John Metzger

John has over 35 years of experience in managing software development, first at Software Decisions, a company he co-founded at age 24 which developed the implementation standard for lights-out factory automation protocols (acquired by Ungermann-Bass Networks), and then with several other successful start-ups. These companies covered many different areas of technology including networking, network and systems management, security, compression, virtualization, web and video optimization. He was instrumental in helping these companies achieve significant growth and product execution, leading to four acquisitions: Network Computing Inc., a developer of network and server monitoring products was acquired by Seagate in 1993; Apptitude, Inc., a provider of traffic classification engine technology was acquired by Hifn in 2000; Netli, a SaaS-based dynamic website acceleration provider was acquired by Akamai in 2007; Skyfire, the first to develop a web browser for both computers and smartphones with built-in video and image optimization, was acquired by Opera Software in 2015.