about us
management team
Mike Thompson
President and CEO
Mike Thompson is responsible for management, execution and strategic direction of the company. With more than 25 years of sales and marketing experience in technology companies, Mike joined Sepaton after serving as president, CEO and chairman of the board at Egenera Corporation. Mike joined Egenera originally as COO and was instrumental in driving growth to $100m annually after just four years from the first product shipment. Before joining Egenera, Mike was senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing and a member of the board of directors at Stratus Technologies, where he managed a 400-person operation that generated more than $700 million in annual revenues through direct and indirect channels. Prior to Stratus, he served as director of U.S. sales operations for the financial line of business at Tandem Computers.
Mike holds a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Southern Connecticut University.
Paul McDermott
Chief Financial Officer
Paul McDermott is responsible for finance, legal, human resources, and administration functions at Sepaton. He has twenty years of management experience at high technology companies, both public and private. Before joining Sepaton, Paul held chief financial officer positions at three high technology companies, Network Intelligence (now EMC), Firepond, and ServiceWare Technologies. He has also held controller/chief accounting officer positions at Sonus Networks and Legent Corporation (now Computer Associates). Paul is a licensed certified public accountant (CPA) and holds both a bachelor's degree in accounting from Duquesne University and a master's degree in business administration from the University of Pittsburgh.
Jeff Tofano
Chief Technology Officer
Jeff brings a extensive experience and technical depth to this position, which he earned over his thirty-year career in the data protection, storage, and high availability industries. Before joining Sepaton, Jeff was Chief Technology Officer at Quantum Corporation where he established the technical vision and direction of the company, led the advanced development team, and played a key role in new market development and sales activities.Prior to this role, Jeff was Technical Director for Decru/Network Appliance, where he managed the architecture, performance, platform, and security design of all NAS and SAN encryption/compression appliances. He also served as the Chief Architect for Onstor Inc., where he was responsible for their NAS gateway product and led every major product release.
His experience also includes senior architect roles with a variety of leading companies, including Oracle Corporation, Tandem Computers, and Stratus Technologies. Jeff earned a BA in computer science and mathematics from Colgate University.
Kevin Shea
Senior Vice President of Engineering
As senior vice president of engineering, Kevin Shea leads Sepaton's worldwide engineering team and is responsible for all product development and delivery work for the company. Kevin brings a broad range of engineering and leadership experience to this position, which he earned over his twenty-five year career in the industry. He has led product development efforts for clustered files systems, parallel computing runtimes, asynchronous replication, and high performance data base management systems. Kevin has held roles as the vice president of engineering at several high tech companies, including IBRIX, Interactive Supercomputing, Giantloop and Praxis International. Kevin came to Sepaton from Microsoft where he served as principal group manager for their technical computing team following Microsoft's acquisition of Interactive Supercomputing.
Kevin hold a BS in Mathematics from University of New Hampshire, and an MS in Computer Science from Boston University.
Al Lanzetta
Senior Vice President of Operations and Services
With the knowledge and experience of over 30 years in operations, finance, manufacturing and customer service, Al Lanzetta oversees Sepaton's operations and services on a global basis. Lanzetta joined Sepaton from Egenera where he served as executive vice president of operations and worldwide services. While there he built out the Egenera technical support and professional services staff, processes and tools, creating a superior customer experience while growing revenue and income for seven consecutive years. Prior to Egenera, he served as vice president of global field operations and field support for EMC Global Services guiding a worldwide staff of 3,000 professionals responsible for customer service field operations, field support, logistics and contracts administration. Earlier in his career, Lanzetta held executive positions with Data General Corporation ranging from corporate manufacturing controller to director of the Manufacturing Services Division. After serving in the United States Marine Corps, Lanzetta earned a bachelor of science degree in business administration from Clark University and a master of business administration degree from Babson College.
Amy J. Lipton
Senior Vice President of Marketing
As Senior Vice President of Marketing, Amy J. Lipton leads the development and execution of Sepaton’s marketing and communications strategy, including all of its efforts related to brand awareness, product marketing, channel enablement, promotion, press and analyst relations, interactive media, and new social media initiatives aimed at further increasing awareness of the Sepaton brand and growth of the company’s market-leading, enterprise-class solutions.
Amy has marketing experience in both large and mid-tier companies, where she held a succession of increasingly senior marketing and leadership roles. At IBM she served in several capacities, including as director of global marketing for Digital Media, director of global marketing for Media and Entertainment Industry, director of global marketing for Business Process Management and marketing executive for IBM’s wireless eBusiness services. Most recently she was vice president of marketing at WMS Industries, an industry leading gaming technology provider based in the Greater Chicago metropolitan area.
Amy holds a Master of Science degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Design from Syracuse University.
