The Surfliner Team
The pride of Surfliner Services is not only in our ability to provide exceptional services and products to our customers. Our true pride lies in our ability to obtain some of the greatest minds in their respective fields.
Our team consists of highly skilled professionals from the industry, with the experience you need in a technology partner. All principal team members have at least 10 years of real-world experience within the Business Intelligence, Data Integration, and/or Application Development areas of competency. And the experience isn't in just some regular old companies - most of our time was spent in fast-paced, extremely fast growing companies who have relied heavily on their information to make strategic business decisions.
Core Team Member Profiles
Matthew "Xeno" Derer
Founder
Matthew brings broad and deep software and database engineering experience to the group. After graduating from Caltech with a B.S. in Engineering and Applied Sciences focused on computer science, Matthew worked for Oracle Corporation, porting the database kernel, network drivers, and pre-compilers from Solaris to AIX. He went on to work at early web startup Presence Information Design, implementing one of the first production deployments of Java-based servers on the web, fixing JVM bugs and writing drivers to connect the servers to a variety of databases. Later he served on the founding technical team of Overture Services (originally GoTo.com), at various times designing, building, architecting, supporting, and/or scaling up the pay-for-performance search engine, internal customer management systems, external advertiser-facing account management systems, and Linux clusters processing and aggregating data for general warehousing, fraud detection, and account debiting. Post-Overture, he has been working as an independent consultant for example: providing database engineering expertise to a team of software developers at Symantec Corporation, helping them enhance a data warehousing software package and port it across multiple databases.
William Theisinger
Founder
Bill's unique combination of business analytics and operations insight along with strong data warehousing, business intelligence and database development skills provides Surfliner with a unique blend of technical and strategic expertise. Bill spent several years in the finance and media industries prior to joining GoTo/Overture Services (currently a Yahoo! company) where he was fortunate to work with Surfliners' other founders. During his tenure there, he was integral in identifying customer behavior in an effort to understand and measure how internal business processes and product designs impact the business. This type of knowledge led to several key process changes and implementations including helping to reduce online credit card fraud, increasing productivity, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty and harnessing deep insight to online marketing. Bill then focused on helping internal and external customers gather key business insight through data development and reporting. In that role, he was instrumental in helping measure and track marketing campaign performance, providing marketplace analysis, tracking financial performance, supporting the company's international business strategy and helping drive sales performance and success. He then went on to leverage his database development, warehousing and analytics skill by leading the development team responsible for advertiser, marketing and sales reporting for the entire company. This included working and scaling both an Oracle VLDB that supported the business and its custom Business Intelligence application.
After leaving Yahoo, Bill moved to Snap.com (an Idealab company) and was instrumental in developing and tracking business Key Performance indicators to help the company focus their overall business strategy. In addition to the analytic and strategic insight he provided Snap.com executives, he was responsible for data modeling, data migration and database development tasks. Bill's breadth of business analytics and data warehousing skills make him a valuable member of the Surfliner organization.
Paul Barmaksezian
Founder
Paul brings several years of Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, and Data Integration experience to the team, starting early in his career as a senior consultant with Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting). In his days as a consultant, Paul built expertise in designing and implementing large, scalable database solutions for fast moving companies, including Sprint PCS, FileNET, Southern California Edison, and others. Paul then moved on to GoTo/Overture Services (currently a Yahoo! Company) and was integral in building, maintaining, tuning and reporting on what then became one of the largest commercial Oracle databases in the world. Paul managed a team of 15 Data Warehouse developers who implemented and maintained over 500 reports in a custom Business Intelligence solution which he helped design. From Yahoo!, Paul moved on to create a new Warehouse solution for a start-up Internet search engine named Snap.com (an Idealab Company). At Snap, Paul's team of five created a customized data processing solution with a dimensional data model, helping Snap management build the company strategy while keeping reporting costs to a minimum. Paul's broad experience in Business Intelligence and Warehousing makes him a valuable member on the Surfliner team.
Gary Holm
Principal Consultant
Gary brings over 15 years of database experience to the Surfliner team. He received his M.S. degrees in the fields of Physics and Computer Science from Michigan State University. He initially designed and developed OLTP systems as a senior consultant at Cambridge Technology Partners and at Holland Systems Corporation. He moved into the data warehousing realm when he started working for GoTo/Overture Services (currently a Yahoo! Company). There his role evolved as the company and its data requirements grew. he designed data structures and developed ETL processes; he managed the team monitoring company-wide production data operations and, in that role, planned for a 100x data growth; he developed data aggregation scripts and numerous reports for business users; and he managed a data development team and a reporting team. After Yahoo!, Gary moved to a start-up internet search engine named snap.com (an Idealab Company). In his role as data architect, he developed the dimensional data model, and designed and implemented the database ETL processes. Gary's broad experiences on multi-terabyte databases make him a valuable member of Surfliner Services.
Deanna Kawasaki
Principal Quantitative Analysis
Deanna brings a rare and exceptional skillset of statistical expertise and strategic business knowledge to the team. With over 15 years of experience, Deanna has used her analytical knowledge to help a variety of businesses identify and optimize their opportunities. She has developed statistical models that quantify a customer's current and potential value, created customer value tiers based on operational capacity, customer behavior, value, and customer service strategies. She has developed customer profiles and segmentations, demand and capacity forecasts, new product launch projections. In addition she has designed scorecard metrics, defined various industry benchmarks, and performed numerous other statistical analyses on such topics as media impact, campaign effectiveness, price sensitivity, etc. Further, she has helped companies to better understand the driving factors affecting their customer acquisition and retention including such factors as new product releases, multi-channel delivery methods, seasonality, competition and consumer behavior. Her experience is in both the B2B and B2C realm with many companies having benefited from her extraordinary mix of quantitative knowledge, strategic planning and operational experience. She has helped a breadth of companies that include but are not limited to NCR, Amgen, Mattel Toys, Disney, Countrywide Financial, Match.com, AT&T Wireless (currently Cingular Wireless) and Overture Services (currently Yahoo!). In addition, she served as a subject matter expert for the CRM thought leaders, The Peppers and Rogers Group, with clients such as Ford Automotive Group, E*Trade, and Nordstroms. We are extremely pleased to have Deanna as a member of the Surfliner team.
Ready to tap into the power of Surfliner? Email us at info@surflinerservices.com.
