Management Team

Geoff Squire has more than 40 years experience in information technology. He currently serves as Chairman of Kognitio Ltd and as a director of several privately held companies. Geoff spent 10 years building data oriented user systems prior to joining ICL where he held posts as customer support manager and project manager prior to his final appointment as worldwide marketing manager.

He introduced the Oracle database to the UK in 1981 as the exclusive distributor, and subsequently joined Oracle Corporation, where he ultimately became chief executive of worldwide operations. He was widely credited with Oracle’s history making financial turnaround in 1990 and is one of the few individuals in the world to have built a $1 billion international business from scratch.

He joined OpenVision in 1994 as the president and chief executive officer of its newly formed international subsidiary. He became chief executive officer of the parent company in 1995 and took the company public on NASDAQ prior to its merger with VERITAS in 1997. He executed the merger with the Seagate software and grew the combined entity to over a billion dollars. He remained as Vice Chairman until the Symantec VERITAS merger in 2005.

Geoff served as a director of Cranfield IT Institute from 1989-1991 and was president of the Computing Services & Software Association in 1994-1995. Oxford Brookes University awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Science in September 1993 for his outstanding contribution to his profession. In recognition of his services to the information technology industry, he was awarded an OBE in the 1997 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

Roger Llewellyn joined Kognitio in April 2003, having previously been Managing Director of Arelon for two and a half years - a company acquired by Cedar Software. Roger instigated the Management Buy-Out of Cedar and the formation of the Redac Group with Alchemy in May 2002.

Roger has started a number of American companies in Europe, including WICAT Europe, where he was Managing Director for 6 years and Vice President USA Sales, and Macromedia, where he was Managing Director Europe for 5 years from start-up to IPO. Roger then took the helm at VINCA Europe for 4 years, until it was purchased by Legato, now EMC. He was also Vice President of Elevon Inc.

He trained as an Electronic Engineer before taking his first job for Hewlett Packard. He then held senior positions in Digital Equipment and Prime Computers, before becoming Managing Director of Prime Sweden. After two years in this role Roger took the Managing Director role for Prime in Switzerland.

John Thompson is responsible for all aspects of the US operations of Kognitio. John is a global sales and marketing executive with over 23 years experience encompassing all aspects of demand and revenue generation, channel acquisition and growth, cost management in growing emerging technology companies. His marketing experience includes all elements of corporate, brand, product, field and channel marketing.

John has formulated and implemented novel sales and marketing approaches for delivering top and bottom line growth from sophisticated technologies by significantly increasing adoption and usage rates. His direct sales and partner development experience is with enterprise class and medium sized organizations.

Johns technology expertise includes data warehousing and business intelligence systems, grid computing, knowledge discovery, analytical applications, data mining and exploration, high performance computing, and database systems.

Prior to joining Kognitio, he held a number of senior sales, technology, marketing and business development positions at: ACNielsen, WhiteCross Systems, Inc., PLATINUM technology, IBM, and Metaphor Computer Systems. John holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Ferris State University and a MBA in Marketing from DePaul University.

Ian Sandbach joined Kognitio from Envox Worldwide where he had been EMEA financial controller culminating in the successful sale of the business in October 2008. He qualified in practice and is an FCCA, he started working in high technology businesses in 1998.

Ian has been involved in a number of Merger and Acquisition projects, including the sales of Envox Worldwide, the Hypercom EMEA lease portfolio and United Southern Publications. Ian was an integral part in the successful acquisition and subsequent integration of Andyne Ltd, Leonard’s Logic and PC Docs.

Ian has worked in both Europe and North America, and has reported in US GAAP and implemented Sarbanes-Oxley. After qualification he managed wholesale finance and was part of the team which developed retail finance for FIAT Auto UK Ltd.

Roger Gaskell joined Kognitio from WhiteCross, which he joined in 1988, the company's founding year. At Kognitio he now has overall responsibility for all product development across the merged company. Roger has been instrumental in all generations of the WX and WX2 database products to date, including evolving it from a database application running on proprietary hardware, to a software-only analytical database built on industry-standard blade servers.

Prior to WhiteCross, Roger was test and development manager at AB Electronics for five years. During this time his primary responsibility was for the famous BBC Micro Computer and the development and testing of the first mass production of personal computers for IBM.

Graham Tweddle has responsibility for Sales across the EMEA region. Graham joined Kognitio with over 25 years experience in the IT industry, in various technical, sales and management roles. Prior to Kognitio, Graham was with Hewlett Packard, where he was UK Sales Manager for the Neoview Data Warehouse platform.

In the ten years prior to Hewlett Packard, Graham was General Manager of Informatica Northern Europe, where he spearheaded the phenomenal growth that Informatica enjoyed in the early 2000s and he played a key role in establishing Informatica as the number one vendor in the Data Integration marketplace. Graham also was the first European Managing Director of MINT, where he helped grow the Company from a standing start to world class Financial Services payments solution company that was successfully acquired by Sungard to form Sungard Business Integration.

Graham graduated into ICL’s graduate intake programme as an electronics engineer. He also spent over 13 years at Tandem Computers.

Sean Jackson joined Kognitio in March 2006 and is responsible for the rollout of Kognitio’s marketing effort that will drive future growth for the Company, including direct, channel, email, web, event, alliance and public relations based marketing activities.

Most recently, Sean worked at BakBone Software as the European Marketing Director for 5 years and was instrumental in developing channel and alliance sales across the European continent including the creation of the first EMEA-specific channel partner program. This included growing and certifying over 200 BakBone VARs.

Prior to that, he worked at Legato Systems where he was responsible for channel marketing in Northern Europe. Before that he worked at Vinca Europe and Compaq in various marketing roles. Fluent in French and German, Sean holds a BA (Hons) degree in Modern Languages from the University of Bristol.

Diane Kolonko has responsibility for all commercial aspects of Kognitio, including the provision of IT across the business, and Human Resources. Diane previously worked for WhiteCross where she was responsible for spearheading its transition from a proprietary database machine to a provider of high-end analytic services and software.

In her initial role as managing consultant at WhiteCross, Diane built a strong portfolio for its UK telco business by securing high profile clients including ntl. Prior to the merger with Kognitio, Diane was CEO of WhiteCross leading the migration of its offering to become an industry recognised model.

Prior to WhiteCross, Diane started her career at Bull Information Systems, focusing on application development and implementation. She stayed at Bull for nine years, before moving to Pilot Software where she had technical design authority for solutions supplied to the telco sector.

Paul Groom is responsible for the development of WX2 as a fully integrated BI solution, and has over twenty years experience working with the very largest databases and database technologies. He began his career with a three year database research project at the UK national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, followed by five years working as a lead systems engineer providing pre and post sales technical support in the UK and Europe within the then leading vendors of database machines: Britton Lee (ShareBase), Teradata and NCR.

In 1993 Paul joined WhiteCross to participate in the launch of a new MPP database server. Paul quickly progressed from consultant to the role of UK Support Manager before relocating to the USA to facilitate the set-up of local support services; whilst there he also led the creation of a joint venture Data Mining centre and a Web Analytics service centre.

Nick Strangways has responsibility for all Business Intelligence Service and Delivery programmes undertaken by Kognitio. He has over 20 years experience in the IT Industry with the past 12 years having been focussed on the Business Intelligence/ Data Warehousing market. Nick joined Kognitio in February 2000 in a project management role undertaking engagements for major organisations in the Financial Services Sector. Numerous successful projects resulted in Nick taking on a client management role before accepting responsibility for the management of all customer engagements in 2007.

Prior to joining Kognitio, Nick worked for numerous blue chip organisations including LogicaCMG, EDS, Prudential, Tesco, Abbey and Woolwich on a range of Business Intelligence, Customer Relationship Management and Online Application processing environments giving him extensive knowledge in the field of data management, acquisition and integration.