Executive Team
Bart Copeland: President & CEO
As ActiveState Software’s President and CEO since 2006, Bart Copeland brings more than twenty-three years of leadership, management, finance, and technology business experience to his role. With a passion for technologies that help people lead more productive and enjoyable lives, Bart is currently focused on Stackato, ActiveState’s private platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering. Bart views PaaS as an enabler to accelerate cloud adoption and deliver value in enterprises, and is actively involved in Stackato strategy, business development, and evangelism. Bart is also an active angel investor and serves as a director for a number of other tech companies. He holds an MBA in Technology Management from the University of Phoenix and a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of British Columbia.
Jeff Hobbs: CTO & VP, Engineering
Jeff oversees development of all ActiveState products—from language distributions to development tools and our cloud solutions, including the strategy of integrating our products for an end-to-end desktop to cloud experience.
Though he’s responsible for leading and fostering our talented development team, Jeff is a coder at heart! He is passionate about technologies that just work, making the lives of developers easier. His current obsession is making Stackato the best private PaaS platform for developers: using any language, any infrastructure, and leveraging open source - so that applications just deploy and scale in any cloud. Jeff is a contributing author for Perl and Python extensions, and has been a member of the Tcl Core Team for more than a decade. Jeff is co-author of “Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk”, and has been a speaker at Cloud Expo, OSCON, the Tcl Annual Conference, and others. Jeff works closely with ActiveState customers including Cisco, Boeing, Synopsys, NASA and Intel to deliver the best dynamic languages solutions for their development projects.
Before joining ActiveState, Jeff was the Tcl Ambassador at Scriptics and a software engineer at Siemens. He has a Masters Degree in Computer Science from the University of Oregon.
Angie Hirata: VP, Sales & Business Development
Angie Hirata brings more than twelve years of experience in marketing, PR, sales and business development to her position as head of sales & marketing at ActiveState. Prior to joining ActiveState, Angie's successful career included start-ups and large organizations including Maximizer Software, JustSystems, Eyeball Networks, Seagate Software and SEI Industries. Angie holds a B.Comm. in Marketing and MIS from the University of British Columbia.
Paul Stanton: Director of Business Development
Paul is responsible for driving ActiveState’s success through partnerships with System Integrators, OEMs, ISVs, Consultants, and Resellers who deliver Stackato based solutions to enterprises around the world. Paul brings over 25 years of business development and marketing expertise gained at Intel, Microsoft, and successful startups. His hands-on approach has led to product innovations and patents in Knowledge Management, Business Intelligence, and other enterprise solutions. Paul holds a Masters of Business Administration and Bachelors of Chemical Engineering from the University of Washington.
Toph Whitmore: VP, Marketing
Toph leads the ActiveState marketing team, with focus on branding, communications, media management, and strategic planning. Toph has 15+ years' experience as a marketing/project lead and management consultant. He spent four years on strategic marketing assignments at Microsoft as a project manager with Caiman Consulting. Toph also headed DH Media Inc., a regional magazine publisher. Prior to that, he worked in enterprise high-tech marketing and product management in Washington State. Toph has a PMP certification and received his MBA from the Tuck School at Dartmouth College and his BA in English from Pomona College.
Maria Chu: VP, Finance, HR & Admin
Maria has over 13 years of experience in senior financial management roles surrounding all financial reporting aspects, analysis, planning, systems implementation, internal controls, cash management and operational mandates in diverse companies from IT, general aviation, real estate property development and manufacturing in both unionized and privately held companies.
Prior to joining ActiveState, Maria was the Controller for: PowerWallz, AWT Tech, who developed the latest aircraft parts and wing technology for the de Havilland Beavers, WWP, a unionized Saskatchewan based Agricultural plant and the Delta Land/Coal Harbour Properties, a well-known multi-million dollar property developer, who recently sold The Georgia Hotel and developed the award winning "Calisto and Carina" at Coal Harbour. Maria holds her B.Sc. in Accounting and CMA designation.
Technical Leadership
Jeff Hobbs: VP, Engineering
Jeff oversees development of all ActiveState products—from language distributions to development tools and our cloud solutions, including the strategy of integrating our products for an end-to-end desktop to cloud experience.
Though he’s responsible for leading and fostering our talented development team, Jeff is a coder at heart! He is passionate about technologies that just work, making the lives of developers easier. His current obsession is making Stackato the best private PaaS platform for developers: using any language, any infrastructure, and leveraging open source - so that applications just deploy and scale in any cloud. Jeff is a contributing author for Perl and Python extensions, and has been a member of the Tcl Core Team for more than a decade. Jeff is co-author of “Practical Programming in Tcl and Tk”, and has been a speaker at Cloud Expo, OSCON, the Tcl Annual Conference, and others. Jeff works closely with ActiveState customers including Cisco, Boeing, Synopsys, NASA and Intel to deliver the best dynamic languages solutions for their development projects.
Before joining ActiveState, Jeff was the Tcl Ambassador at Scriptics and a software engineer at Siemens. He has a Masters Degree in Computer Science from the University of Oregon.
Brent Smithurst: Director of Product Management
Brent is ActiveState's Director of Product Management with a primary focus on Stackato. Prior to joining ActiveState, Brent was Vice President of Technical Operations (Product Management, IT, Technical Support, and others at various times) at Faronics for seven years. In addition to overseeing the Product Management team at Faronics, Brent was also the hands-on product manager for all Mac OS X products (including Deep Freeze Mac) and for Deep Freeze Windows (off and on for several years). In the eight years prior to Faronics, Brent held leadership positions in operations, marketing, and IT in several organizations including a startup that made software for the motion picture and television industry, a food services chain (restaurants and manufacturing facility), and an Apple Computer retail chain and catalog/online reseller.
Follow @brentsmi
John Wetherill: Developer Evangelist
Originally from Canada, John has spent much of his career designing and building software at a handful of startups, at Sun Microsystems, NeXT Inc., and more recently in the smart grid and energy space. His biggest passion is for developer tools, or more generally any tool, language, process, or system that improves developer productivity and quality of life. Without question, Stackato is one such tool and the reason why he is here. No stranger to technology evangelism, John spent several years in the late 1990's on Sun's Technology Evangelism Team spreading the Java Gospel across the globe and focusing on the prolific number of Java technologies. Now John is now returning to his roots, as a technology evangelist working for a Canadian company, albeit remotely from Santa Cruz.
Follow @bcferrycoder
Ingy döt Net: Senior Developer
As the newest member of ActiveState's technical leadership team, Ingy works with developers to help them get their applications to the cloud. He is a software artist and inventor, whose mission in life is to see computers solving the real world problems that we humans face today. To that end, Ingy continually looks for new ideas to make software development simpler, while searching for more ways to socialize those ideas.
With over twenty years of experience, he has been a vocal leader in open source software for the last ten. He is a regular speaker at OSCON, OSDC, and YAPC; the inventor of YAML - the human friendly data format for all languages; and module author for Perl (CPAN), Python (PyPI), Perl 6 and Bash. Before re-joining ActiveState, Ingy was the first programmer at SocialText and was CTO of FatPort. He holds a BA in Computer Science from Northern Illinois University.
Jan Dubois: Senior Perl Developer
Jan is a senior Perl developer and the technical lead for all ActiveState Perl products.
He is an active member of the core Perl development team where his primary focus is the Windows platform. He also leads the libwin32 Perl project, a collection of Windows Perl modules. Jan is the primary author of the Win32 and Win32::OLE Perl extensions and also maintains various other Perl modules. Over the years, he has contributed to "The Perl Journal" and "PerlMonth" and has spoken on Perl at industry conferences, including OSCON.
Before joining the ActiveState team, Jan created innovative solutions for customers in the German banking and insurance industry. He has a Masters Degree in Physics (Diplom-Physiker) from the University of Hamburg.
Andreas Kupries: Senior Tcl Developer
Andreas is a senior Tcl developer at ActiveState where he continually enhances the ActiveTcl distribution and works on the Tcl Dev Kit component of ASPN Tcl. He's a member of the Tcl Core Team and is the Tcllib release manager. Andreas is also the primary author of more than 25 Tcl modules and extensions, including Trf and Memchan.
As a Tcl expert, Andreas has presented on the topic at international conferences and has published conference papers on niche Tcl topics including "Reflected and Transformed Channels", "Tools for a new generation of Tcl package documentation" and "Experiences with Modularizing the Tcl Core for Better Portability". Andreas works closely with ActiveState customers including Boeing and Cisco to ensure Tcl adds value to their software development projects.
Prior to ActiveState, Andreas developed software for Ingenieurbuero Kisters and Ascom Deutschland GmbH in Germany. He has a Master in Computer Science (Diplom-Informatiker) from the RWTH Aachen.
Todd Whiteman: Komodo Development Lead
Todd Whiteman is the Development Lead for Komodo IDE. He works adeptly with Mozilla, Python and JavaScript to ensure that Komodo IDE is the IDE of choice for development teams. Todd has been working on Komodo IDE for nearly 5 years, adding components such as the Vi Key Bindings, Distributed Source Code Control, 64-bit Linux builds as well as Remote SSH support into Komodo IDE.
Before joining ActiveState he worked as a software engineer for MDSI in Canada and Schlumberger in Australia.
