founders

It’s my turn to tell you about David Dupré, finishing the round up of commonIT’s founders.

When I first met David in 2001, I was struck by his ability to see the big picture. David is a marketing natural and a born leader able to adapt, to anticipate, to innovate, capturing market tendancies.

 
David Dupré:

David started his career with Arkoon’s newly-created sales team in 2001 as a pre-sales consultant, after graduating from the INSA Lyon engineering school. A year later he left Arkoon to study marketing and business strategy at EMLyon Business School.  He returned to Arkoon as manager of Product Marketing, and was named Director of Marketing in 2006. He played a major role in a series of key developments which contributed to the growth of Arkoon - a successful M&A operation extending Arkoon’s product lines, channel development, IPO, European expansion.

I met Albino just as we were getting started with Arkoon adventure begun; a mutual friend introduced us to each other. I was quickly convinced that Albino had the capacity to develop Arkoon sales - starting from zero!

Albino Pili :

Albino’s Franco-Italian background has contributed to a succesful multifaceted sales career. A graduate in electrical engineering, Albino has held sales responsabilities in various large European IT services and distribution groups including Allium and InfoPoint. In 1997, he joined the sales team at ECS Group, the European leader in IT equipment leasing, and developed a contract portfolio worth €2.5M. In 2000, Albino joined us at Arkoon to start the sales activity. The strategic partnerships and key agreements he signed early on still contribute significantly to Arkoon’s revenues. Albino also started the European development of Arkoon in october 2004, when he was charged with developing new sales channels in Italy. In 2006, Albino joined Databail, a subsidiary of the C2A group, as sales manager. In early 2008, Albino left Databail to study strategic management (ICG) at Nanterre Paris X university. In the same period, we decided to start the commonIT project.

It’s my turn to tell you about Daniel, with whom I have worked for many years.

Daniel Fages:

Daniel, a graduate of the INSA engineering school in Lyon like myself and David, has worked in the information security field throughout his career. Technically speaking, we are complementary: Daniel is an inventor, designing and experimenting with innovative technical solutions while I transform his proof-of-concept into an industrial-level product. He is a visionary who knows how technologies will evolve and what should be done now.

Daniel started his career in 1997 at IBM as a consultant in the security and Internet fields, then in 1999 began working on an innovative application layer firewall with security and performance in mind. This led to him founding Arkoon Network Security and patenting the breakthrough FAST (Fast Applicative Shield Technology) technology which is still the core filtering engine of Arkoon’s FAST360 UTM appliances.

As a founder and CTO of Arkoon, he built up the R&D department and was a valued member of the executive committee. Daniel is one of the key people who has made a significant contribution to the success of Arkoon and its status as French leader in IT security solutions.

With a few more weeks to go before the official launch of commonIT, it’s time for us to introduce ourselves. Who are the founders of commonIT? There are four of us: Daniel Fages, Albino Pili, Mathieu Lafon and myself, David Dupre… But what is our background? And what brought us together?

My dear co-founders, I suggest a round-robin presentation: each of us will present one of our colleagues in turn. I’ll start with Mathieu, then it’s up to you…

Mathieu Lafon:

Mathieu is a graduate of the INSA engineering school in Lyon (a leading French engineering school) like myself and Daniel, and he started his career at Arkoon in 2000. If I had to present him in one sentence I would say he’s the kind of engineer able to develop in a day what most other engineers need a week to accomplish… and that would take me a year.

As lead developer, he participated in designing and developing FAST, the core technology of Arkoon’s UTM appliances. He’s recognized as co-inventor, with Daniel, of this technology, patented by Arkoon. In the Arkoon R&D labs, Mathieu launched and managed the security response team. I consider Mathieu to be one of the leading experts in IT security. His in-depth analysis of Internet threats during the last 5 years has contributed to uncovering many major vulnerabilities. Mathieu is also a contributor to the open source community.