Brian Nejmeh, President & Principal Consultant
As President of INSTEP, Brian Nejmeh has advised large firms such as AT&T, Ford, Hughes, Legent and Proxicom as well as many mid-sized and start-up ventures. His clients come from many technology sectors including enterprise software, Internet, telecommunications, wireless, software development tools and others. Nejmeh regularly consults to a number of leading venture capital funds and M&A firms.

Before forming INSTEP, Brian's background included executive and operational management roles in technology companies. He began his career as a software engineer at AT&T-Bell Labs. In later years, he was a Director at The Software Productivity Consortium, leading teams in building commercial software development tools. Nejmeh was then the founder of Innovative Software Engineering Practices, Inc. where he secured funding to develop, market and sell Process Mapper, a Unix-based workflow product. He spent several years at Legent Corporation working for the CEO and CTO focusing on overall product strategy and M&A transactions - including pre-deal synergy and market analysis, due diligence and post-deal integration of acquisitions. Legent's revenues increased significantly, culminating in the acquisition of Legent by Computer Associates. He was also the Vice President, Products Group at Nat Systems, an enterprise application tools vendor.

Brian has published numerous articles related to commercial technology issues in journals such as IEEE Software and Communications of the ACM. He was a co-author of Software Engineering in the Unix/C Environment (Prentice-Hall) which was selected as a feature book by Unix Review. He holds an MS degree in Computer Science from Purdue University and a BS degree in Computer Science (minor in Economics) from Allegheny College. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, ACM and IEEE.

Ian Thomas, Principal Consultant
Ian Thomas has been consulting to software companies at various stages of maturity, from companies having received initial funding to well-established, well-funded enterprises. The principal focuses of these engagements have been market requirements analysis - combining information from multiple sources into a coherent view of the market, product and service definitions, and development of product road maps.

Recently, Ian Thomas was co-founder, SVP Engineering and CTO of Liquid Software. Liquid built Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and B2B product integration solutions for the HR application market delivering a ready-to-use product and powerful customization techniques rather than a tool set that allowed a customer to develop their own integration solution. Prior to Liquid, Ian worked at specialist consulting companies in the US and France, interspersed with positions at Hewlett-Packard and other software companies. At Hewlett-Packard in the early nineties, he lead technical product definition efforts for next generations of HP's SoftBench product. He has been a Silicon Valley resident for more than ten years, with strong ties to the high-tech and software community. He began his career as a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull in the United Kingdom.

Ian has published more than thirty technical papers, including many on software development and development process, in journals such as IEEE Software and leading specialist ACM and IEEE conferences. He has chaired an ACM specialist conference on Software Development Environments and participated in Program Committees for many specialist conferences. He holds several software patents. He holds a MS degree in Computer Science from London University, and a BSc Degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Wales.

Donald F. Heitzmann, Principal Consultant
Based in Boston, MA, Don Heitzmann's engagements have included the adoption of Internet technologies into older products, formation of new engineering protocols to reflect the needs of Internet development, and general process improvement work. He has also provided due-diligence on behalf of companies and venture capital firms.

Don has over 25 years of computer software industry experience. His recent work has focused on Internet products, but his background also includes in-depth technical experience with databases, client-server technologies, and software development tools. He has held engineering executive positions at several software firms (Legent, Cadre Technologies, and Cullinet Software), managing groups ranging from 5 to 250 people. In his professional roles in engineering, Don has made a special point of promoting true partnership between product development, marketing, and sales as a necessity for product success. His style might be characterized as "consensus building with vision and direction." He has taught seminars and courses, to excellent reviews and requests for more.

Don's educational background includes a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University, and an M.Arch. degree also from Princeton. He has done graduate work in computer science, and has taken the Stanford-AEA Executive Institute program in management. He resides with his wife and son in Rehoboth.

John Favaro, Principal Consultant
Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, John Favaro has been based in Europe for many years. In Paris, France he worked for an Alcatel telecommunications subsidiary and with the INRIA national research centers. For over ten years in Germany he consulted to major industrial enterprises including Siemens AG. In 1990 he joined Intecs Sistemi in Italy as consortium manager for the unified European Space Software Development Environment project. While at Intecs he launched the IT Value Initiative there for the application of Value Based Management principles to projects in information technology. During this initiative he laid the groundwork for the approach to evaluating the economics of flexibility that has been proposed within the Extreme Programming movement.

John is co-author of a book on robotics programming and several papers on software engineering techniques. He was a member of the Expert Committee on Engineering Environments of the European Commission and the NATO Industrial Advisory Group, and is currently European Co-Chair of the IEEE Subcommittee on Software Reuse. He was General Chair of the Sixth International Conference on Software Reuse in June 2000.

John has many years of teaching and seminar experience in a variety of professional development contexts, both at the technical and managerial level. Recently he was a lecturer within the "Redirecting Software Development" series of the Atlantic Systems Guild, where he presented on advances in the use of option-theoretic techniques in IT project valuation.