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BlackBall Executive Team

Bob Brown, Chief Executive Officer

Bob Brown Robert Brown is our CEO, with over 20 years of experience; he has an extensive background in storage management, network management, Internet collaboration, and telecommunications. As President and COO of Contigo Software, he successfully grew revenues from $800k/yr. to $4.4M/yr. in the first year. Contigo was merged with Evoke Communication to enable an initial Public Offering (IPO) of the combined companies. As Vice President of Corporate Development for Seagate Software and Seagate Technology, Mr. Brown was the mastermind behind the $3.1 billion acquisition of Seagate Software by Veritas Software. Running 6 business units as Vice President of Products at Arcada Software, a Conner Peripherals subsidiary, Mr. Brown was the driving force and visionary behind the industry standard Backup Exec product line where revenues grew from $1M/yr. to $220M/yr. in 3 short years.

His distinguished career in storage management began in 1987 as Vice President of Engineering at Emerald Systems, where his product releases grew revenues by 900% in just two years and developed the first MS-Windows backup product, the first shared tape drive on a file server, and a tape format patent that is now widely used in the industry as a standard that creates the media directory "on-the-fly" as the backup happens ensuring that the information in the directory is accurate and representative to the information on media. This approach was utilized by Novell in the SIDF tape format, and Microsoft in the Microsoft Tape Format, MTF.

Patricia Brown, President & Chief Operating Officer

Patricia Brown Ms. Brown co-founded BlackBall in June 2000 and has been instrumental in the operations and processes for the company. Ms. Brown has over 25 years experience in software operations and administration. Ms. Brown started her career in high technology in 1981 working for the powerhouse of the industry in that era, IBM. Patricia was trained and certified by IBM, including special government security clearances. Her various functions spread her talents across Sales as the Assistant to the Vice President of Sales, Director of Human Resources, and a special administration task force. As part of this task force, she helped to plan, install, and IPL the first Wide Area Network across America for IBM that ultimately became the IBM global network that was sold to AT&T several years ago.

Patricia then moved onto the 8th largest software company in the world, Sterling Software. As a Senior Services Representative, she downsized and streamlined operations, created and was editor for the companies' quarterly newsletter, SAMS:TechNews. She ran and maintained the project management schedules and task lists, including various special projects for NASA. Patricia is a Certified Government Contractor, and a Notary Public for the State of California.

David Allen, General Manager, European Operations

David Allen David is a veteran of over 25 years in the high tech business, most of it living at the front edge of some of the most important technology cycles. The first half of his career was in the software business. He started in main frames at Xerox Computing Services in Los Angeles and went on to mini-computers, all the while focusing on application software. In 1990 he moved (full time) to the UK, and started in the inter-networking business. He was one of the first employees as VP Products & Marketing, at Madge Networks, in the token ring business. Company grew from start-up to $175M in 1993. He stayed through the NASDAQ IPO in 1993 and went to a small router company (at the time), Cisco Systems where he was Director of Market Development to build/deploy the 2500 series routers. After that he joined the founders of Compaq at Thomas Conrad, a new 100 Mb Infrastructure Company, built up and sold to Compaq. He then went to Digi International: a serial I/O and infrastructure company heading all European Operations, and then heading up global M&A.

David also helped start Netverk Ltd. a satellite data co., as President. Raised $7M with various VCs, built it up and then company sold to Icelandic investment group. Beginning of 2000 he joined Contigo Software (web collaboration) in running all their International Operations. Part of the management group that merged the company with Evoke Communications Inc. in June 2000, and then did the NASDAQ IPO in July 2000. Was COO of the European Co. after the merger. Has also helped start Fiber in the Loop, Fiber Optic Access Company for emerging 1 GB native Ethernet services market across first & last mile point-to-point fiber. Mid 2002 took over COO/CEO of Asita Technologies, high speed security appliance vendor. David has a vast level of experience helping companies enter Europe and build the most effective presence in the market there.

Charlie Keiper, Vice President, Product Marketing

Charlie Keiper Over twenty-five years of senior-level product management and marketing experience with a strong background in the storage network software industry. Throughout his career he has been instrumental in rapidly bringing new products to market and assuring critical market penetration by enhancing both a company's positioning and its products competitive advantages, while reducing costs-to-market; all of which have resulted in improved bottom-line performance for leading domestic and international technology firms. Mr. Keiper has made significant contributions over the years as a Strategic Product Manager, Director of Technical Marketing, Vice President Product Marketing, and Director of Business Development for Sterling Software; Sun / StorageTek; Arcada Software and Seagate Software through the transition to Veritas; Seagate Technology; Contigo Software (Now West Communications); BakBone Software; and Intel.

Andrew Scherpbier, Chief Technical Officer

Andrew Scherpbier Mr. Scherpbier has been CTO of BlackBall since May of 2001. He is responsible for the technical direction and architecture for BlackBall products. Mr. Scherpbier has over 15 years experience in Internet systems design, architecture, and implementation. He has been responsible for building some of the most notable Internet technologies recognized today, most notably being the original author and designer of the popular ht://Dig search engine. Andrew wrote ht://Dig, a World Wide Web search engine package to fill the need to find information on the growing intranet at San Diego State University. ht://Dig is now a popular Open Source Software package licensed under the GPL. (http://www.htdig.org/)

In 1996 Andrew founded Contigo Software, an Internet startup, where he was the original developer of the company's patented collaboration platform on which the award winning Contigo i2i product line was built. Contigo Software was considered the leading technology provider in the Internet collaboration business up until it was merged with Evoke Communications and taken public in July 2000.

Prior to founding Contigo Software, Andrew held various positions with San Diego State University, most recently in the Computer Development Research Group. Mr. Scherpbier has a Masters of Science in Computer Science from San Diego State University.