Executive Management Team
Clark Masters, President and CEO
Fazil Osman, Chief Technology Officer and Founder
Daniel Krall, VP Finance & Administration and CFO
Mike Heumann, VP Sales & Marketing
Keith Klarer, VP Engineering and Founder
Dr. Simon Knee, VP Software and Architecture
Robert Harling, Vice President of Operations
Clark Masters
President and CEO
Mr. Masters brings over 30 years decades of technology and industry leadership to his position as President and CEO of Astute Networks.
Prior to joining Astute Networks, Mr. Masters was Chairman and President of Sun Microsystems Federal, Inc. and Executive Vice President of Global Industry Sales. In this capacity, he was responsible for worldwide government and industry sales for the Telecommunications, Education, Manufacturing, Energy and Financial markets.
In December of 2007, Mr. Masters was elected to the Board of Directors of SonicWall, Inc. More information on SonicWall may be found at http://www.sonicwall.com .
Mr. Masters previously served as Executive Vice President and General Manager of Sun's Enterprise Systems Products Group. In this role, he was responsible for overseeing the development, design, manufacture and marketing for Sun's server product lines. This included responsibility for the highly acclaimed Starfire™ server (Sun Enterprise 10000™) for the enterprise and high performance computing markets. As a result of Mr. Masters contributions at Sun, his strong leadership and commitment to the company, he was awarded the 1999 Sun Leadership award by Chairman and co-founder, Scott McNealy.
Before joining Sun in 1996, Mr. Masters was Corporate Officer, Vice President and General Manager of Business Systems at Cray Research, where he served in multiple leadership positions during his tenure. In addition to leading Cray's Business Systems division as VP & GM, he was Chief Engineer, VP of Development, VP of Manufacturing and Development and a corporate officer. Prior to Cray's acquisition of Floating Point Systems (FPS) Computing in 1991, Mr. Masters was VP of Engineering at FPS where he was responsible for all engineering activities related to the development of the SPARC and Solaris™ supercomputers, the forerunners to Sun’s StarFire™ server line. Mr. Masters was also an integral part of a start-up company Celerity Computing where he was VP of Systems Engineering.
Clark began his distinguished career in 1969 with NCR Corporation, where he was responsible for software engineering and received NCR's highest corporate R&D award for outstanding technical achievement for his contributions in mainline integration methods for software engineering.
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Fazil Osman
Chief Technology Officer and Founding Member
Mr. Osman has more than 25 years of hardware and systems engineering design and management experience in the communications and computer industries. In 1989, he co-founded XLNT, Inc. and, as CTO, was responsible for all of XLNT’s products. His achievements include the development of the first commercial, single chip, switched Ethernet controller and two FDDI to Ethernet switches. Mr. Osman also held engineering design positions at Cumulus, where he developed the first high performance FDDI interface for the VME bus, and at Scientific Computer Systems and Burroughs. He holds a B.Sc. Degree (Honors) in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Edinburgh University. He has had numerous patents awarded for a number of technologies; including programmable logic, memory chip architecture and network protocols.
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Daniel Krall
Vice President of Finance & Administration and CFO
Mr. Krall brings more than 25 years of experience to Astute Networks in the financial management of high-technology companies. Prior to joining the company, he was Vice President of Finance & Administration and CFO at RC Networks, where he was responsible for all finance and administration activities including financial planning, cash management, accounting and human resources. Prior to RC Networks, Mr. Krall was Vice-President of Finance at Cirrus Logic's PCSI Division and held a variety of financial management positions at Unisys Corporation, including PC Products Division Controller and Semiconductor Operations Controller. Mr. Krall holds a BS Degree in Finance and an MBA, both from San Diego State University.
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Mike Heumann
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
Mr. Heumann brings over 25 years of sales, marketing, and engineering experience to Astute Networks, including executive positions at multiple storage system companies. Before joining Astute Networks, he held several executive Sales and Marketing positions at Dot Hill Systems Corporation, including Vice-President of Marketing and Vice-President of Sales Management. His background also includes senior marketing and engineering management positions at JNI Corporation, Sony Electronics of America, and at Stac Software. Mr. Heumann holds a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, and an MS in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Purdue University.
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Keith Klarer
Vice President of Hardware Engineering and Founding Member
Mr. Klarer has 30 years of hardware design and management experience, including fifteen years of technical management experience and four years as a founder and CEO of an engineering services company. Before co-founding Astute Networks in 2000, he was the CEO of Axym Design, which provided system design services to such companies as Philips Semiconductor, IBM and Gateway 2000. Mr. Klarer has held technical and management positions at Logic Innovations, a consulting firm that provided product design services to clients such as General Instruments, Brooktree, and Symbol Technologies. He has also held engineering positions at Scientific Computer Systems and Control Data Corporation. Mr. Klarer holds a BSEE Degree from the University of Waterloo, Canada.
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Dr. Simon Knee
Vice President of Software and Architecture
Dr. Knee has an extensive background in software design and the architecture of network solutions. Prior to joining Astute Networks, Dr. Knee served as Senior Advanced Development engineer for Intel Corporation, formerly XLNT Inc., where he architected high-performance frame forwarding engines and other ASICs. Prior to Intel, he performed research into the generation of software for massively parallel architectures. Dr. Knee has been awarded two patents with several pending in the areas of parallel processing and inter-domain routing. Additionally, Dr. Knee has published multiple papers in the areas of massively parallel programming, modeling and performance prediction. Dr. Knee earned a M.A. degree from Cambridge University, England, and a D.Phil. from the Programming Research Group, Oxford University, England.
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Robert Harling
Vice President of Operations
Mr. Harling brings nearly 20 years of Operations, Supply Chain Management and Product Development experience to Astute Networks. Mr Harling has extensive operational experience in diverse industries such as, storage networking, semiconductors, industrial computing, wireless networks, power conditioning and consumer products. His focus has been on assisting companies achieve their goals through operational excellence. Prior to joining Astute Networks, Mr. Harling held key management positions with Carttronics, AP Labs, JNI Corp. (AMCC Enterprise Division), Maxwell Technologies, and Scotts/Miracle-Gro. Robert graduated from the University of California at San Diego with a degree in Quantitative Economics and Decision Sciences.
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