Management

Pierre Violo, Chairman & CEO

Pierre has worked with large solution providers and dynamic information technology start-ups on both sides of the Atlantic. Pierre has successfully navigated all of the major changes from client server computing to the current web centric paradigm in his professional career spanning 35 years. Pierre applies business innovation and strategic vision to complex challenges. In addition to his role as CEO of Xcalia, Pierre is on the board of Afdel, the French Software Editors Association.

Before joining Xcalia as CEO, Pierre was Vice President and General Manager of BEA SEMEA, where he piloted the growth of sales in his region by setting up subsidiaries. Pierre was instrumental in establishing BEA as the clear leader in its market place.

Prior to BEA, Pierre was Vice President and General Manager, EMEA Country Group, at Sybase. Pierre was promoted to this position after contributing to changing and improving the sales model as his role as Vice President and General Manager of Channels and Alliances EMEA. Pierre also served as a member of the European Management Committee.

Pierre previously held the position of Executive Vice President and General Manager, International and a member of the Corporate Management Committee at IDEA in Boston , Massachusetts where he was responsible for managing the operations for Europe and Asia Pacific. Pierre successfully launched the new Internet product line and reduced distribution costs.

He has also been Vice President and General Manager of the Computervision CVSelect Business Unit based in Boston USA and member of the Corporate Management Committee. He was before International Vice President Marketing and Sales based in Munich Germany.

Pierre co-founded a company called Scaledia, which provides expert level assistance in areas that founding teams are often weak. Scaledia’s areas of expertise include strategy, business planning, finance, legal, sales strategy, organization, change management and M&A. Pierre’s current advisory role has brought member and officer board appointments for the companies he works with.

Pierre holds a degree in electrical engineering from ESEO (Ecole supérieure d’électronique de l’Ouest) and a business degree from the INSEAD Business School.

Eric Samson, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer

Eric co-founded LIBeLIS (now Xcalia) in 2000 in order to solve a complex business problem surrounding the gap between a sophisticated object oriented development approach and a simple database structure. Prior to co-founding Xcalia, Eric steered his own company, Allware Concept, a high-level consulting company focusing on object-oriented programming (Smalltalk, C++ and others), relational databases, Corba, rich user interfaces, 4GLs, Upper Cases and modeling tools and object-oriented design and analysis. Allware Concept was later acquired by Business & Decision, a business intelligence consulting company. Eric remained at Business & Decision as the Manager of New Object Technologies business unit and as Technical Director for two years and then joined Versant, an ODBMS vendor, as the Technical Director for Southern Europe. At Versant, Eric was responsible for managing the pre-sales, support, consulting and training technical teams in South EMEA and worked with customers such as France Telecom, Bull, Alcatel, Nortel, Lucent, Sagem, BNP Paribas and Thalès. Eric has held other positions at Alcatel TITN, Elf and Air France.

Eric is one of the world’s foremost experts on database access and the JDO standard, which has emerged as the preferred response to data access issues. Eric serves on several international committees such as JSR 12 (JDO1), JSR 243 (JDO2), JSR 220 (EJB3) and JSR 235 (SDO) within the JCP and also works on Service Data Object (SDO 2) with IBM, BEA, Oracle and SAP.

Eric has a PhD in Computer Science from Paris 6th University where he graduated second in his class specializing in Distributed Artificial Intelligence.  He also has a Masters of Sciences specializing in Operating Systems, Computer Graphics algorithms, and AI.

Marc Bouchet, Co-founder, Vice President of Sales, Europe

Marc has solid hands on entrepreneurial experience, which was invaluable in the founding of LIBeLIS, now Xcalia.

Marc started the French operations of Take Five, a multi-language, multi-platform integrated development environment. Marc grew Take Five’s revenues from zero to in excess of one million in less than two years, while firmly establishing their position within their target market. Today, Take Five is firmly integrated with the Wind River Group.

Marc began his career as an R&D engineer for UML CASE Tool Editor.

Marc holds a Master of Sciences in Computer Science from Napier University in Edinburgh and is a graduate of the Paris Academy of Computer Science (ESI Sup Info).

Regis Le Brettevillois, Co-founder, Director of R&D

Prior to co-founding Xcalia, Regis was a senior consultant with Versant France responsible for Java/Database architecture. Customers included Banque Nationale de Paris and France Telecom.

Regis was a consultant and R&D Engineer for LM Informatique (Paris), OTI (Canada) and Anderson Informatique (Paris) prior to joining Versant France.

Regis has been involved in various strategic object distribution and persistence projects developed in Java and Smalltalk .

Regis has a Masters degree in Computer Science from Nantes University .

Bernard Jacon, Member of the Board

Bernard enjoyed a long and successful career with IBM and now lends his extensive business experience to Xcalia in its current stage of rapid expansion. Bernard has been instrumental in the development of Xcalia's strategic alliances on a pan-national level.

Since his retirement from IBM, Bernard has focused his energy and expertise on assisting start up companies in the role of business angel, administrator and management consultant. Bernard has worked with Proof9, Alcove, Eurelec, Axemble, Lab Production, IdealX, Mediapac, Jware Technologies, Net-Tone, Thor, Axiare and Diwan.

Bernard holds an engineering degree from ENSERG (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Electronique et de Radio Électricité de Grenoble) and a master in sciences.