trixbox Management team
Chris Lyman
Chief Executive Officer
Fonality is Chris' third startup. Prior to Fonality, he founded and led Virtualis, a top-ten Web Hosting company. Chris bootstrapped Virtualis for 3 profitable years until raising $8 million in venture capital, eventually growing the firm to over $7 million in recurring revenue. Keys to Virtualis' growth were its Web-based control panel and its 44,000 member online reseller channel. Chris sold Virtualis to Allegiance Telecom (NASDAQ: ALGX) in late 2000, re-branded it to hosting.com, and joined the Allegiance management team as Vice President of Web Hosting Services. There he led the acquisition and roll-up of additional hosting firms. In 1994, before Virtualis, Chris founded a media-focused systems integration firm in Los Angeles. Chris is a licensed SCCA-Pro driver and owns a motor sports racing team.
Andrew Gillis
trixbox Founder
Andrew Gillis has been working with VoIP since VoIP became commercially viable in 1998. He was a Senior Systems Engineer at several VoIP startups including Octave Communications developing VOIP voicemail systems. Andrew became an independent consultant, deploying worldwide roll-outs of VoIP PBX systems to companies such as Liberty Mutual. In his spare time, Andrew created Asterisk@Home as a fun project to build home PBX systems for his friends and business associates. Asterisk@Home took a life of its own and grew to be the largest source forge in the world with 80,000 downloads a month. Fonality became aware of Asterisk@Home and was impressed by the growing active community. In an effort to give back to its open source roots as well as becoming a lead generation tool for Fonality's PBXtra product, Fonality acquired Asterisk@Home in October 2006. Fonality renamed Asterisk@Home to trixbox. Andrew continues to grow the trixbox community and the products that surround it. Andrew spends most of his spare time perfecting his multi-terabyte MythTV server.
Kerry Garrison
trixbox Community Director
Kerry Garrison has been in the IT industry for over 20 years with positions ranging from IT Director of a large multi-site distribution company to developing a large hosted web server platform for a major ISP, to running his own IT consulting business in Southern California. Kerry was introduced to the world of Asterisk by a friend and began installing Asterisk-based phone systems for his small business clients. He wrote articles about Asterisk and trixbox that became extremely popular on the net, and eventually published the definitive book on trixbox, "trixbox Made Easy." Today, Kerry is the Senior Product Development Manager for trixbox at Fonality. Kerry regularly speaks at trade shows, user groups, and radio programs. He is also the publisher of both http://www.voipspeak.net and http://www.asterisktutorials.com. Kerry is an avid amateur photographer who writes tutorials and product reviews for his photography blog site at http://L7Foto.com.
Arnold Waldstein
Senior Vice President of Marketing
Arnold, serving as an executive in three public companies, brings more than 20 years of strategic marketing and business development leadership to Fonality. Starting in the computer gaming and multimedia entertainment space, he was a member of the "new" Atari, publishing hundreds of games on a variety of platforms and taking the company public. As one of the original executives for Creative Labs, he built the Sound Blaster brand over four years from $5M in sales to $1.2B, developed it into a household name, sold 80 million units, and executed an extremely successful public offering. For the last 10 years, Arnold has worked with startups and public companies in the consumer and business-to-business sectors, raising funds, building brands and executing distribution strategies. When not building companies, Arnold skis, dives, collects art and travels.
Chris Vuillaume
VP of Bus Dev & Channel
Chris was previously Vice President for the IP Telephony Product Marketing Group at Alcatel (NYSE: ALA). At Alcatel, Chris was responsible for all marketing and business development for its North American IP Telephony practice including the creation of its distribution channels. Chris also has a rich entrepreneurial history, notably co-founding Santa Clara-based NetManSys. At NetManSys, Chris served as VP of Marketing, growing the company from inception to 80 employees and ultimately selling it to a private acquirer. Chris is an avid power-glider and can be seen precipitously arcing from a random cliff-top in Southern California on your typical Sunday. Chris holds his MBA from Berkeley.
Dan Rosenthal
Vice President of Finance
Prior to Fonality, Dan was a partner at MMC Capital, an $80M corporate venture capital fund focused on communications-enabling technologies, where he led investments in communications and semiconductor companies. Prior to MMC, Dan was a Vice President with Mercer Management Consulting's Communications and Information Group; ran StrongLight Advisors, a management consulting firm; and was a senior product engineer with National Semiconductor Corporation. In a former life, Dan hosted a morning drive-time radio show called 'Coffee at 70 Miles Per Hour', where he introduced Pittsburgh, PA to early-eighties Garage Bands. Dan holds a B.S. in electrical engineering and industrial management from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from Wharton.