Management Team
Our management team averages over 25 years of career experience in a broad range of relevant technology sectors. These include wireless networking; telecommunications; enterprise, personal and mobile computing; software; and internet services.
Hatim Tyabji – Executive Chairman
John Cole – Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific
Adrian Hall – Chief Marketing Officer
Tom Hubbs – Chief Financial Officer
Chris Koopmans – Vice President, Product Development
Constantine Polychronopoulos, Ph.D. – Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Warren Simpson – Vice President, Worldwide Customer Support
Marty Smuin – Vice President and General Manager, Americas
Bryan Visser – Vice President and General Manager, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA)
Hatim Tyabji
Executive Chairman
Hatim Tyabji joined Bytemobile in August 2001.
Previously:
- Tyabji was founding chairman and CEO of Saraide, whose mission was to drive the convergence of the Internet and wireless telecommunications (1998-2000).
- While he was chairman and CEO of VeriFone (NYSE), market capitalization grew from $30 million to approximately $1.5 billion (1986-1998).
- He held several positions at Sperry Corporation, the last one being president, Information Systems — the number-three position in the 77,000-person company (1973-1986).
Tyabji is recognized for both his visionary innovations and his executive leadership:
- At VeriFone, he created the world's first virtually run company long before the advent of the Internet. His pioneering organizational concepts are documented in two Harvard Business School cases.
- In 2001, he received the Point Of Sale (POS) Industry's Lifetime Achievement award.
- In 2000, the Academy of Management chose Tyabji for its Distinguished Executive of the Year Award for Excellence in Strategic Leadership, honoring his ability to create innovative and highly profitable companies based on "… a strongly held system of personal values that permeate an organization and everyone in it."
- He received the Silicon India Lifetime Achievement award for excellence in business and technology.
- In 2007, he published Husband, Wife & Company: An Honest Perspective on Success in Life and Work, a book on the complex interrelationships between family and career.
In addition to Bytemobile, Tyabji currently serves on the boards of two public companies, Best Buy (NYSE) and OnMobile Global Limited (Bombay Stock Exchange, National Stock Exchange of India); five private companies — DepotPoint, Jasper Wireless, Merchant eSolutions, Sierra Atlantic, and TAFMO (Melbourne, Australia); and one not-for-profit organization, Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance. He is also ambassador-at-large for Benchmark Capital.
Prior boards:
- Public companies: Ariba, Deluxe Corporation, eFunds, Novatel Wireless, PubliCard, and SmartDisk Corporation
- Private companies: Datacard Group (chairman), Impresse and Norand Corporation
- Carnegie Institute
- Dean's Council, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University
- Dean's Council, School of Engineering, State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo
Tyabji holds a B.S. and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a M.B.A. in International Business. He is a graduate of the Stanford Executive Program and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the State University of New York.
John Cole
Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific
John Cole has more than 20 years of sales, marketing, business development, and general management experience in the telecommunications industry. Before joining Bytemobile in 2007, he was senior vice president and managing director, Asia Pacific, at Tellabs. Over a five-year period, his staff of 180 achieved a cumulative sales growth rate of 100%, while reducing operating costs by 15%. Prior to Tellabs, Cole spent 12 years at Motorola, based in Thailand, Hong Kong and Indonesia. His last position was general manager and director of Operations, ASEAN Markets, in Motorola's Telecom Carriers Solutions Group, where he was responsible for sales of cellular infrastructure products, services and solutions in several country markets. At Motorola, he also served as director of Network Operations, Asia Pacific, in the Messaging Strategic Networks Division; director of Business Development, Asia Pacific, in the Information Products and Services Group; and general manager of the STARPAGE joint venture. Cole began his career as a senior accountant at Coopers & Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers). He holds a B.B.A. degree in Accounting from the University of Portland.
Adrian Hall
Chief Marketing Officer
Adrian Hall has 19 years of management experience in international sales, marketing and business development in the information technology and wireless network industries. At Bytemobile, Hall is responsible for marketing, business development, partnership management, education services, and corporate communications. Prior to joining Bytemobile, Hall directed Business Development at Visto Corporation, where he developed and managed strategic partnerships with Handspring, Microsoft, Kyocera, IBM, and Oracle. Previously, he was vice president, Business Development, at FlyteComm. Hall also spent 12 years at Hewlett-Packard Company, based in both Europe and North America. At Hewlett-Packard, he held a variety of global management positions, including general manager, Sales, Marketing, Professional Services, and Support, for two vertical industry business units spanning 46 countries; corporate program director for the PC business; director of the North America Alliance Channels organization; and director of marketing for the North America Enterprise Server Business. As director of Solutions Marketing and Industry Marketing, he was responsible for marketing, sales and services for Hewlett-Packard's wireless products. Hall holds a B.A. in Business and Finance, with a specialization in Marketing, from Brunel University.
Tom Hubbs
Chief Financial Officer
Tom Hubbs joined Bytemobile in October 2001, following a career in financial management spanning the prior 35 years. At Bytemobile, he directs the finance, legal, sales operations, human resources, and administrative functions. Hubbs led Bytemobile's Series B and Series C rounds of private equity financing, raising a total of approximately $42 million, and the acquisitions of Broadcloud, Daedalus and ProQuent Systems.
Prior to Bytemobile, Hubbs's experience encompassed the following milestones:
- Led three successful initial public offerings (IPOs):
- interWAVE Communications International (Nasdaq), a provider of microcellular technology and cellular networking solutions for emerging markets (2000)
- VeriFone (NYSE), a leader in transaction automation, focusing on electronic payment systems in a broad range of retail environments (1990)
- Ungermann-Bass (Nasdaq), which led the emergence of local area network (LAN) technology for inter- and intra-office communications (1983)
- Orchestrated several mergers and acquisitions, including:
- interWAVE's acquisitions of Microcellular Systems Corporation (2000) and Wireless, Inc. (2001)
- VeriFone's acquisition of ICOT Corporation (1989)
- The sale of Phoenix Technology to Bridge Communications (1986)
- Ungermann-Bass's acquisition of Amdax Corporation (1983)
Hubbs currently serves on the boards of directors of the following companies:
- Linktone (Nasdaq), a leading provider of wireless interactive entertainment products and services in China, where he is chairman of the audit committee and a member of the compensation committee
- DCL, a privately held provider of logistics management and supply chain services
- Provista Software International, a privately held supplier of information technology software for government applications
Hubbs's early career included financial management positions at Four-Phase Systems, Hewlett-Packard Company and Price Waterhouse & Company (now PricewaterhouseCoopers). He holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Lehigh University and an M.B.A. from Santa Clara University.
Chris Koopmans
Vice President, Product Development
Chris Koopmans, a founding engineer at Bytemobile in 2000, is responsible for engineering, product management and information technology (IT). He has over 10 years of industry experience in hardware and software engineering and architecture. In eight years at Bytemobile, he has held a wide range of technical leadership positions. Most recently, he served as chief architect, with direct responsibility for the Unison™ Multi-Service Platform and suite of mobile data, web, multimedia, and advertising services. Previous management assignments included director of Engineering for Unison Optimization Services Node (OSN) Monaco™ Edition. He was also the architect responsible for product integration following Bytemobile’s acquisition of ProQuent Systems and subsequent transition of the Unison architecture to off-the-shelf hardware platforms and a fully interoperable product suite. Koopmans’ contributions include eight issued and pending patents covering wireless internet protocol (IP) services and optimization technology. Prior to Bytemobile, he held engineering positions at Intel Corporation's Microcomputer Research Laboratories and Silicon Graphics' Cray Research subsidiary. He earned a B.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering with Highest Honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and received the Bronze Tablet Award for outstanding academic performance as an undergraduate student. He also received an honorable mention in the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Awards, which recognize the research potential of an elite selection of students. Koopmans was working toward M.S. and Ph.D. degrees on a fellowship from the National Science Foundation when he left to help found Bytemobile.
Constantine Polychronopoulos, Ph.D.
Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Dr. Constantine Polychronopoulos’ research in multithreading computer architectures and wireless network performance optimization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) formed the core of Bytemobile technology. He founded the company in 2000 to pursue a vision of the Mobile Internet and recruited a few of his graduate students, including Chris Koopmans and Nicholas Stavrakos, today vice president, Product Development and chief architect, respectively, at Bytemobile. As a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UIUC since 1986 and director of the Center for Supercomputing Research and Development since 1995, Dr. Polychronopoulos led research efforts that have had a profound impact on both academic and commercial computing. His innovations included the Computational Network Federations, the first dynamic virtualization architecture; the Nanothreads prototype, used by Silicon Graphics and other companies; and the Parafrase-2 and Promis multilingual parallelizing compilers, which spawned nearly two decades of research and influenced compilers and run-time systems at Intel, IBM and Compaq. Dr. Polychronopoulos has chaired and served on the committees of more than 50 international conferences, served on the editorial boards of IEEE and ACM journals, and delivered more than 70 presentations by invitation at universities, conferences and industry events. He holds 10 U.S. and international patents and has published a book and over 150 papers in research journals and conference proceedings. Among other honors, he received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989, the 1998 Bodossaki Foundation Award in Engineering and a Fulbright Scholarship. In 1999, he was recognized as Pascal Professor by Leiden University. Dr. Polychronopoulos holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, an M.S. from Vanderbilt University and a B.S. from the National University of Athens.
Warren Simpson
Vice President, Worldwide Customer Support
Warren Simpson is responsible for serving and supporting Bytemobile’s worldwide customer base of network operators. He has over 20 years of technical customer support experience in the enterprise hardware, application software and telecommunications sectors, including 10 years of management and team leadership experience in mobile solutions and communications networks. Before joining Bytemobile in 2008, he spent eight years at Openwave Systems, where he was director of Technical Support for mobile and messaging product lines in Europe, Middle East and Africa; mobile products worldwide; and third-party stack technologies worldwide. At Openwave, he was responsible for more than $20 million in maintenance and support revenue and a staff of over 35 engineers, architects and customer support managers in eight countries. Simpson achieved industry best-in-class customer satisfaction levels regionally, built close customer relationships at the senior management level, negotiated all maintenance and support contracts and renewals, and created value-added services to develop new revenue streams. Prior to Openwave, he held technical support team leadership positions at Northgate Information Systems and McDonnell Douglas. He is based near Belfast, Northern Ireland and directs Bytemobile’s global customer support team in Europe, Asia and North America. Educated in the U.K., he holds a diploma in Technology and Engineering with distinction in Mathematics.
Marty Smuin
Vice President and General Manager, Americas
Marty Smuin has 18 years of management experience in sales, marketing and business development in the wireless communications, storage management and application software, media, and cable industries. Before joining Bytemobile, he was vice president of GSM and Latin America at Openwave Systems, where he built sales teams that served a customer base of leading mobile network operators in North and South America. Previously, Smuin was vice president of Sales and Marketing at ACCESS Systems, where he developed strategic account and channel relationships with operators, infrastructure providers and handset manufacturers for the deployment of ACCESS mobile web browsers and server products worldwide. Prior to ACCESS, he was executive vice president of Business Development and Sales at Anuvio Technologies (formerly I-Drive). Smuin also held several management positions at InterActiveCorp (IAC), operator of the Home Shopping Network and many other media properties, and at Comcast/QVC. He holds a B.A. in Business and Latin American Studies from the University of Oklahoma. Fluent in Spanish, Smuin is a former member of the board of governors of 3G Americas.
Bryan Visser
Vice President and General Manager, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA)
Bryan Visser has more than 35 years of sales and general management experience at telecommunications, enterprise computing and other high-technology companies, where he has consistently demonstrated an ability to drive profitable revenue growth. Before joining Bytemobile, he was vice president and general manager of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at Openwave Systems, where his team focused on business value propositions for mobile network operators and more than doubled its regional revenue contribution over a rolling 12-month period. Previously, Visser was managing principal, HP Services, at Hewlett-Packard UK and Ireland, where his team won major contracts for managed services and outsourcing, such as Bank of Ireland, GlaxoSmithKline and BT. He was also vice president and general manager, EMEA, at Wireless Knowledge, a joint venture between Microsoft Corporation and Qualcomm Corporation, and director and general manager of Corporate Managed Services at Racal Telecommunications. Before and after Racal, Visser spent a total of 15 years in various executive management positions in sales, marketing and business development at Unisys Corporation in Europe. Born in South Africa, he is fluent in Afrikaans and conversant in Dutch and Flemish.
