About Us Executive Leadership

When it comes to high-speed, light-weight, reliable messaging systems and transports, the team at 29West has been leading the industry for more than 20 years. We have first-hand experience at what works and have been active in the design of hundreds of solutions and systems.

Mark Mahowald—President and Founder

Mark led the design effort of the world’s first digital trading floor systems (the Rich/Reuters Triarch system) and created the reliable UDP broadcast messaging protocol used to reliably distribute financial data across the trading LAN. This work was done in 1985 and 1986, and for the next couple of years as VP of Advanced Development at Rich, Mark had management responsibility for all digital trading floor development on the Triarch system. From 1989 to 1995, Mark was the executive VP of Lachman Technologies, responsible for the development and sale of its TCP/IP software and integration services. In late 1995, after being acquired by CA, Mark founded WhiteBarn, where the first commercial implementation of Cisco’s PGM reliable multicast software was developed. After WhiteBarn was acquired by Talarian, Mark headed up the multicasting development and integration efforts at Talarian and was later promoted to COO after the company went public. Mark left Talarian in April of 2002, when Talarian was acquired by TIBCO, and founded 29West.

Michael Garwood—Managing Director of Engineering

Mike has been active in networking and consulting/integration services since 1984 when he started his technical career as a consultant for Lachman Technologies. In 1987, Mike became responsible for developing the Lachman TCP/IP stack that became the leading UNIX STREAMS-based OEM TCP stack. Mike became the Director of the Software Development and Integration Group, managing a number of multi-million dollar porting and integration projects. After the Lachman team was acquired by Computer Associates, Mike left to head up the services and integration team at WhiteBarn. For the next four years, Mike delivered critical work on RADIUS proxies for the 3Com remote access servers and managed the growing PGM and file transfer development teams at WhiteBarn. After WhiteBarn was acquired by Talarian, Mike took management responsibility for the broader PGM effort as well as the multicast services and integration work.

Matt Meinel—Global Director of Marketing and Business Development

In 1984-1986, Matt worked with Mark on the team that designed and built the original Reuters Triarch system at Rich/Reuters. Following that, Matt spent more than 15 years at UBS Investment Bank and its predecessor organizations—Swiss Bank Corp and O’Connor & Associates—starting as software architect/project leader with O’Connor and rising to CIO-level positions at Swiss Bank Corp. and later in the Fixed Income & Treasury Division of UBS. Matt spent five years living and working in London and ran global IT development groups at UBS for more than 10 years. Matt also served on the board of Swapswire.com and helped create FPML, serving as founder co-chair of the Standards Committee. From 2003 until joining 29West in January of 2006, Matt had been providing IT management consulting and coaching to IT companies, such as Red Hat, serving the global banking community. Since joining 29West, in January of 2006, Matt has been driving our global strategy to meet the enterprise messaging needs of the top tier banks worldwide.

Todd Montgomery—Chief Technology Officer

Todd has been active in the development of reliable multicast software since his early research work in reliable multicast as a graduate student at West Virginia University. Todd’s knowledge of reliable multicast was important in his work with NASA in 1994 and 1995. In 1995, Todd co-founded GlobalCast Communications in Fremont, CA. During his 4 years with GlobalCast, Todd implemented a number of reliable multicast protocols including a prototype of PGM and commercial releases of RMP and Lucent’s RMTP II. These protocols employed different methods of packet recovery, and both had clear strengths and weaknesses. GlobalCast was acquired by Talarian and at that time Todd joined the WhiteBarn team to develop a commercial PGM product as well as reliable file transfer applications built on this framework. In this work, Todd helped shape the PGM specification submitted to the IETF as a co-author of draft IETF RFC 3208. When Talarian acquired WhiteBarn, Todd continued to drive the PGM development effort as well as support the integration of PGM into the Talarian SmartSockets product family. Todd continued in these roles after the acquisition of Talarian by TIBCO. In early 2004, Todd left TIBCO to join the 29West team. Additional details are available in an extended resume.

Annalisa Sarasini—Managing Director EMEA and Head of Worldwide Sales

Annalisa is in our London office at 44 (0) 207 763 7001, located at 2 Finch Lane, London EC3V 3NA. Prior to joining 29West, Ms. Sarasini was responsible for Business Development and Technical Sales at IONA Technologies supporting the firms SOA solutions within the financial and telecommunications community throughout Northern Europe. Prior to IONA, Ms. Sarasini was a Senior Architect and Sales Engineer for Sonic Software with responsibilities in eleven European countries. Ms. Sarasini has extensive experience as an authority on architectural design within the financial and telecommunications sectors.