John De Santis, Chairman and CEO
Jack Martin, VP, Worldwide Field Operations
Vatsal Sonecha, VP, Business Development & Product Management
Jon Brody, VP, Marketing
Ravi Sandhu, Chief Scientist
Mihir Bellare, Chief Cryptographer
Kyle Austin, VP, Engineering
Mercedes Dy, VP, Finance and Administration, Controller

John De Santis, Chairman and CEO
John De Santis has more than 25 years of sales, marketing and general management experience in the telecommunications and information technologies fields and has held management positions with both start-ups and large international public companies. Most recently, he was President and CEO of Sygate Technologies (an enterprise security software company) from 2000 to 2005 until its acquisition by Symantec. Prior to Sygate, De Santis served as senior vice president for Network Computing Devices, and was vice president, European Operations for Cincinnati Bell Information Systems (now Convergys Corporation). He has a degree in Philosophy and Mathematics from Fairfield University and completed the Stanford University Executive Institute Program for Management of High-Technology Companies. He is on the board of directors of two security firms, Applied Identity and Neohapsis; and was on the board of Tablus until it’s acquisition by EMC.

Jack Martin, VP, Worldwide Field Operations
Jack brings to TriCipher over twenty five years of networking and security experience. Jack was recently the Vice President of Sales and Business Development at Sygate, the recognized leader in endpoint security. Under his leadership Sygate enjoyed tremendous growth, and recently Symantec purchased the company in order to merge the technology and customer base into their portfolio. Prior to Sygate Jack served as Vice President of Field Operations for intrusion prevention pioneer TippingPoint Technologies, now a division of 3COM. From 1994 through 2000, Jack was at Cisco Systems where he held a number of positions of increasing responsibility in sales and field management. In a highly successful seven-year run, Jack managed sales and delivery teams that sold, cumulatively, more than $700 million. Prior to Cisco, Jack was president and CEO of Bridgeworks, where in 1993, his work redefining how manufacturers worked with their channel partners led to his being honored by Computer Reseller News as one of the top 25 power brokers in the technology industry.

Vatsal Sonecha, VP, Business Development & Product Management
Prior to joining TriCipher, Vatsal Sonecha has held business development and security
technology positions for over 16 years. As vice president of Business Development at McAfee, he led the company's efforts developing new markets and evangelizing emerging solutions. He developed the service provider market leveraging McAfee’s upcoming managed security solutions. Vatsal was also responsible for Strategic Alliances with other technology firms with complimentary solutions to McAfee’s own portfolio. Prior to McAfee, Vatsal was at Raza Foundries, an early stage venture capital firm. During his tenure at Raza, he served as the vice president of Business Development for IntruVert Networks, a Network Intrusion Prevention company acquired by McAfee in early 2003. Prior to joining Raza, Vatsal was an Executive-in-Residence with Columbia Capital where he was involved with Riptech, a Managed Security Service Provider, acquired by Symantec in 2001. Prior to Columbia, Vatsal was a Strategic Development executive at MCI, where he worked on high revenue impact projects under the direction of Vice Chairman, the late John Sidgmore. During his time at MCI, Vatsal worked on integrating MMDS acquisitions covering 56% US markets, negotiated a $375M access contract and led the due diligence for $300M investment with a mobile wireless carrier. Vatsal has worked in engineering, marketing, sales and sales management roles at companies such as ANS Communications, America Online and IBM. Vatsal holds a M.S. in Computer Science (Magna cum Laude) from the University of Delaware.

Jon Brody, VP, Marketing
For the past 10 years, Jon Brody has led marketing teams for enterprise middleware, and IT security and compliance vendors. As VP Marketing at Sygate Technologies, Jon and his team established Sygate as the thought leader for enterprise endpoint security. After Symantec acquired Sygate, Jon managed positioning and message integration. Prior to joining Sygate in 2001 Jon was Vice President of Marketing at PeerLogic, an innovator in large scale distributed computing and enterprise application integration solutions acquired in 2001 by Critical Path. From 1989 to 1996 Mr. Brody lead the North American services and support operations of Verimation AB, the leading vendor of office automation and collaboration solutions for multinational enterprises. From 1996 through 1998, Jon served as President of Veri-Q Inc., a Verimation subsidiary that pioneered business integration software for the Global 1000.

Ravi Sandhu, Chief Scientist
Ravi Sandhu co-founded TriCipher and has been instrumental in the design, development and deployment of the product.

In June 2007 Ravi became the Executive Director of the new Institute for Cyber Security (ICS) at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), funded by $4.5M in competitive grants from the State of Texas. Ravi holds the Lutcher Brown Endowed Chair in Cyber Security at UTSA. The ICS mission is to pursue world-class high-impact cyber-security research, education, commercialization and service.

Previously, Ravi was a professor of Information Security and Assurance at George Mason University, where he taught advanced graduate courses on the theory and practice of information security and directed doctoral research. He is a Fellow of the ACM and a Fellow of IEEE. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Information and System Security from 1997-2004, Chairman of the ACM Special Interest Group on Security Audit and Control from 1995-2003 and Security Editor for IEEE Internet Computing from 1998-2004. He founded the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security and the ACM Symposium on Access Control Models and Technologies and led them to high reputation and prestige. Ravi has authored over 170 research papers on Information Security, is an inventor on ten security technology patents and has over a dozen patent applications in process (most of these inventions were developed for TriCipher). His seminal work on role-based access control has been incorporated into a NIST-ANSI industry standard model. He earned his B.Tech. and M.Tech. degrees in EE from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) in Bombay and Delhi respectively, and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Rutgers University.

Mihir Bellare, Chief Cryptographer
Mihir is responsible for the cryptography architecture of the TriCipher product. As one of the world’s leading cryptographers, Mihir is a recipient of the David and Lucille Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering, and an NSF Career Award. He is a co-developer or developer of numerous algorithms including the HMAC authentication algorithm and the OAEP encryption algorithm. He is a co-developer of iKP, a family of electronic payment protocols, which led to MasterCard and Visa’s SET. In April 2003, Mihir was honored by RSA with the Field of Mathematics Award recognizing his innovation and ongoing contribution to the field of cryptography. In addition to the work he does at TriCipher, he teaches Computer Science and Engineering as a professor at the University of California San Diego. Bellare received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Kyle D. Austin, VP, Engineering
Kyle has been an active participant and contributor in the security industry for more than 14 years. Before joining TriCipher and leading the development of TriCipher’s authentication technologies and services, Kyle was the Principal Architect at Identrust (formerly Digital Signature Trust). In this role he worked with President Clinton to digitally sign the eSign act (Senate Bill 761), and consulted with large financial institutions, US government agencies, and foreign governments on large-scale PKI implementations. He has also served as Senior Research and Development Engineer at Zions Bank, developing technology and services around retail banking. As part of this work he led the development of one of the first Internet banking sites.

Mercedes Dy, VP, Finance and Administration, Controller
Mercy has over fifteen years of experience in corporate finance, specializing primarily in startup companies. Prior to TriCipher, she was VP of Finance for Escalate, Inc. where she was a co-founder, set up all finance functions and led several financings. Prior to Escalate, she was Controller for Red Brick software and Controller for Kiva Software, where she was instrumental in closing the acquisition of that company by Netscape, Inc. She also held various finance positions at GE Capital. She has an MBA from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from University of Notre Dame.