BlackBall Executive Team
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Bob Brown, Chief Executive Officer
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.
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Patricia Brown, President & Chief Operating Officer
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.
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Charlie Keiper, Vice President, Product Marketing
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.
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Andrew Scherpbier, Chief Technical Officer
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.
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