Jack Blount
Founder, Chairman of the Board, President, and Chief Executive Officer
Jack Blount is Chairman of the Board, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Alpha Bay. Mr. Blount founded the corporation in 2005 and has served as leader of the organization since its inception.

Mr. Blount began his career with IBM more than 30 years ago. Since then, Mr. Blount has held a series of executive and leadership positions with many of Technology’s most creative and influential forces of their times, including Novell, Borland, Raindance Communications, TeleComputing, and JD Edwards. Mr. Blount’s experience is deep technically, encompassing efforts in enterprise software, personal productive software, Internet, telephony, data networking, wireless networking, and hardware. Mr. Blount’s corporate experience is cross-functional in nature, including sales, marketing, and operational responsibility for both international and domestic products and services, including strategic product launches in the U.S., Europe, Canada, Japan, China, and Latin America.

For more than 20 years, Mr. Blount has operated in senior management positions including the roles of Chairman, CEO, COO, and CTO and has built a reputation as a practiced and successful executive in coalescing talent to successfully lead teams and achieve impressive, profitable corporate growth in all economic and business situations, including four successful turnarounds of distressed organizations. Of most recent note, he led Dynix Corporation to double-digit sales growth for three consecutive years and manufactured its external purchase.

Ingrained with entrepreneurship, Mr. Blount has launched three software startups, taken two software companies public, and worked in tandem with venture capital and private equity communities during the corporate lifecycle. Furthermore, Mr. Blount has sat on the Board of Directors of more than a dozen technology companies and shares his expertise more generally as a frequent speaker at industry conferences globally, including COMDEX, Windows World, PC Expo, NetWorld, CeBIT, CTIA Wireless Apps, and Telecom Asia.

Mr. Blount is a graduate of the Southern Methodist University with degrees in math and computer science. He is also a graduate of IBM's esteemed Watson Institute in MBA studies.

Byers Parsons
Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer
Byers Parsons is Alpha Bay’s Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer. Mr. Parsons has focused on building the technical product and corporate infrastructure needed to continue Alpha Bay’s rapid growth and on ensuring that quality remains high, while product development cycle times are kept to a minimum. Along with Mr. Jack Blount and Mr. Bill Davison, Mr. Parsons shares responsibility for Alpha Bay's day-to-day operations.

Mr. Parsons worked with Mr. Blount and Mr. Davison at both Raindance Corporation, where he designed and architected a new collaboration solution, and later at Dynix Corporation, where he architected the next generation of their primary product. Mr. Parson’s experience culminates a 20-year record of achievement as an Internet strategist, entrepreneur and developer of great technologies. His well-seasoned perspective perfectly complements Alpha Bay's customers' needs as a young and rapidly growing adaptive, retail application provider with a unique corporate culture for turning out customer value in rapid form.

Mr. Parsons, has built many high performance teams using his knowledge of processes and project management. He has developed many large scale systems quickly, while also improving quality through the use of automated testing processes. This resulted in significantly reduced support and maintenance costs for many products.

Mr. Parsons’ first software architect role was at Martin Marietta, where he won the Excalibur award for technical achievement for work with the GAPP, a massively parallel processor. He also worked for the U.S. Army and Navy on several high up-time and secure communications systems.

Mr. Parsons was the chief architect of a Small Office Home Office (SOHO) joint venture between Signet Bank and United Video Satellite Group (UVSG). He was a senior software architect at Integram International, which developed a worldwide distributed system for unified messaging and faxing.

Mr. Parsons has consulted for Sun Microsystems, Storage Tek, US West (Qwest), @Home, HP, Digital Instruments, Delta Airlines, and other major companies on near real-time and large scale systems.

Mr. Parsons has taught Lisp, Prolog, Smalltalk, and Java programming for several large companies and at Seybold conferences. He has taken many post-graduate classes in artificial intelligence, parallel and distributed systems, and languages systems.

Mr. Parsons has a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from Florida State University.

Bill Davison
Chief Operating Officer
Bill Davison is chief operating officer and reports to Alpha Bay’s Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, and President, Mr. Jack Blount. Mr. Davison is responsible for all of the company's worldwide sales and operations, including end-to-end management of Alpha Bay’s sales activities, customer project delivery, service and support in all markets and countries. He also plays a key role in Alpha Bay’s cultivation of strategic partnerships, ensuring flexibility in Alpha Bay’s response to an increasingly demanding retail marketplace.

Along with Mr. Blount, Mr. Davison leads the strategy for Alpha Bay’s internal transformation to become the retail industry’s premier provider of on demand (SaaS, Cloud and Hybrid IS) retail business applications. In this capacity, Mr. Davison is responsible for working across Alpha Bay to define and deliver core business processes, create an IT infrastructure to support those processes, and help create a culture that recognizes the value that on-demand leadership can bring to Alpha Bay and its customers.

Before joining Alpha Bay, Mr. Davison held a number of executive leadership positions in sales, marketing, and services, including CEO/President of the American Academy, an accredited e-Learning entity delivered in a SaaS model, and as COO and CMO at SirsiDynix Corporation, a $125 million enterprise class software company serving over 25,000 libraries worldwide. Under his leadership, the company grew organically through a series of strategic mergers and the eventual sale to a private equity partner.

Prior to SirsiDynix, Davison served as Vice President of Sales and Customer Delivery at Raindance Communications, where he helped grow the communications service provider from a startup to a publicly-traded company with over $60 million in annual revenue.

Davison received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from the College of the Holy Cross, Worchester, Massachusetts and his Master of Business Administration with concentrations in Finance and Operational Management from the McCombs School of Business at University of Texas at Austin.

Mark Carden
Vice President of Europe, Middle East & Africa

Mark Carden is responsible for Alpha Bay in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), ensuring that the company successfully develops its international product portfolio, resources and customer base.

Before joining Alpha Bay, Mr. Carden spent 15 years managing 'international' for other US-based software companies, notably as a Vice President at Innovative Interfaces Inc., Dynix Inc. and Ingram Digital. Mr. Carden has conducted business in over 25 countries.

At Ingram Digital, Mr. Carden established the European presence of this new e-content division of Ingram Industries, a $2Bn privately-held company headquartered in Nashville, TN. In this role he recruited a new sales, marketing and customer service team, established a Europe-wide distributor network and doubled sales within 18 months.

Prior to Ingram, Mr. Carden was recruited by Jack Blount to manage the EMEA division of Dynix Inc. In this role he grew sales in Europe and the Middle East by an average of over 40% each year, with no increase in overall sales headcount. He personally initiated and closed numerous strategic deals, including a $2M project in Southern Europe and a $1.5M project in the Middle East. As part of the Dynix turn-round, he transformed and re-motivated the multi-national, multi-location customer service team, raising customer satisfaction by 25% while implementing a 10% reduction in headcount.

Mr. Carden was recruited to join Dynix Inc following a five-year tenure at Innovative Interfaces, Inc., a search and portal software vendor based in Emeryville, CA. Following his leading role in the sale of a European software vendor to Innovative, he was retained as territory VP to bring Innovative's new software to the European market. He and his team doubled revenues in three years, and increased the EMEA share of global new sales from 7% to 25%. He was also involved in growing Innovative's business in Asia, making numerous visits to Beijing and Singapore.

Before becoming an international sales and delivery specialist, Mr. Carden had a successful career in IT project management, particularly in retail financial services, with senior roles at Barclays Bank, NatWest Life Assurance, Mortgage Systems and Metier (a Lockheed company). He started his career as an IT consultant at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture).

Mr. Carden received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy and Psychology from Oxford University. He has attended executive education courses at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University and at the Saïd Business School at Oxford University.

Bjørn Bjerkøe
Vice President of Engineering
Bjørn Bjerkøe is Vice President of Engineering for Alpha Bay’s software group. Mr. Bjerkøe is a seasoned technical management professional with a successful track record developing innovative software services, processes, and network structures. In his present role, Mr. Bjerkøe is responsible for building, branching, and merging of all corporate software solutions and their quality assurance.

Prior to Alpha Bay, Mr. Bjerkøe had held a variety of positions managing client care and the analysis of systems. Notably, Mr. Bjerkøe has founded QA teams on more than one occasion, from the ground up, including test planning and implementation of processes and tools. In the past, he has re-architected problematic customer care functions based on his philosophy and leading-edge practices to increase service incident closure rates and has reduced incident backlogs by more than 400%, resulting in a 93% customer satisfaction rate spanning his career.

Mr. Bjerkøe has experience in database administration of Oracle, DB2, MSSQL, Sybase and PostGres, as well as 10+ years experience with Microsoft, Unix and Linux server environments, including software, OS and database installations, data import and export, backup, recovery, in depth system analysis, and complete system administration.

Mr. Bjerkøe's experience also encompasses the integration and installation of peripheral and third party solutions into new and existing systems, including but not limited to self-service workstations, authentication systems, printers, and debt collection solutions. Mr. Bjerkøe is adept as well in the implementation, configuration and management of enterprise level Java-based web applications in client server environments, including in depth experience with Tomcat, Terracotta clustering on Linux, Adobe Flex 2.0, 3.0 & AIR, Ant, Quartz, Lucene, MSSQL, Oracle, DB2, and Postgres. He is adept with Agile, Subversion, VersionOne, and Advanced MS Office user environments.

Jeanne Carty
Vice President of Marketing
Jeanne Carty is Vice President of Marketing for Alpha Bay. Ms. Carty is responsible for the marketing platform, marketing and sales communications, competitive insight, events, and public relations. Prior to Alpha Bay, Ms. Carty was a founding partner of Technology Transitions and Energence, a joint venture with the University of Utah that commercializes R&D based on the work of the University's staff and students. Ms. Carty also was a co-founder of Voyant Technologies, a carrier-grade software and hardware supplier of voice and integrated IP media applications, which sold to Polycom in 2002, after reaching a market cap of $110MM by the time of its acquisition.

Prior to Voyant, Ms. Carty held executive-level marketing/sales and technical management consulting positions with Exelon, SchlumbergerSema (Convergent Group) and the Shaw Company's Stone & Webster Engineering Divison. Ms. Carty launched several new business divisions, led M&A evaluations and managed post-M&A market-facing logistics. In the 1990's she was influential in the successful introduction and adoption of Geographical Information System applications (AM/FM/GIS) for energy and communication sectors.

Ms. Carty is a registered professional engineer. She is a member of Sigma Xi, the National Scientific Research Honor Society. She holds a Master of Business degree from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the University of Vermont. Ms. Carty attended Harvard University's Executive MBA program with specific coursework in Marketing Innovative Technologies. Ms. Carty has been awarded more than 50 marketing and entrepreneurial awards in the past decade including Ernst & Young/Colorado, Deloitte Touche Rising Star, and Women in Cable & Telecommunications (WICT) Women’s Walk of Fame finalist honors.

Jeromy T. Wilson
Co-Founder & Director of Product Management
Jeromy Wilson is Alpha Bay’s Director of Product Management and has been with the firm since its inception in 2005. In his role at Alpha Bay, Mr. Wilson works closely with customers and industry pundits to guide the continual enhancement and new development of the Adaptive Integrated Retail System—AIRS®.

Mr. Wilson most recently worked at SirsiDynix Corporation where he was respected by employees and customers as a product expert and industry expert in the areas of portals, multi-source searching, and point of service. While at SirsiDynix he worked closely with the development team, product experts, industry experts, partners, and high profile customers to design and implement large-scale enterprise software systems, including many multi-country implementations.

Mr. Wilson is a frequent speaker and presenter at both US and international conferences and travels extensively, both locally and internationally, to meet with customers.

Mr. Wilson earned a bachelor’s degree in business management with a concentration in marketing from Brigham Young University-Idaho.

Brad Rust
Director of Engineering

Brad Rust is Director of Engineering at Alpha Bay with over ten years of software design and development in enterprise class applications and an additional five years of research experience in heterogeneous, high-performance scheduling software. In his role at Alpha Bay, Mr. Rust, along with his counterpart, Mr. Greg Murray in Colorado, guides the technology development of the Adaptive Integrated Retail System—AIRS®.

Prior to Alpha Bay, Mr. Rust was a Senior Architect at SirsiDynix Corporation where he was involved in a complete re-design and implementation of a large scale enterprise software system.

Previously, Mr. Rust was also a lead designer and developer at Contigo Software and Raindance Communications, where he developed an Internet-based collaboration and communication system. Mr. Rust's development responsibilities have included all aspects of enterprise class applications including thin client, thick client, network, clustered servers, and data storage.

Mr. Rust has a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Maryland.

Greg Murray
Director of Engineering
Greg Murray joined Alpha Bay in 2007 and is a Director of Engineering, along with his Utah headquarters' counterpart, Mr. Brad Rust. In this role, Mr. Murray leads technology development and innovation efforts for the company's AIRS® (Adaptive Integrated Retail System) suite.

Mr. Murray brings more than 15 years of experience in architecture and development of server applications, communication systems, and graphical user interfaces utilizing the Java/J2EE and C/C++ programming, large scale systems design and operation, online consumer product development, high volume transaction processing, and engineering management.

Prior to joining Alpha Bay, Mr. Murray held architecture & systems development positions at Hart InterCivic, Inc., Edgewater Technology, Inc., Cambridge Technology Partners, Inc. and Andersen Consulting, Inc. where he championed the development of products and expansion of platform API programs to meet the needs of wide ranging vertical market applications including retail, insurance, credit card processing , healthcare, and academia.

Mr. Murray holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science with German Studies from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts. Mr. Murray has also earned the following certifications: Sun Certified Web Component Developer J2EE 1.4 Certification (SCWCD); Sun Java 5 Programmer Certification (SCJP) and BEA WebLogic 7.0 Certified Programmer.

Mindi Ringdahl
Director of Human Resources
Mindi Ringdahl joined Alpha Bay as Director of Human Resources in 2006. In this position Ms. Ringdahl is responsible for the human resources practices, policies, and operations of the organization and reports to Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer Jack Blount.

Prior to joining Alpha Bay, Ms. Ringdahl held positions of increasing responsibility within cross-functional human resource and corporate disciplines. Ms. Ringdahl was Human Resource Manager for Rocky Mountain Management, Inc. of Wyoming with principal responsibilities in benefits administration and consultation.

Previously, as well, Ms. Ringdahl was a Partner at Southwest Temporary Services, LLC, Scottsdale, Arizona where she developed and implemented HR policies, employment contracts, and authored training procedures and documentation. Further, Ms. Ringdahl implemented and administered health benefits packages for 15 multi-state franchise branches and performed weekly and monthly accounting duties.

Ms. Ringdahl also has worked on the front lines and as a manager, overseeing at one time the administration of garnishments, employment verifications, prevailing wage/certified payroll, and office services, including reception and mail services for temporary labor staff of over 350,000.

Ms. Ringdahl has a bachelor's degree in Human Development and minor in Environmental Behavior from the University of Utah, as well as many additional training certifications.