· Superb software architect
· Excellent software developer
· Excellent leader
· Good manager
RateIntegration, Durham NC. Feb 2000 - present
Vice President of Engineering – Jun 2002 -
Jul 2003
Executive Director of Engineering – Feb 2001 - Jun 2002
Chief Architect – Feb 2000 - Feb 2001
RateIntegration provides the telecom billing industry with a standalone engine for rating, pricing, and settlement of billing records. Our unique spreadsheet-based interface provides pricing analysts with the means to design, realize, and maintain rating and pricing rules without the need for long and expensive IT projects. Our “no preset data model” architecture gives us the ability to easily integrate with a wide variety of billing and mediation platforms. Our core real-time engine allows us to support low-latency rating in real-time environments as well as high-throughput rating in batch environments.
RateIntegration is a venture-funded company which began operations in early 2000. Our most recent funding round of $9M in Feb 2002 was based on the strength of our technology, the potential of our market, and on the value of our premier reference customer. British Telecom has been in production since Apr 2002, processing wholesale billing records worth $6B annually.
I have been the technical leader and chief architect of the company since it began operations. As technical leader, I have been responsible for product definition, design, and implementation of all of our offerings. As chief architect, I have personally led most of the design effort and much of the implementation effort. In addition, I was a key code developer during the first two and a half years. Finally, I served as the project architect for many of our customer deployments.
In Feb 2001, I assumed the formal management role for the engineering organization, operating as a 2nd line manager with distributed development in Durham, NC and McLean, VA. Since then, I have successfully led the engineering organization through significant periods of change while maintaining a quality organization with high morale and low turnover. First, I led the organization through good times with growth to 22 engineers and through bad times with reductions to 10 engineers. Second, I led the organization through several due diligence efforts by potential investors. Finally, in Sep 2002 I led the organization through a complete replacement of upper management, sales, and marketing, helping to build a new organization that revitalized our business and achieved our first sales in 18 months.
Since Sep 2002, I have been extremely active in the sales process. I have been the key player on the technical side of our customer engagements. First, I am called in for the “second meeting” in order to demonstrate to the customer the depth and seriousness of our product. Second, I have worked closely with the customers to define solutions built around our product and crystallize the value proposition.
IBM, Research Triangle Park NC. May 1995 - Feb 2000
Product Architect of WebSphere Payment Manager – Oct 1997 - Feb 2000
Payment Manager is IBM's system for processing payment information collected by e-commerce applications (e.g., processing credit card information collected from an online consumer). As architect, I was the key technical leader in a 50-person development organization, responsible for 1) providing the guiding vision of the product, 2) understanding and refining requirements, 3) developing technical project plans, 4) leading the design effort, 5) driving decisions on priorities, 6) ensuring conceptual integrity, and 7) managing the technical relationships with related IBM products. In addition, throughout the development cycle I was one of the lead programmers with direct development responsibility for the core components of the product.
Advisory Programmer in eNetwork Studies – Apr 1996 - Oct 1997
eNetwork Studies was an advanced technology study group under the direction of Jim Gray, an IBM Fellow. Our group emphasized the construction and analysis of advanced technology prototypes. I performed and led several empirical studies that investigated the ARB rate-based congestion control protocol used in APPN/HPR. Some of these studies were aimed at evaluating the expected performance of proposed products, while others were aimed at evaluating architectural problems and proposed solutions. My other activities included building a prototype to investigate the utility of putting a Berkeley sockets interface over the HPR transport protocol, constructing a testbed laboratory for performing my empirical studies, and building a real-time network simulator.
Advisory Programmer in Anynet – May 1995 - Apr 1996
The IBM 2217 Multiprotocol Concentrator was a stand-alone device using the MultiProtocol Transport Network architecture (MPTN) to transparently translate between several different transport protocols. I developed the remote configuration application.
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC. Aug 1989 - Apr 1995
Research Assistant – Distributed and Real-Time
Systems
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Pittsburgh PA. Apr 1989 - Aug 1989
Programmer – Network Monitoring and Maintenance
Tools
Donald L. Stone Co., Pittsburgh PA (self-employed). Jun 1988 - Apr 1989
Programmer – Personal Composer and IDL translator
and runtime system
Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh PA. Jun 1985 - Jun 1988.
Software Engineer
Rule-based system and apparatus for rating transactions
US Patent Application Serial Number 09/891374 – filed Jun 27, 2001
International Patent Application Serial Number PCT/US02/20123 – filed Jun 27, 2002
Ph.D. Computer Science, Aug 1995.
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC
Dissertation: Managing the Effect of Delay Jitter on the Display of Live
Continuous Media
Advisor: Kevin Jeffay
M.S. Computer Science, Dec 1991.
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill NC.
B.S. Applied Mathematics/Computer Science Track,
Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA, in May 1985.
My dissertation addresses the effect of variable processing and transmission delays on the display of live audio and video in workstation-based video teleconferences transmitted over asynchronous networks such as ethernets and token rings. There are two aspects to my approach. First, I have developed a real-time operating system kernel to support an experimental video conferencing application; for this kernel, I have developed analysis techniques for demonstrating that the processing delays incurred by audio and video during a conference are tightly bounded. Second, I have developed an adaptive mechanism which dynamically adjusts the latency at which audio and video are displayed to a level consistent with the current level of congestion in the network. In all, my dissertation demonstrates methods for supporting audio and video transmission over building-sized networks using inexpensive network technology.
Refereed Journals
An Empirical Study of Delay Jitter Management Policies, Stone, D.L., and Jeffay, K., ACM Multimedia Systems, Volume 2, Number 6, (January 1995), pp 267-279.
Transport and Display Mechanisms For Multimedia Conferencing Across Packet-Switched Networks, K. Jeffay, D.L. Stone, F.D. Smith, Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Vol. 26, No. 10, (July 1994), pp. 1281-1304.
Kernel Support for Live Digital Audio and Video, K. Jeffay, D.L. Stone, F.D. Smith, Computer Communications, Vol. 15, No. 6, (July/August 1992) pp. 388-395.
Refereed Conferences and Workshops
Accounting for Interrupt Handling Costs in Dynamic Priority Task Systems, K. Jeffay, D.L. Stone, Proc. 14th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symp., Raleigh-Durham, NC, December 1993, pp. 212-221.
Queue Monitoring: A Delay Jitter Management Policy, D.L. Stone, K. Jeffay, Proc. of the 4th International Workshop on Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video, D. Shepherd, G. Blair, G. Coulson, N. Davies and F. Garcia (Eds.). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 846, Springer-Verlag, Lancaster, UK, November 1993.
Adaptive, Best-Effort, Delivery of Audio and Video Data Across Packet-Switched Networks, K. Jeffay, D.L. Stone, T. Talley, F.D. Smith, in Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video, Proceedings, V. Rangan (Ed.). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 712, pp. 3-14, Springer- Verlag, Heidelberg, 1993.
Kernel Support for Live Digital Audio and Video, K. Jeffay, D.L. Stone, F.D. Smith, in Network and Operating System Support for Digital Audio and Video, Proceedings, R.G. Herrtwich (Ed.). Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 614, pp. 10-21, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1992.
YARTOS: Kernel support for efficient, predictable real-time systems, K. Jeffay, D. Stone, D. Poirier, Proc. Joint Eighth IEEE Workshop on Real-Time Operating Systems and Software and IFAC/IFIP Workshop on Real-Time Programming, Atlanta, GA, Real-Time Systems Newsletter, Vol. 7, No. 4, Fall 1991, pp. 8-13.)
Articles
YARTOS: Kernel support for efficient, predictable real-time systems, K. Jeffay, D. Stone, D. Poirier, in "Real-Time Programming," W. Halang and K. Ramamritham, eds., Pergamon Press, Oxford, UK, 1992., pp. 7-12.
IDL: Background and Status, with Nestor, J.R. Sigplan Notices 22 (11), November 1987, pp. 5-9.
Books
IDL: The Language and Its Implementation, Nestor, J.R., Newcomer, J.M., Giannini, P., Stone, D.L., Prentice Hall, 1990.