Executive Team

Charles (Chuck) Berger is the chairman and CEO of ParAccel.  Mr. Berger is an established chief executive and director with 30 years experience in technology including extensive P&L, general management, marketing and financing experience in high growth, large and mid-sized companies. Prior to ParAccel, he served as the Chief Executive Officer and President of DVDPlay Inc. Before that Mr. Berger was CEO of Nuance Communications and has also served as CEO of Vicinity Corporation, AdForce, Inc. and Radius Inc. He has also held executive positions in finance, marketing and sales at Apple Computer and Sun.

Chuck Berger currently serves on the Boards of Tier Technology (NASDAQ: TIER) and Bucknell University: Trustee. He received his BS in Business Administration from Bucknell University and his MBA, Cum Laude from the University of Santa Clara.

Mr. Zane has 33 years of product development experience, principally focused on large distributed and parallel software and hardware systems. He has led the development teams for several products from inception to successful customer and market segment acceptance.

Prior to ParAccel, Barry Zane served as vice president of Architecture for tera-scale database appliance vendor Netezza Corp. since its founding in 2000. He was responsible for guiding all aspects of software architecture and implementation, from initial prototypes through volume shipments to leading Telecommunications, Retail and Internet customers.

Mr. Zane was CTO at Applix Inc., which he joined shortly after it was founded in 1983 and held several key development positions at the company before being named CTO in 1991.  He was responsible for the development of Applixware, and was part of the senior management team that led Applix to a successful initial public offering (IPO) in 1994. Previously, Barry Zane held development and management positions at Prime Computer since 1978. He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University.

Paul Zolfaghari is Chief Operating Officer of ParAccel. Prior to joining the Company, Mr. Zolfaghari worked for more than eleven years at MicroStrategy, Inc. (Nasdaq: MSTR) a leading business intelligence software company where he most recently served as executive vice-president, Worldwide Sales and Operations.  In that role for nearly five years, Mr. Zolfaghari reported to the CEO and was responsible for MicroStrategy’s annual revenue of more than $400 million, global P&L, field operations, sales engineering, field marketing, corporate development, and business affairs. Mr. Zolfaghari was a Section 16 Officer of MicroStrategy where he also served on the company’s Executive Management Committee. Prior to becoming the EVP for Worldwide Sales and Operations, Mr. Zolfaghari served in a series of executive management roles at MicroStrategy, including vice president, Worldwide Business Affairs; vice president and chief of staff; and assistant to the President and CEO.

Prior to joining MicroStrategy, Mr. Zolfaghari was an attorney for the United States Department of Justice and in private practice in Washington, D.C. Mr. Zolfaghari received a B.A. in English from Gettysburg College and a J.D. with Honors from the University of Pittsburgh.

As CIO of Paraccel, Mr. Torgersen directs ParAccel information technology strategic plans, policies, programs, and schedules for business and finance systems, computer services, network communications, and management information services.   His responsibilities include all company enterprise applications, computer system operations, help desks, data centers, and communication networks, as well as support for ParAccel’s customer proof-of-concept program.

 Mr. Torgersen's experience spans more than 30 years in Silicon Valley high technology companies.  He has held vice president IT and CIO roles at Sonicwall and Nuance, and was CIO and vice president of Operations at Vicinity Corporation, vice president of Operations at Internet start-ups Socialnet.com and Communities.com, as well as senior management positions at Fujitsu Software, Apple Computer, and Hewlett-Packard. Mike holds an MBA from the University of Chicago, a BS from the University of Illinois, College of Engineering, and a BA from St. Joseph College.

As Vice President of Marketing, Rich Ghiossi is responsible for developing and executing the ParAccel marketing and communications strategy. His responsibilities include corporate and product marketing, customer acquisition and relationships.

Rich Ghiossi brings over 30 years of high tech and marketing experience to the ParAccel team, with nearly 15 years spent specifically in the business intelligence arena. He is a Silicon Valley industry veteran with three decades of experience at companies ranging from innovators in business intelligence to some of the world’s largest technology companies. Most recently he was at Hewlett-Packard where he was responsible for evaluating innovative emerging technology for the company’s business intelligence solutions business unit. In his career, he also led marketing efforts for fast growing companies in business intelligence and analytics including Vertica, Sagent Technology, Hyperoll and Whitelight Systems. Ghiossi attended California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

Mr. Glick joined ParAccel as the VP Customer and Partner Development to ensure that ParAccel solutions meet the needs of customers and partners.  Mr. Glick brings tremendous industry experience with him to ParAccel. Most recently he served as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Teradata’s Database Engineering group, where he was responsible for product direction and vision of the Teradata Database.

In that position, Mr. Glick focused on feature enhancements for data loading, manageability, extensibility and performance initiatives. His Teradata career spans back to 1991 when he was one of their first professional services employees hired to work on high profile retail customers. He also served as a senior consultant in Chicago where he helped major retailers and telecommunications and insurance providers to develop breakthrough data warehouse systems and practices based on highly differentiated analytics. Mr. Glick helped to introduce Teradata technology into new geographic regions including South America and Asia-Pacific. Mr. Glick also served as Director of Teradata’s Active Data Warehouse Center of Expertise and Partner Engineering. Mr. Glick received his BS in Computer Science from Iowa State University.

As the Vice President of International Operations Dave is responsible for ParAccel’s international business strategy, planning and execution. Dave brings to ParAccel over 20 years of sales and channels management and consulting experience in the Business Intelligence market. He comes to ParAccel from Aster Data where he was responsible for their Worldwide Channels and Partners programs. Prior to Aster Data, Dave worked 8 years at Netezza Corporation (NYSE: NZ), where he most recently was the Vice President of Strategic Development. Dave joined Netezza as the first business person and drove early customer attainment including the initial customers in Europe. He launched Netezza’s European business and as VP EMEA Operations grew the business from $0 to $20M in annual revenue and 35 customers in 4 years, making significant contributions to support Netezza’s successful IPO in 2007.

Prior to Netezza, Dave held various technical selling, direct sales and channels management roles at Arbor Software/Hyperion Solutions (now Oracle) helping to drive customer growth and revenues there from $0 to more than $250M and a successful IPO. Prior to that, he was a consulting leader with Arthur Andersen delivering Executive Support Systems for Global 1000 clients. Dave earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from UNC Charlotte and an MBA from Babson College.

Greg Petraetis is the Vice President of Sales at ParAccel. Before joining ParAccel, Petraetis was an area vice president for Adobe Systems responsible for managing sales, ensuring customer success and executing the go-to-market strategy for Adobe's customer experience management solutions. Prior to Adobe, he was a regional vice president for Business Objects responsible for the development and execution of the vertical markets strategy for Business Objects' financial services, communications and retail/CPG practices. At Business Objects, he also held the position of area sales director for the defense, aerospace and intelligence practice where he structured the company's Enterprise Software Initiative Blanket Purchase Agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense. Prior to joining Business Objects, Petraetis was the Director of Sales for Narus, Inc. (now a Boeing company), where he was responsible for customer adoption, strategy and building early and sustainable revenue for the company's lawful intercept, network security and regulatory compliance solutions for the communications industry.

Petraetis holds a Masters of International Management degree from Portland State University, a Masters of International Trade from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a B.S. in History from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

John Santaferraro is the Vice President of Solutions and Product Marketing at ParAccel. Prior to joining ParAccel, Santaferraro was an independent industry analyst in the business intelligence and analytics market. Before that he developed and executed a vertical market strategy for Hewlett Packard's business intelligence group, focusing on energy, communications, retail, healthcare and financial services. At Hewlett Packard, he was also instrumental in helping establish the new business intelligence business group with a combination of solutions, products, and consulting. In 2000, John founded a marketing and sales consulting company, Ferraro Consulting, providing business acceleration strategy for technology companies. Along with business intelligence executive positions in Compaq Computers and Tandem Computers, Santaferraro co-founded a venture-backed, data warehouse startup company, Virtual Integration Technology, that was later sold to Teradata as SeeCommerce.

As vice president of Engineering, Alok Srivastava is responsible for all product engineering and R&D activities at ParAccel and brings more than 25 years of systems software R&D, engineering, product management, and operations experience.

Prior to ParAccel, Mr. Srivastava was the founding vice president of Engineering at Delphix, a database virtualization startup, where he led all product and R&D activities from its inception in 2008 through Q2-2011.  He was previously director of Engineering at Oracle for 12 years where he led multiple R&D and multi-platform engineering teams in U.S and India responsible for much of the innovation and development for Oracle clusterware (CRS) and Oracle cluster database server (RAC). In addition, he was one of the core designers of India's first massively parallel processing computer, PARAM.

Mr. Srivastava holds a Bachelor's degree in Electronics Engineering from IIT, Roorkee, India, and an MBA from The Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania. He has been awarded 27 U.S. patents and more than 10 U.S. and world-wide patents pending in the areas of cluster database server internals, cluster systems management, database virtualization, and distributed systems diagnosis.

Mr. Mayer has served as ParAccel’s Controller since November 2007.  He is responsible for the Company’s Finance, Human Resources, Contract Administration and Legal functions. Prior to joining ParAccel, Mr. Mayer served as chief financial officer for PostX Corporation from 2000 through the sale of the company in 2007 to IronPort Systems, an operating division of Cisco Systems.  He also served as controller for RealChip, Inc., a semiconductor start-up, from 1999 to 2000 and as director, Global Risk Management Solutions at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP from 1996 to 1999.  Mr. Mayer has held a number of key management positions at Lockheed Martin Corporation from 1980 to 1996, most recently as Regional Internal Audit Manager.

He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from California State University, Northridge and is a Certified Public Accountant and Certified Information Systems Auditor.