Executive Team

Stephen Savignano

Chairman of the Board & Chief Executive Officer

Steve Savignano is founder and chief executive officer of Ketera Technologies and has served as chairman of the Board of Directors since 2002. He has overall responsibility for the company's strategy, organization and operations. Prior to Ketera, Savignano served as senior vice president of AOL where he was responsible for iPlanet, AOL's partnership with Sun Microsystems. Savignano founded and served as senior vice president and general manager for the Application Products Division of Netscape Communications. As a member of the senior management team there, Savignano was responsible for Netscape's e-commerce applications for commerce exchange, customer relationship management, internet procurement and online selling. Prior to the acquisition of Netscape by AOL, he grew the business to $50 million in under 18 months. Before joining Netscape, Savignano headed the product development organization for Manugistics, Inc. where he was responsible for managing and overseeing the company's industry-leading Supply Chain Management solution. Savignano holds an MBA from Northeastern University, an MS in Computer Science, and a BS in Civil Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Leslie Cedar

Vice President of Business Development

Leslie Cedar has been with Ketera since early 2003 serving in channel sales, direct sales, and sales management. Now serving as Vice President of Business Development, she is responsible for the overall strategy and execution of Ketera′s partnerships, indirect channels and M&A activities. Leslie has over 12 years of experience in marketing, sales, business development, supply chain and operations consulting.

From 2000 to 2003, Leslie was a Director at ICG Commerce, a procurement outsourcing firm, responsible for sales execution and services delivery. Prior to ICGC, Leslie was a management consultant at Deloitte Consulting in its CRM practice. Leslie began her career in architecture, and spent four years in Japan teaching English language classes.

Leslie holds an MBA and a BS in Architectural Studies, both from the University of Texas at Austin.

Chris Newton

Vice President of Marketing

Chris Newton leads strategy and execution for Ketera's demand generation, corporate marketing, and product marketing activities. He brings over 10 years of enterprise software marketing and product leadership experience to the role, having held management positions in both large and small firms.

Previously, Chris was VP of Marketing at M-Factor, where he held responsibility for corporate marketing, lead generation, and applications product management. During his tenure, Chris rebranded and repositioned M-Factor from a single offering company to a solution suite and platform provider. Prior to joining M-Factor, Chris was responsible for defining and executing the product strategy for the Siebel Marketing product suite. Beginning in 1998 with only a concept for the first Siebel Marketing product module, he and his team successively designed and launched 24 new products across 5 product lines, firmly positioning Siebel as the leader in marketing automation software license revenue.

Chris received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rice University and his M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.

Mike Gardner

Vice President of Products

As the Vice President of Products, Michael Gardner is responsible for Ketera's product strategy and delivery, including product management engineering. Michael brings nearly 30 years of experience in management and product and technology development and has held executive positions at a variety of startups and established companies..

Prior to joining Ketera, Michael was the Vice President of Engineering at Liveops, a provider of on-demand call center services based on VOIP technology. While at eBay, he directed key groups, including the Search and Finding product development organization, eBay's internal advertising engine group, and eBay's India development capability. Prior to eBay, he was Vice President of Professional Services and later VP of Product Development at Lutris, a provider of open source application server solutions. While at Borland, Michael headed up Java Products development as well as a variety of database and compiler products, and was responsible for the development of key technologies that are still instrumental today in languages such as JavaScript, and in many user interfaces.

Gardner was also the VP of Engineering at WordTech Systems, and a co-founder of PeachPit Press. He holds a BS from the University of California, Berkeley.

Percival Tieng

Chief Technology Officer

As Chief Technology Officer, Percival Tieng is responsible for Ketera′s technical strategy and overall platform architecture. He has over 13 years of experience in designing, building, and delivering enterprise applications at various Silicon Valley companies.

Prior to joining Ketera, Percival held engineering and architecture management positions at Netscape and iPlanet, a Sun and AOL alliance, responsible for product design and development. Previously, he led development teams at Oracle working on the Oracle Applications suite.

He holds a BS in Applied Mathematics/Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Madhusudan Krishnapuram

Vice President of Engineering and General Manager of Ketera India

As VP of Engineering and General Manager of Ketera India, Madhusudan Krishnapuram is responsible for all aspects of Ketera India operations, including product development, management and professional services. He has over 14 years of experience designing, developing and delivering large scale, distributed, mission critical enterprise applications at Kontiki, Netscape and Oracle.

Before joining Ketera, Madhu was the director of engineering at Kontiki, a distributed peer to peer network communication platform. He was responsible for the delivery of Kontiki′s client and network platform, and its successful deployment in several large enterprises. Prior to Kontiki, Madhu held positions as Engineering Manager and as the Director of Architecture for eCommerce applications at Netscape and iPlanet. He worked on the initial versions of Netscape′s procurement and supplier-side ecommerce solutions. Prior to Netscape, Madhu was at Oracle as architect and group manager for Oracle′s integrated distributed lock manager, a core part of Oracle′s RAC.

Madhu holds a MS in Computer Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.