsible for driving IDC’s collaborative applications research which includes integrated collaborative environments (ICE), team collaboration, conferencing, enterprise instant messaging, unified messaging and communications, and email applications software and software as a service, as well as email usage and spam volumes. He also directs IDC’s research in the area of portals and composite applications.

Mr. Levitt regularly publishes market forecasts, vendor analysis, and analysis of emerging trends such as contextual collaboration and the enterprise workplace. He also provides customers with assessments of vendor strategies and market opportunities.

Since joining IDC in 1989 as a research analyst in IDC’s PC software and PC hardware programs, Mr. Levitt has conducted research in the areas of PC pricing, worldwide and regional PC markets, PC distribution channels, storage, and printers. Since 1995, he has focused on messaging and collaboration.

Mr. Levitt is often quoted in business and computer trade publications. He delivers speeches, moderates panels, and presents webinars on collaboration market trends and issues. As an attorney and legal consultant, Mr. Levitt has written about the privacy of email in the workplace and government access to information contained on computers.

Erica Driver (formerly Rugullies) primarily contributes to Forrester’s offerings for the Information and Knowledge Management professional. She is a leading expert on enterprise collaboration strategies and platforms and Information Workplace strategies and platforms. In the past, Erica has covered information rights management, message archiving, product information management, idea management, product life-cycle management, commerce servers, eProcurement, business-to-business (B2B) marketplaces, and electronic bill presentment and payment.

PREVIOUS WORK EXPERIENCE

Erica came to Forrester through its acquisition of Giga Information Group. She covered a wide range of trends and technologies in her more than six years with Giga. Prior to joining Giga, Erica was a research analyst at Hurwitz Group, where she covered electronic commerce and information security. She has experience with Lotus Notes/Domino application development and administration, network administration, and project management. She has also served on the board of trustees of the Massachusetts Electronic Commerce Association.