HIGHFENS - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Business Development Manager

Ed joined Highfens after a decades-long career in technology companies, where he successfully architected and designed enterprise infrastructure services for mission-critical systems. He also spent significant time leading high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives critical to successful product innovations. In his current role as Business Development Manager for AI consulting services, he brings the unique perspective of understanding the challenges in bridging the gaps between traditional IT systems and highly performant AI infrastructure. While he is recognized as a strong technology leader, he started his career as a systems engineer and has always enjoyed the challenges of solving complex problems through hands-on technical experience. Ed was born and raised in Massachusetts but traveled the world as a Marine Corps Communications officer before returning to Massachusetts. He holds a BA in Biology. Outside of work, Ed has coached youth sports for many years and enjoys spending time in the great outdoors.

Job Titles:

• Chief Technology Officer
• Founder
• CTO & Founder of High

CTO & founder of HighFens, is an expert in high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). Called the Tech Forecaster, Van Haren has the unique ability to view an existing architecture, forecast issues a company will face, and quickly design efficient and impactful solutions. He is a co-host of "Utilizing AI", and every week a new podcast is released on the topic of AI in the enterprise. Our Chief Technology Officer, Frederic Van Haren, is known for his insights into the AI, Big Data, HPC, and storage industries. He has over 20 years of hands-on experience in high-tech and has built large HPC & AI environments for several customers from the ground up. He provides technical leadership and strategic direction to organizations aiming to become leaders in today's AI market. Frederic spent more than a decade at Nuance Communications. He contributed to innovative speech products and is frequently invited to speak at events to provide his vision on AI, Big Data, and HPC. He is a co-host of Utilizing AI, and every week a new podcast is released on the topic of AI in the enterprise. Frederic has also served as the president of various technology user groups promoting innovative technology. As an engineer, he enjoys working directly with engineering teams from technology vendors and challenging customer projects. Frederic lives in Massachusetts, USA but grew up in northern Belgium, where he received his Master's in Electrical Engineering, Electronics, and Automation.

Job Titles:

• Chief Architect

Mark is our consulting Chief architect responsible for the architecture of highly scalable environments and transformation projects. He has over 15 years of experience designing storage solutions and managing multi-petabytes of associated data. His experience as a non-traditional storage architect includes clustered and object solutions for High-Performance computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence environments. His background stretching across computing, storage, and network gives him an edge in handling complex data flows and managing large data sets. He started his career as a systems analyst focusing on network programming, where resilience and performance are a must. At Nuance Communications, he has managed clusters of over 2,500 servers through automation. Mark firmly believes in automation as it improves the time to implement changes into production from days and hours to minutes. It also helps to reduce human error and keeps costs down. At the same time, he developed solutions that reduce data gravity for multi-petabyte data systems. Most recently, Mark developed a solution for Aptiv's Mobility division to offload large amounts of data (2.6PB daily) from a fleet of autonomous cars. Throughout his career, he has enjoyed solving hard-to-find problems. Each new issue is a challenge and an opportunity to learn something new. Mark was born and raised in New England and resides in southern New Hampshire.