Management Team

Elizabeth Charnock, CEO

Elizabeth founded Cataphora and has led it from concept to profitability and to a successful pre-IPO divestiture that is unprecedented in the history of bootstrapped Silicon Valley software startups. To do this, she has drawn on her prior experience as a CEO and on her extensive knowledge of information retrieval technology and business. She was CEO and founder of Troba, an industry-leading Customer Relationship Management software company which she sold in 2001. Elizabeth has significant experience in engineering management, management consulting, and restart management at such companies as Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. Elizabeth holds a BS in Theoretical Mathematics from the University of Michigan Honors Program.

Philip Carruthers, Vice President of Sales

Philip is a senior sales executive with more than twenty-five years’ experience in delivering high-value technology solutions in a variety of areas, including cybersecurity, networking, and telecommunication for customers in the public and private sectors. Prior to joining Cataphora, Philip worked in sales management roles for industry-leading companies such as EMC, Alcatel-Lucent, and Compaq Computer amongst others. Philip’s educational background includes financial studies at the University of Maryland and the Executive Leadership Program at Babson College.

Rick Janowski, Director of Marketing

Rick has over 20 years of computer industry experience and has been with Cataphora since its foundation. Prior to Cataphora, he was Director of Product Marketing for Mercado, a search software startup. Previously, Rick held a series of positions with Hewlett-Packard. He started in HP’s corporate research laboratories in Bristol, England, and then in Palo Alto, California, researching knowledge representation technologies and inventing a number of tools for use in HP businesses. In 1994, he assumed the role of Technology Program Manager for HP’s public corporate website. Subsequently, he served in a variety of strategic business development and marketing roles. Rick earned a First Class Honours Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Manchester, England.

Mark Epstein, Chief Information Officer

Mark is responsible for the design and deployment of Cataphora’s data center and network systems. He also provides expert input to the design of Cataphora’s solutions for its customers. Mark leads a team that has many years of experience of deploying and running systems for fast, accurate, secure, large-scale and extremely reliable processing of data while supporting uninterrupted real-time access for large numbers of simultaneous users. Prior to joining Cataphora, Mark co-founded Ponte Communications, a network security software company, where he was Vice President of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer for over five years. Mark’s experience also encompasses network security consultancy and engineering of computer storage systems with companies including McAfee and Silicon Graphics.

Steve Roberts, Chief Technology Officer

An acknowledged industry leader in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Steve has specialized in combining NLP techniques with other technologies. Previously he led groups working on speech recognition at ViaFone and on agent technology at Dejima. He held similar roles at other Silicon Valley companies, including Neuron Data, the leading vendor of expert system technology. Steve studied computational linguistics at the University of Michigan.

Markus Morgenroth, Managing Director of European Operations

Markus has more than 10 years of computer industry management and software development experience. Prior to joining Cataphora in 2006, Markus worked as a software engineer at various companies in Germany including Dystar and Accovion. This was followed by experience as an entrepreneur with Smart-Websolutions, an Internet software and services startup. At Cataphora, he was part of the Application Development team in Cataphora’s headquarters offices in the San Francisco Bay Area, focusing on the design and development of components for various applications. In 2007, Markus relocated back to Germany, where he was appointed Managing Director of European Operations. Since then he has been responsible for meeting the region’s growing market demand for advanced software solutions for monitoring and analysis of individual and organizational behavior patterns. Markus obtained vocational training in Software Engineering at IHK in Frankfurt, Germany.