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Paul Pluschkell

Chief Executive Officer

Paul Pluschkell is CEO and Founder of Spigit, an enterprise social software provider. Best described as a creator, a strategist and an athlete – both in sports and in business, Paul’s drive and creative spirit have resulted in his track record of establishing and transforming private- and public-sector companies. His success as an entrepreneur began in 1997 when he merged his first company MXNet and took it public. In between starting new companies Paul has served as CTO of Reuters and was President of Broadband for a global telecommunications provider. Paul has 4 children and has managed back to back National Championship Baseball Teams.

Jim Heilig

EVP & Chief Revenue Officer

Jim Heilig is the Executive Vice President of Sales for Spigit, bringing 15+ years of sales, general management and business development experience to the team. Inside both publicly traded and privately held organizations, Jim has built and managed businesses taking advantage of the flexibility of software to deliver on enterprise requirements. Jim’s proven solution sales background, combined with his financial market experience, puts him in a unique position to leverage the breadth of the Spigit team and technology, while continuing to drive Spigit’s market leading growth. Jim holds a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Shail Khiyara

EVP & Chief Marketing Officer

Shail Khiyara is the EVP and Chief Marketing Officer at Spigit and brings 15+ years of executive and marketing experience with a track record of proven success, leading marketing teams at some of the most recognized brands in Silicon Valley. Shail has worldwide marketing responsibilities including increasing revenue and brand awareness of Spigit. He comes to Spigit from Taleo where he was the SVP and CMO and drove significant successes leading up to the acquisition of Taleo by Oracle. During his tenure the company grew successfully, established a robust pipeline and drove significant new customer acquisition and revenue growth. Prior to Taleo, he was the SVP and General Manager for EVault, the Cloud services business of Seagate Technologies where he drove significant revenue growth through innovative product positioning, branding and channel marketing.

Previously Shail created and implemented the European go-to-market strategy for Verisign and led the sales and marketing efforts to position the Verisign brand in multiple geographies, drove revenue and significant customer acquisition of F1000 companies. Shail holds an MBA from Yale University, completed the Strategic Leadership Program from Harvard Business School and has an MS in Engineering. An avid soccer player, he is actively involved in civic activity and serves on Boards of multiple non-profit organizations in the Bay Area.

Lisa Purvis

Chief Scientist

As Chief Scientist at Spigit, Lisa is responsible for setting the strategic product roadmap for capabilities and next dimensions of Spigit to ensure that customer needs are addressed, new opportunity spaces are captured, and Spigit maintains and augments its technology leadership position. Lisa’s previous roles in Product Development and R&D at Xerox, IBM, and The Jackson Laboratory provide her with a rich background in intelligent reasoning and analytics, information modeling, personalized and collaborative information workflows, strategic planning, customer-led innovation, and innovation management. She holds 11 issued US patents, has authored 12+ technical publications, and has her PhD from The University of Connecticut, MS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and BS from Clarkson University.

James Gardner

Chief Technology Officer

James Gardner is Chief Technology Officer at Spigit, having twice been a Spigit customer when he was CTO at the UK’s largest public sector organization, and prior to that, when he was Head of Innovation and Investment at the UK’s largest bank. As a thought leader and innovation practitioner, James has led innovation teams and programs in multiple industries, continents, and cultural settings. In 2009, his team was awarded the prestigious UK Financial Services Innovation Award twice for work with crowd based innovation, and in 2010, he was nominated the most social-media connected financial services executive in Britain. James is the author or three top-selling innovation books, including his 2012 release “Sidestep and Twist”: a controversial reimagining of the way innovation efforts should be constructed to create value. His prior books, Innovation and the Future Proof Bank (2009) and Little Innovation Book (2010) have been sold in more than 40 countries. James blogs regularly at Innovatorinside.com and Spigit.com. Following a Masters degree in Information Science, he was awarded his Doctorate in Innovation Management in Australia, and moved to London a decade later. He presently splits his time between Spigit’s corporate head office in Pleasanton, and visiting and advising clients around the world.

Jim Walker

Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer

Jim is the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer at Spigit bringing 30 years of experience with mostly venture-backed companies where he has served in various roles including CFO, COO and CEO. In his current role Jim is responsible for Finance, Sales Operations, Human Resources, and Spigit’s customer-facing business and delivery.

Prior to joining Spigit Jim successfully managed three companies through the early stages of growth, each resulting in an initial public offering and ultimately in the sale of each company to larger firms. Most recently, Jim served as a senior executive at Alara, Inc. as both Chairman of the Board, from 1995 to 2004, and as President and CEO, from 2004 to 2011. Prior to Alara Jim was Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer of AlphaSmart, Inc. Earlier in his career, Jim served as Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc., Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Global Village Communication, Chief Operating Officer for Fujitsu Computer Products, and Vice President of Finance for its parent company, Fujitsu America.

Jim received a BA degree in Mathematics from San Jose State University and an MBA degree from Santa Clara University.

Cameran Haire

SVP Customer Success

Cameran Haire is the Senior Vice President of Customer Success and is responsible for building and supporting Spigit’s community of customers. Cameran comes to Spigit with more than 20 years experience in the programming, consulting, professional services and SaaS services. Throughout her career she has successfully developed and grown the implementation services teams of numerous organizations. Prior to Spigit, Cameran has held leadership roles in EDS, KPMG and Cambridge Technology Partners where she focused on providing emerging technology to enterprise customers. In recent years, she headed up services for “new media” companies that provided solutions in a SaaS model. She received her B.S. in Management from San Jose State University.

Madhukar Govindaraju

SVP of Engineering & Technology

Madhukar Govindaraju is the Senior Vice President of Engineering and Technology at Spigit bringing more than 20 years of experience leading software engineering organizations to the Team. Madhukar is responsible for leading the global product engineering, technology platform and SaaS operations organization in the design, development and delivery of Spigit’s products. Most recently, Madhukar served as the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Saba Software where he played a pivotal role in developing Saba’s social enterprise platform and products. Earlier in his career, Madhukar also held engineering leadership and executive positions at various technology companies such as SAP, Business Objects (acquired by SAP AG), Cloud9 Analytics, Hyperion Solutions (acquired by Oracle Corp), Promptu Corporation, Digital Market (acquired by Agile Software/Oracle), Hewlett-Packard Company and IBM-Transarc Corporation. Madhukar has attended the Doctoral program in Computer Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and holds a M.S. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (India). Madhukar has been coaching his sons’ FIRST Robotics teams, enjoys sports, music, and travelling in his spare time, and is also a Certified USSF/FIFA Soccer Referee.

Leslie Fine

SVP of Product

As SVP of Product, Leslie owns the strategic product roadmap for Spigit. Leslie joined Spigit as a result of the acquisition of Crowdcast where, as head of product, she designed their market leading Social Forecasting platform. Prior to joining Crowdcast, Leslie spent eight years at HP Labs designing and implementing BRAIN, HP’s collective intelligence prediction system. She has filed 10 patents and her work was recognized by MIT Tech Review as delivering one of the 50 most innovative products in 2011. She received her PhD in Economics from Caltech, where she focused on game theory and mechanism design, and her BA in economics and comparative politics from Wesleyan University.

Boris Pluskowski

SVP, Innovation Strategy

Boris is an acknowledged thought leader and evangelist of corporate Innovation Management, Social Media/Technology and Collaboration. Boris has spent the last 15 years working with senior executives at some of the world’s largest companies, teaching them how to create a sustainable repeatable and value- creating collaborative innovation engine to drive the creation of new products and business models, novel cost reductions, and step-change process improvements. Prior to joining Spigit, Boris was a founding employee of Imaginatik, the company that created the first commercial innovation software platform – where he was in charge of their research arm as well as leading their professional services team. Boris was also previously a part of PricewaterhouseCooper’s (PwC) Strategic Management Consulting practice based in London, focusing on knowledge management and collaboration strategies. Boris is the author of numerous articles and research reports on innovation, collaboration and social media practices, and is the author of the widely read blog, “The Complete Innovator.” Boris has a BSc from Imperial College, London, and an MBA from the Cass School of Business in London.