Olliance :: Management Team

Olliance has a diverse set of industry consultants with deep experience in many functional areas including: business strategy, finance, marketing and sales, organizational change, and Open Source and proprietary technology. We draw on this experience base to deliver the most effective Open Source strategies. Olliance's consultants seek out practical Open Source solutions to real world needs.

Combined we have more than 20 years of business, technical, legal, and operational experience in Open Source technology. Olliance team members have contributed their expertise and talents to the success of companies such as: IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, KPMG, and many others.

Principals

Andrew Aitken
Founder and Managing Partner

Andrew has over 18 years senior management experience building and leading national professional services companies. Prior to founding Olliance, Andrew held positions as VP of Business Development, Corporate Strategy, and Marketing, with various national technology services providers, including Renaissance Worldwide and eWork. In 2001 Andrew founded Olliance Group with other industry veterans, to provide management and business strategy consulting to companies leveraging open source. Andrew is a frequent speaker on the topic of open source.

He has chaired and spoken internationally at multiple industry and government conferences, is a member of the Open Source Software Institute's Board of Directors, SDForum?s Board of Advisors and Chair of their annual Open Source Conference, is on the Board of Advisors of SugarCRM, and has personally worked with companies such as: IBM, Sun, Intel, Nokia, HP, and others, assisting them with developing their open source strategies.

Chris Maresca
Founder and Senior Partner

In his leadership role at the Olliance Group, Chris Maresca’s innovative thinking has been instrumental in creating Open Source business and technology strategies for clients such as Nokia, Wells Fargo, Intel and other Fortune 100’s. His blend of expertise in open source technology, business strategy, and as a startup executive, has enabled top-tier VCs to understand and participate in the Open Source revolution.

Chris has been a contributing member to the Open Source community since the late eighties. In mid-‘90s, he was one of the pioneers responsible for introducing Linux into the US Government. Prior to founding Olliance, Chris served as consultant to the financial and shipping industries, designing trading and supply chain intelligence systems.

At a leading web consultancy, Chris helped several large OEM’s develop customer-oriented outbound sales and marketing strategies, and led the implementation of award winning technologies for clients such as HP, Kinko’s and Starbucks.

Mike Pope
Partner

Mike has over 20 years of executive management experience at both startup and leading edge technology companies. He was previously Director of Enterprise Software Programs at Intel Corporation, where he was responsible for strategic planning, development and implementation of Intel's server independent software vendor (ISV) programs. Mike has helped major technology companies design, implement and deploy Linux support programs for ISVs.

Brian Fan
Partner

Brian has extensive experience in software development, marketing and finance. Brian led Product Planning at Microsoft for Expedia.com, where he oversaw the effort to define customer and market requirements. Brian worked extensively with the technical and marketing staffs over multiple product cycles to ensure that the product feature set fulfilled customer and market needs. Prior to Microsoft, Brian worked at the Walt Disney Co. in channel marketing for Buena Vista Home Video and Disney Interactive, and at Procter & Gamble in brand marketing for a variety of health and beauty care brands, including Pert Plus and Oil of Olay.

Brian was also an Equity Research Analyst for The Cypress Funds, LLC, a long-short hedge fund with $300 million under management. Brian's coverage included technology, software and Internet stocks. Brian is actively involved in Open Source business strategies as well as Open Souce licensing and IP compliance.

Greg Olson
Senior Business Development Executive

Greg recently joined the Olliance Group as Senior Business Development Executive with 25 years of software industry experience in engineering, marketing, sales and business development. He was most recently Chairman and EVP of Business development with Sendmail, Inc, and continues to serve on their Board of Directors. As founder and chief executive of Sendmail, Greg created one of the first hybrid business models incorporating Open Source with market positioning and licensing models that have become standards for open source business, raised over $60 million of investment capital to realize this new model as a high-growth technology business, and built the company to a recognized leading vendor in Internet email with strong presence in North America, Europe and Japan.

Prior to Sendmail, Greg served as vice president of marketing for Integrated Systems, Inc., the largest provider of software and services to the embedded computer systems industry. Before Integrated Systems, Greg was VP of Strategy at Sybase, where he developed the company's Internet strategy in 1995 with founder Bob Epstein and managed a wide range of product and business initiatives. During his six years at Sybase, the company?s revenue grew from $80 million to over $1 billion. Greg joined Sybase from Britton Lee, Inc., where he held a wide range of executive positions including Chief Technical Officer, Vice President of Marketing, Vice President of Customer Services and Director of Software Development. Greg holds a BS degree in Information Sciences from the University of California at Santa Cruz.