President & CEO

Frank Gilbane is President & CEO of Gilbane Group, Inc., (formally Bluebill Advisors, Inc.) and organizes the Gilbane Conferences. Frank is also a Managing Partner at Lighthouse Seminars LLC, a producer of educational events for enterprise software. Frank serves on the board of directors of APT (Art Plus Technology), a Boston-based firm specializing in communications strategies, information delivery, and document processing solutions for the financial industry.

Before founding Gilbane Group Inc. Frank was with the market research and consulting firm CAP Ventures, Inc., an Inc. 500 company in both 1997 and 1998. Frank joined CAP Ventures as a corporate officer and member of the Board of Directors in 1994 when CAP acquired his company.

Frank was the founder and former president of Publishing Technology Management, Inc., a founder of the French firm TechnoForum SARL, co-founder of the Documation conferences in the U.S., Canada, France, the UK, and Switzerland, and founder of the Gilbane Report. In the early eighties he held various positions in software development, marketing, and senior management at Texet Corporation and Quadex Corporation.

Frank was a founder and former member of the board of the Content Management Professionals Association (CM Pros). He was also a founding member of the Board of Advisors to SGML Open (now OASIS), is a past member of ANSI, ISO, and CALS Standards Committees, the Graphic Communications Association (now IDEAlliance), the MIT Enterprise Forum, the Advisory Board of the MIT Press journal Markup Languages: Theory & Practice, served on the advisory board of the University of Washington iSchool Content Management Systems (CMS) Evaluation Lab, and a recipient of the GCA's TechDoc award. Mr. Gilbane has a Bachelors degree from Boston University and a Masters degree from Tufts University in Philosophy.

Now the fun part: According to CMS Watch Founder Tony Byrne "Every truly worthy community boasts a genuine eminence grise. For the content management analyst community, that person is surely Frank Gilbane." link - According to Content Management Bible author Bob Boiko, "Frank is the godfather of document and content management." link

VP Consulting Services

Mary Laplante is Vice President, Consulting Services, and Senior Analyst with The Gilbane Group, an analyst and consulting firm that provides education, advice and market expertise in content management technologies. As Vice President, she oversees Gilbane's consulting practices; manages research and client projects; participates in the development and launch of programs for vendor, user, and investor clients; contributes editorial content; and participates in Gilbane conferences and other industry events. As Senior Analyst, she is active is Gilbane's globalization and XML practices and Software-as-a-Service coverage.

Laplante has twenty-three years of experience in standards, publishing, software marketing, and research and consulting arenas. Prior to joining the Gilbane Group, she was a founding partner in Fastwater LLP, a consulting firm that helped companies take new products to market. From 1996 through 1998, she was a Director in the Dynamic Software Strategies Group at CAP Ventures/InfoTrends, a research and consulting firm that tracks markets for document and printing technology. She was the first Executive Director of the organization now known as OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), serving from 1993 through 1996. She has worked as an independent consultant helping companies implement publishing technologies, and she has held management and senior marketing positions at software companies including Cygnet Publishing Technologies, Avalanche Development Company, and Scribe Systems. In 2006 she was elected to the Board of Directors of Content Management Professionals, serving as the organization's president in 2007.

Lead Analyst,
Publishing Strategy & Technology Practice

At The Gilbane Group, Steve leads a consulting practice focused upon the strategies and technologies employed by commercial and enterprise publishing professionals. He assists small publishing technology company's turn their ideas into profitable businesses and larger companies in assessing their strategy and current performance and then helping to accelerate their growth. In the past ten years, Steve has worked with more than 30 companies by helping refine their strategic plans, raise capital, devise go-to-market plans, and make and integrate acquisitions. Steve also mentors a number of CEOs and offers training on board meeting preparation.

Before joining the Gilbane Group, Steve founded several successful consulting Practices and served as Chairman of Rovia - A start-up that developed secure fully featured e-books for the college market. Steve has considerable experience with custom publishing, licensing of intellectual property, electronic publishing work flow and technology, and EDI. He was the founder of the publishing industry's Pubnet e-commerce and information system.

Before that, Steve was CEO of Inso Corporation. Under his leadership, Inso grew from a 35 person division of Houghton Mifflin Company to a 1000 person public company with sales of $100 million dollars. Steve led the IPO and two subsequent offerings and led the company through 10 successful acquisitions. He also established a comprehensive mentoring program to develop promising young managers into capable executives.

Before Inso Corporation, Steve ran Berlitz Translation Services for three years providing him with significant experience in running service businesses and dealing with international clients. Previous to Berlitz, Steve held a series of progressively responsible Sales and Marketing positions at Macmillan Publishing Company culminating in the role of Marketing Vice President. Steve has served on the Boards of SpyGlass and Mathsoft and is Deploy Solutions - a developer of Human Resources technology. Steve also sits on several non-profit boards.

Steve holds a Bachelors degree from SUNY Cortland and an MBA from RIT. He has spoken on numerous industry panels and has presented to area forums for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Lead Analyst,
XML Technologies & Content Strategies Practice

As a Lead Analyst at Gilbane Group Inc., Bill leads the XML Technologies and Content Strategies Consulting Practice, helping enterprises leverage XML to better create, manage, and deliver information. Bill also covers trends and technologies in the content management industry and develops and tutorials on XML and content management. Bill Trippe founded New Millennium Publishing, a Boston-based consulting practice formed in 1997, and has more than 20 years of technical and management experience in content management, XML, and related technologies. He specializes in large-scale applications of content management technology, working with publishers who are typically converting extensive legacy databases and systems into more contemporary, open technology. He brings a unique blend of strategic and hands-on knowledge of the products and trends that are shaping the publishing and content technology marketplace. He is a sought-after speaker and author in the XML field, and is the XML columnist for Transform, and a regular contributor to the magazine, EContent. He recently co-authored Digital Rights Management: Business and Technology (John Wiley & Sons) and SVG for Designers: Using Scalable Vector Graphics in Next-Generation Web Sites (Osborne/McGraw-Hill).

Lead Analyst, Globalization Practice

Leonor brings over 18 years as a content technologies practitioner and analyst to provide education, management consulting, and marketing services to the enterprise users, vendors and investors in the content management community. A co-founder of Gilbane's globalization practice, Leonor specializes in developing content globalization strategies that blend business practices, technologies, and standards to create high-value business solutions.

Lead Analyst, Enterprise Search Practice

Currently Lead Analyst for Enterprise Search for The Gilbane Group, Lynda Moulton is also a consultant on information technologies and knowledge management. She has over 30 years of experience using and implementing search technologies, and developing technology-based solutions for managing enterprise content. Following employment at Union Carbide Corporation and Arthur D. Little, Ms. Moulton founded Comstow Information Services in 1980 to develop database technology for enterprise content management, a software application, BiblioTech. She is also a leader in the Boston KM Forum, which holds semi-monthly meeting in the greater-Boston area. She is widely published and a frequent speaker at conferences and seminars. Her current thinking and research commentary on search can be seen at: http://gilbane.com/search_blog/ and other projects and writings are at http://www.lwmtechnology.com.

Lead Analyst, Collaboration

Geoffrey Bock is the Lead Analyst for the Gilbane Group's Collaboration Consulting Practice, which covers a broad range of collaboration technologies, including enterprise applications of wikis, blogs and other "social media', and focuses on business strategies for content management and collaboration. An analyst and author with over twenty-five years industry experience, he tracks how organizations create, organize, and manage business information to sustain profitable relationships. He advises software companies, end-user organizations, and government agencies in areas of business planning, technology innovation, and operational excellence.

Lead Analyst, Web Content Management

Tony White is the Lead Analyst for the Gilbane Group's Web Content Management Consulting Practice. Over the past ten years, Tony White has been an analyst at both Giga Information Group (now Forrester Research) and the Yankee Group, and has served in senior marketing roles at Interwoven and BroadVision. More recently, Tony has founded Ars Logica, Inc., a high-tech marketing and advisory firm offering a range of strategic and tactical marketing services to software vendors and providing needs-analysis/product-selection support to enterprise clients. In addition to hosting and speaking at analyst, vendor, and user conferences across Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific, Tony has delivered competitive analyses to the sales forces of companies such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and BEA. His clients have included Adobe Systems, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Ford Motor Company, JPMorgan Chase, Qantas Airways, Siemens, and numerous other Global 2000 companies.

Senior Analyst, Publishing Strategy & Technology Practice

Bill Rosenblatt is is a Senior Analyst in the Gilbane Group's Publishing Technology & Strategy Consulting Practice, and a recognized authority on digital media technologies, including content management, digital rights management, cross-media publishing, and content production systems, as well as on issues related to intellectual property in the online world. He has written several articles and contributed to technology standards initiatives in these areas, and he is the author of Digital Rights Management: Business and Technology (John Wiley & Sons) and managing editor of the Jupitermedia newsletter DRM Watch. He was one of the architects of the Digital Object Identifier, an emerging standard for online content identification and digital rights management. Before founding GiantSteps, Bill was Chief Technology Officer of Fathom, a knowledge destination web site for lifelong learners sponsored by Columbia University, the London School of Economics, Cambridge University Press, the New York Public Library, and other scholarly institutions. Bill defined Fathom's content and e-commerce technology architecture and built its technology infrastructure. Bill's publishing industry experience includes stints at McGraw-Hill and Times Mirror Co. (now part of Tribune Co.). Before joining Fathom, he served as VP of Technology and New Media for McGraw-Hill's trade magazine division, where he was responsible for implementing the business' vertical market web portal strategy, including AviationNow.com, an information portal for the aviation industry. At Times Mirror, as Director of Publishing Systems, Bill implemented content management systems for many of Times Mirror's newspaper, book, and professional information publishing businesses, and helped develop the editorial system architecture for MDConsult, a web service for physicians. At Sun Microsystems, Bill served as a technology strategy consultant to Sun's major media and publishing customers and did business development for Sun's video server product line. Then, as Market Development Manager for Media, Entertainment, and Publishing, he defined Sun's market strategy for the industry and built alliances with software vendors who serve it. His career in digital media began at Moody's Investors Service, the bond rating agency, where he developed a pre-web-era architecture for electronic publishing of Moody's credit reports. In addition to Digital Rights Management: Business and Technology, he is an author of three technical books for the publisher O'Reilly & Associates, which have been translated into French and Japanese; and he was a contributor to the book Electronic Publishing Strategies, published by Pira International Ltd. in the UK. He has been quoted in The New York Times, US News & World Report, Der Spiegel, The Globe and Mail, Australian Financial Review, Electronic Times (South Korea), Billboard, Editor & Publisher, Information Today, and on NPR's All Things Considered. He holds a B.S.E. with honors in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, and he has had executive education at Harvard and University of Southern California business schools. Bill is a member of the Gerson Lehrman Group Media Council.

Senior Analyst, Publishing Strategy & Technology Practice

Thad McIlroy is a Senior Analyst in the Gilbane Group's Publishing Technology & Strategy Consulting Practice, an electronic publishing analyst and author, and president of Arcadia House, based in San Francisco and Toronto. A well-established expert in the technology and marketing issues surrounding electronic publishing, color imaging and the Internet, he has authored a dozen books and over 180 articles on these subjects. McIlroy also served for five years as Program Director for Seybold Seminars. In 1988 he founded Arcadia House, a consulting firm specializing in the implementation of electronic publishing technology in the graphic arts and publishing industries. Arcadia House provides consulting services to publishing and media companies, printers, prepress shops, design and advertising agencies, as well as vendors serving the publishing industry. Principal consultant Thad McIlroy serves also as an expert witness on patent litigation, as well as other litigation related to technical and marketing issues in the publishing industry, its vendors and service providers. McIlroy wrote the Composition, Design, and Graphics chapter (with contributions from Frank Romano) for the Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing (Columbia University Press, January, 2003). He is a contributing editor to PrintAction magazine, a columnist for XMLPitstop.com, and a member of the Technical Association of the Graphic Arts, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Content Management Professionals. He is a former member of the board of directors of the International Prepress Association. For the past three years McIlroy has been named as one of Canada's 50 most influential people in graphic communications. McIlroy has spoken at the Seybold Conferences, the Gilbane Content Management conference, the Henry Stewart DAM conference, XPLOR, the NAPL Top Management Conference, the I S & T Annual Conference, the International Prepress Association (IPA) Technical Conference, Prepress Asia, and Digital Design World.

Associate Consultant

David R. Guenette is Associate Consultant at Gilbane Group Inc., and Principal of DRG Publications, a practice covering the connected content market with strategic technology and business development research, analysis, and editorial content, with special focus on both digital rights management and the editorial process within electronic publishing. David’s experience in publishing spans more than two decades, including in the top editorial positions at some of the leading CD-ROM and multimedia magazines and newsletters. David has been a speaker at dozens of conferences, and has produced several conference programs, including the first DVD Pro conference.

Director of Sales

Ralph Marto directs the sales activities for both Vendor and Enterprise consulting and services. Ralph is a twenty year veteran in the technology marketplace, having previously held a number of sales and marketing management positions. Prior to joining Gilbane Group, Ralph was with Perot Systems Innovation Lab and it's predecessor. Delphi Group, an analyst firm providing strategic consulting in the areas of Knowledge Management, Information Intelligence, and Business Process Management where he served as Team Leader of the Client Development Team. Previous to that Ralph was a manager working in both the sales and marketing areas for Omtool Ltd., an enterprise messaging software vendor. Earlier in his career Ralph held sales territory positions with New England Systems, Software Spectrum, and Digital Equipment Corporation.

Ralph is active in a number of non-profit organizations, and is a past Trust Fund Commissioner for the Town of Medfield, Massachusetts. He is a graduate of the School of Management at Boston University.

Contributing Analyst, Enterprise Content Management & International Research

Fal Sarkar joins the Gilbane Group with 15 years experience in content management industry in the area of sales, business development, alliances, and evangelism. Fal covers ECM and organizes Gilbane Group's international research from his base in Chennai, India. Fal is the Chief Architect for the India AIDS Training Network (IATN) an innovative training information management system and social network facilitating the training of doctors and clinical workers in the area of HIV and AIDS care throughout India, a high prevalence country for the pandemic. The network, developed under the auspacies of the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) of the Government of India, and funded by the World Health Organization, helps to train thousands of doctors in the urban and rural areas of India through regional Antiretroviral Treatment Centers in India.

Prior to this, Fal was Senior Market Segment Manager for Enterprise Content Management partners at Sun Microsystems in Menlo Park, California. As the goto person for ECM Alliances at Sun, Fal was responsible for managing Sun's strategy and partnerships with ECM companies, including Documentum/EMC, Open Text, FileNet/IBM, Vignette, Interwoven, Adobe, Fatwire, Stellent/Oracle, Xerox, and a range of other leading and emerging content, collaboration, and knowledge management vendors. This experience gave Fal an insider's view to the strategies and products of the leading ECM vendors, and strong grasp of the ever changing ECM market. Previous to Sun, Fal was Director of OEM sales and lead software evangelist at Xinet, a leading provider of workflow and digital asset management solutions for the graphic arts, printing, and advertising agency market.

Fal has been a member of a number of JSR Technical Committees, and a member of AIIM. He has dual bachelor degrees in Economics and Development Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and attended the Masters program in Urban and Regional Planning with an emphasis on international development and technology at UCLA.

Senior Analyst, Content Globalization

Karl Kadie is a senior analyst with the globalization practice at the Gilbane Group. Drawing on over fifteen years of experience with high technology companies, Karl helps organizations design, develop, and enhance their global content value chains. His analysis helps Fortune 500, mid-sized firms, and start-ups to develop and optimize their globalization strategies for product, marketing and sales operations. He also creates whitepapers, case studies, certification processes, and business tools for globalization, particularly for balancing centralized and regional operations. Karl is a co-author of the Gilbane Globalization Study entitled, Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Organizations Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain.

Prior to joining the Gilbane Group, Karl was a marketing director at SDL, a leader in globalization services and technologies, and at TRADOS, a pioneer in localization technologies. Previously, Karl was an executive with Technology Channels Group, a channel and alliance consulting firm, and PRTM, a leading product development and marketing consultancy, where his clients included Sun, HP, 3Com, Polycom, NCR, Lucent, Xybernaut, and Research in Motion. Karl also was an alliance marketing director at Veritas Software, where he managed strategic alliances with Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, and EMC, and a channel strategy manager for intercontinental operations at Sun Microsystems Karl has published educational material on topics such as global alliance strategies and practices, international business development and expansion, and global product communication strategies.