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
Hugh Barton – Vice President and General Manager, North America
John Cole – Vice President and General Manager, Asia Pacific
Adrian Hall – Chief Marketing Officer
Nick Henry – Vice President, Worldwide Systems Integration
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
Bryan Visser – Vice President and General Manager, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Latin America
Hatim Tyabji
Executive Chairman
Hatim Tyabji’s life and career are embodied in the words of the playwright George Bernard Shaw:
Some men see things as they are, and say, “Why?”
I dream of things that never were, and say, “Why not?”
As chairman and CEO of VeriFone (NYSE), Tyabji created the world’s first virtual company a decade before the advent of the Internet and two decades before the publication of Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. Tyabji is a recipient of the Academy of Management’s Distinguished Executive of the Year Award, the Silicon India Lifetime Achievement award, and the Point Of Sale (POS) Industry’s Lifetime Achievement award.
After three heart attacks and open heart surgery, Tyabji was told by his cardiologist that he would never ski again. Less than three years later, mind triumphed over matter, as he returned to the slopes and renewed his passion for the sport. In 2005, he completed one of the world’s highest bungee jumps at Victoria Falls on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe. The same year, he dove among 16-foot great white sharks in the waters off Cape Town, South Africa. Tyabji has also gone cliff jumping and recently took trapeze lessons.
Living life to the fullest, both intellectually and physically, Tyabji has been relentless in his pursuit of excellence. He is committed to a system of values inculcated in him at an early age. He has instilled these values at the core of several successful companies under his leadership. Tyabji’s pioneering organizational practices are documented in two Harvard Business School cases.
Tyabji is executive chairman of Bytemobile, progenitor of the Fourth Wave of Computing — the Mobile Internet. He is also chairman of Jasper Wireless. Tyabji serves on the boards of Best Buy (NYSE), four privately held companies, and the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance. He is ambassador-at-large for Benchmark Capital.
Tyabji previously served on the following boards:
- Public companies: Ariba, Deluxe Corporation, eFunds, Novatel Wireless, PubliCard, and SmartDisk Corporation
- Private companies: Datacard Group (chairman), Impresse, Norand Corporation, and Saraide (chairman and CEO)
- 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.
In 2007, Tyabji published Husband, Wife & Company: An Honest Perspective on Success in Life and Work, a book on the complex interrelationships between family and career. Rich in human anecdotes, historical and literary metaphors, and real-world examples of corporate leadership, the book captures the spirit of Tyabji’s personal and professional life. This spirit combines an abiding courage to dream with discipline, decisiveness, unshakable ethics, and integrity.
Hugh Barton
Vice President and General Manager, North America
Hugh Barton has over 20 years of management experience in sales, business development, marketing, strategic planning, and consulting. Before joining Bytemobile in 2008, he was vice president of North America Sales, Global Commercial Industries, at Unisys Corporation, responsible for large accounts with the leading mobile network operators in the U.S. Prior to Unisys, he was managing director, BT Alliance, at Hewlett-Packard Company, where he managed the company's relationship with British Telecom. Also at Hewlett-Packard, he directed marketing, strategy and operations for HP Services and the Enterprise Solutions Group in the U.K. Previously, Barton served as director of the Information, Communications and Entertainment Practice at KPMG Consulting and senior manager of the Communications Industry Group at Accenture. He was also a partner at Washington Equity Partners, an investment advisory and private equity firm specializing in emerging markets for wireless telecommunications. He began his career at Universal Corporation, where his last position was vice president, Business Development and Strategic Planning. Barton holds a M.B.A. degree from the College of William & Mary and a B.A. degree in History from the University of Virginia. He is certified as a Chartered Director by the U.K. Institute of Directors.
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 more than 20 years of management experience in international sales, marketing and business development in the information technology and wireless data industries. At Bytemobile since 2002, Hall is currently responsible for marketing, sales operations, business development, partnership management, education services, and corporate communications. Previously, he spent 12 years at Hewlett-Packard Company, based in both Europe and North America. At Hewlett-Packard, Hall 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 also 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 holds a B.A. in Business and Finance, with a specialization in Marketing, from Brunel University.
Nick Henry
Vice President, Worldwide Systems Integration
Nick Henry directs all services related to systems integration for the deployment of Bytemobile solutions in customer networks worldwide. System components include third-party hardware, operating systems, load balancers, switches, and application software which support the Unison™ Mobile Internet Platform. Based in the U.K., Henry has over 20 years of management experience in systems integration, business development and sales in the telecommunications and media segments. Before joining Bytemobile in 2008, he was head of the Consulting and Integration Practice for the Communications, Media and Entertainment Sector at Hewlett-Packard Company. There he was responsible for the design, development and delivery of total system solutions for major network operators and media companies in the U.K. He had previously been sales director, HP Service, for the same business unit. Prior to Hewlett-Packard, Henry was sales and business development director for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at InfoSpace Mobile, a global provider of mobile application services to network operators. He was also a principal consultant in the Information, Communications and Entertainment practice at KPMG Consulting and head of Product Management, Switching Systems and OEM Products in Motorola’s GSM Division. He began his career as a telecommunications account manager at IBM U.K. Henry holds a M.B.A. degree from Henley Management College and a diploma in Business and Finance from Farnborough College of Technology.
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, 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™ Mobile Internet Platform and suite of mobile data, web, multimedia, and advertising services. Previous management assignments included director of Engineering for Optimization Services Node (OSN) handset solutions. 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.
Bryan Visser
Vice President and General Manager, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Latin America
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.
