About Us: Management Team
Management Team
Cheryl TraversePresident and Chief Executive Officer
Cheryl Traverse joined Xceedium as president and CEO in November of 2005, and has since pioneered the development of Xceedium's market position, product portfolio, sales traction and overall organizational performance.
Cheryl joined Xceedium from Immunix, Inc., where she served as president, CEO and Chairman of the board. While there, she restructured the technology for a new market space (Host Intrusion Prevention), created significant sales traction with OEMs, strategic alliances and enterprise customers and successfully sold the company to Novell, Inc. She previously served and President/CEO of Covigo Inc., a mobile middleware provider, which was purchased by Symbol. She also served as President/CEO of Taviz Technology, brightinfo.com which was sold to Annuncio/Peoplesoft and was an EVP with iBand that was sold to Macromedia.
Cheryl's extensive executive management background also includes building a $600 million direct marketing business for Sprint with an organization of over 800+ people, growing a $60M revenue stream to $130M for MCI and building a $25 million direct marketing business for Gupta Corporation.
Due to her exceptional leadership, Cheryl has been honored with the TrailBlazer Award in 2002 and the LodeStar Award in 2003 from the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs. Cheryl holds a BA degree from Wilkes University and an MS degree from Hofstra University. She sits on the advisory board and mentoring forum of the Astia (formerly the Women's Technology Cluster), and on the advisory board of the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs.
David Ballard
Vice President of Sales
As Vice President, Sales, Mr. Ballard is responsible for building on current lines of business, identifying new revenue growth opportunities and expanding Xceedium's products into the channel. With nearly 20 years of experience in technology, he brings knowledge of a wide array of markets and technologies to Xceedium's executive team.
Mr. Ballard joins Xceedium from IntraLinks, Inc., where as Area Vice President he was instrumental in achieving triple-digit growth for 2007, while developing a sales team and increasing penetration into major global accounts such as Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley.
Prior to IntraLinks, Mr. Ballard served as Area Vice President for CommVault. While in this role, he averaged 60% license revenue growth year over year between 2003 and 2006, and closed significant deals with companies including Honda, Aramark, CBS Broadcasting and ESPN.
Previous to CommVault, Mr. Ballard served as Director of Business Development at Lane15 Software, an InfiniBand startup company in Austin, TX.
Mr. Ballard began his technology career while leading strategic OEM initiatives for Veritas Software, where he was part of OEM licensing wins with IT giants such as IBM, Compaq and Sun, and grew the NetBackup for Windows revenue from $745K to $5.4M while managing that product.
Mr. Ballard holds a Bachelor's Degree from Drew University.
Klaus Sonnenleiter
Vice President of Engineering
Klaus Sonnenleiter is responsible for all aspects of product development and quality assurance with Xceedium. Prior to Xceedium, he served as the VP of Engineering for Iptivia, Inc., a start-up in the network management and service assurance space providing non-intrusive monitoring technology for the routing control plane. Klaus spent six years as team leader for the development group at Micromuse, a network management vendor in the OSS space, with responsibility for the Netcool/Impact product line, an event analytics product that generated close to $100 million under Klaus' stewardship. Micromuse was acquired by IBM for $865 million in 2006.
Before joining Micromuse, Klaus drove the development of the first Web-based digital asset management product at The Media Machine, a startup in the print and pre-press market. Earlier he architected a local online service prototype for Burda Media, one of the largest publishing companies in Europe, and served as a technology editor on the launch team for Burda's Focus news magazine. Klaus studied sports science at Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz, Germany.
Craig Mezik
Vice President of Finance
As Vice President, Finance at Xceedium, Mr. Mezik uses his 24 years of experience to manage all aspects of the strategic and tactical financial and administrative functions of the company . Prior to joining Xceedium, Mr. Mezik was the CFO at Ridge Manufacturing Corporation, a contract manufacturer, where he managed the day to day finances and successfully refinanced the company. Previously, Mr. Mezik was the Controller and CFO, at Wavexpress, Inc., where he concentrated on expense reductions that saved the company millions of dollars . His previous experience included the Vice President & Controller for Prism Communications, Inc., a start-up CLEC and the first DSL provider in New York City. Mr. Mezik was successful at building all of the company's financial operations and processes from scratch, and was integral in growing the company's revenues to $5 million in two years.
Mr. Mezik began his career at AT&T Corporation where he spent 13 years in various roles. His last position was Assistant Controller, AT&T International, where he was responsible for the accounting and financial reporting for the $2 billion division.
Mr. Mezik earned a BS degree in Accounting from the University of Alabama, a MBA in Accounting and Taxation from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and an Advanced Certificate in International Business from Seton Hall University. Mr. Mezik became a CPA in 1991 and is a member of the AICPA.