John W.
Piekos
Work:
(781) 280-7363
Summary: Proven hands-on Engineering leader with expertise
growing and managing development teams in early-stage companies, specializing
in highly-scalable Web,
Experience: EasyAsk, a Division of Progress Software June 2005 to Present
Sr. Director, Engineering
Responsible
for the software development, quality assurance, release engineering and
documentation teams for the EasyAsk division
·
Grew development
team post-acquisition, delivering over 7 versions of EasyAsk on schedule.
·
Defined Web 2.0
strategy for commerce and BI offerings, including Ajax-enabled custom tag
libraries for OEM customers.
·
Defined and lead
effort for V11 BI Studio, an Ajax-based, natural language query and reporting
pervasive business intelligence application.
·
Defined and lead
effort for V10 Ajax-based “one-stop Merchandising” Commerce Studio.
·
Defined Search
and Merchandising product roadmap for the e-Commerce offering.
·
Created Business
Intelligence and Reporting product roadmap.
·
Implemented
prototype commerce-based Google Gadget for EasyAsk Merchandising.
·
Technical
analyst on Progress Acquisition committee, evaluating Ajax-based technologies.
·
Whitepaper: Pervasive Business Intelligence –
Usability is Key for Casual Users
·
Patent filed: “Process
for Dynamically Searching and Browsing Product Catalogs with Reduced User
Gestures”
EasyAsk Inc. October 2000 to May 2005
Vice President, Web Engineering
Managed
software development, quality assurance, release engineering and documentation
teams for the EasyAsk Inc, a leading producer of state-of-the-art business intelligence
and e-commerce search and navigation technology. EasyAsk was acquired by Progress Software in
May 2005.
·
Grew
high-performance team from 0 to 9 engineers, with very low attrition,
delivering over 12 versions of EasyAsk on schedule, using Agile (Feature-Driven,
Scrum, XP) methodologies.
·
Defined team
goals, project schedules, delivered performance reviews and promotions.
·
Managed small
off-shore development team.
·
Helped grow
customer base to 50 enterprise customers over three-year period.
·
Key contributor
to landing accounts such as Lands' End, Gap, E-LOAN, Bass-Pro, SSgA, Coach, and
Ceridian (SaaS offering).
·
Defined Search
Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing strategy.
·
Led effort to
migrate Windows-only Search solution to three Enterprise-ready, multi-platform
products in the Business Intelligence, Self-Service and E-Commerce markets.
·
Implemented NLP text-search
dialect. Implemented DHTML-based wizard for quickly building text search/self-service
applications.
·
Implemented
Flash-based Merchandising tool using Laszlo Presentation Server.
·
Lead I18N effort
for French, Dutch, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese. Double-byte ready.
·
Defined commerce
package integration strategy, including J2EE, XML, XSLT, Web Services, COM, and
HTTP.
·
Product Management
activities included:
o
Project Release
Plans and Roadmaps
o
Analyst
Meetings, Gartner Magic Quadrant submissions (visionary quadrant)
o
Customer
Advisory Board
o
Delivered
in-house product training to field
o
Developed
product marketing literature
o
Met with and
evaluated technology of potential acquisition targets
Mercator Software September 1999 to October 2000
Director, Web Engineering
Manager
of the Boston-based Web Engineering division, reporting to Florida-based Sr. VP
of Engineering. Responsibilities include development, quality assurance,
release engineering and documentation teams (over 20 employees) for the
Mercator Software, a $100+ million dollar in revenue e-business Integration
Company.
·
Responsibilities
include product strategy, engineering process development and management,
hiring, and product packaging and delivery as well as customer crisis
management.
Novera Software Inc.
Novera
was a VC-backed Java Application Server start-up focused on developing a pure
Java solution to enterprise data integration.
Novera was acquired in September 1999 by TSI International Software
(since renamed Mercator Software).
·
Manager of
Server development team. Lead the design, scheduling, and implementation of
high availability Management Server, directory resource JavaBeans, JNDI
integration, session tracking and Enterprise JavaBean support
·
Technical
reviewer for the Sun Microsystems Moscone Enterprise JavaBean Specification.
·
Architected and
implemented Enterprise JavaBean V1.0 support in Application Server.
·
Implemented XML
pipeline to Business Objects (Novera DB Blend).
·
Designed EJB JTS
Distributed Transaction support for Application Server remote objects.
·
Key contributor
to $1M enterprise deals with The Home Depot, Arch and Compaq.
·
Architected,
designed and implemented one of the industries first Java/CORBA-based
Application Servers.
Sybase Inc. February 1994 to September 1996
Staff
Engineer/Technical Lead,
Technical
lead for CORBA-based ESSM, a client/server desktop tool based on the Tivoli
Management Environment that provides system administrators with the ability to
perform distributed system management functions on Sybase SQL Servers in a heterogeneous
network
Digital
Equipment Corporation June 1986 to November 1993
Project Leader for DECforms, a 20-person team,
building a multi-threaded forms management/OLTP offering on character cell,
Motif, and compound document (CDA) devices.
Lead
developer for financial software that automated the University's accounting
procedures. Proposed, designed, and
implemented a purchase order printing system.
Education: Worcester Polytechnic Institute, MS Computer Science, 1990
Miscellaneous:
·
·
Guest Lecturer,
·
Patent filed
August 2006: “Process for Dynamically
Searching and Browsing Product Catalogs with Reduced User Gestures”
·
Patent filing: “Method
and Apparatus for Integrating Functions and Data from Multiple
Applications", application number 60/109,722.
·
Publication: The Rise and Fall of a High Performance
Team, J. Janson, J. Piekos, A. Warner, Proceedings from the 5th
International Conference on Software Quality, October, 1995
·
Whitepaper: Pervasive Business Intelligence –
Usability is the Key for Casual Users, 2008