Executive Members

Bill Bray, PhD, MBA, Vice President, Corporate Development

As a specialist in corporate restructuring and development, Dr. Bill Bray has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry, providing Business Development Strategies, Product Marketing, and Operations Support for software business services companies. He specializes in business plan development, brand recognition, product management and definitions. While his experience spans both the Fortune 500 as well as start-up companies, Bill held several interim executive positions as CEO/COO/CFO in the small- to mid-sized companies, delivering general management services to several industries including Medical Insurance and Medical Clinic, Pharmaceutical, and IT. Earlier in his career, Bill led a start-up Professional Services organization for Hitachi focusing on application development, CRM, database design and implementation for Hitachi where he grew revenue from $7M to $30M in the first year through organic growth and acquisitions. Prior to Hitachi, he defined and delivered an integrated portfolio of customer services to the global IT marketplace at NCR. As former CEO of COMDISCO, Bill also managed Services organization for CONDISCO with the total P&L responsibility to start up, develop, sell and deliver a suite of professional and outsourcing services increasing revenue to $150 million in 2 years. At Unisys, Bill created a new and profitable software business for this company where he took a $100M cost center and created a $250M profit center in a year. Here he created a new business in software products including application development, data and object management, systems and network management, transaction processing, and desktop processing while managing over 1,000 employees across locations in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, California, New Zealand, Australia and Great Britain. Bill holds a BS in Computer Science from Cal Poly University, an MBA from San Diego State University and a PhD in Business Administration from California Coast University.

Stephen Burgess, MBA, Vice President, Business Development

Prior to leading our US business development team, Steve was founder and CEO of Corporate Toolbelt, a training, consulting, leadership and coaching firm providing highly effective tools to greatly enhance the productivity of individuals and companies alike. Steve has over twenty years of senior executive experience turning around, building and leading extreme growth companies in multiple industries. His last 4 organizations have grown at least 300% in their first 3 years and as much as 3000%! Steve turned around and led the 6 th fastest growing small public company in the U.S. (as rated by Inc. magazine). He has served as chief executives for several start-ups, and made radio and television appearances. He currently serves on the boards of Wake Up, Inc. and Manavi Inc. Steve is also the Co-Author of the #1 Best Selling book, Purpose, Passion, Abundance, and the soon to be released Business Successes and the Enlightened Path . He is also author of the forthcoming book, Leadership Lessons Learned , as well as numerous articles on leadership, success, negotiating, networking, and how to build and rapidly grow a business. Steve holds an MBA from UC Irvine, California and is also a member of the National CEO Forum, American Association of Senior Executives, International Association of Coaches, World Speakers Association.

Isra Wattanasarn, MBA, Vice President, Corporate Finance

Isra Wattanasarn has twenty years of experience in the financial services and information technology consulting fields. Isra has been a consultant/industry analyst for Fuji-Keizai, one of Japan 's top market research and technology consulting firms. At Fuji -Keizai Isra concentrates on helping clients with the strategy, market research, technology recommendations and information systems analysis. Clients are the world's largest and best known consumer electronics, computer and communication companies. Before Fuji-Keizai, Isra served as a Vice President of Client Services at iframe, an Internet and information technology professional services firm, where he built the strategy group and managed all billable consultants. Prior to that, Isra was a Vice President at Merrill Lynch, in its Private Client Group, where he made venture capital investments in Internet and New Media startups. He served as a board observer for those companies in which Merrill made private equity investments. Before that, Isra was a consultant with Viant, where he was instrumental in adding value to a number of client engagements across a broad spectrum of services. His experience includes jobs in the securities market data, securities and software industries, having worked with Reuters, Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, Trust Company of the West and Computer Language Research. Isra have also published extensively on a wide range of communications, technology, and Internet topics. Isra holds an MBA in Finance from New York University and is a CPA. He is also licensed with NASD Series 7 and 65.

William Knoke, MBA, Vice President, Mergers & Acquisitions

William Knoke specializes in maximizing corporate valuations related to venture capital, private placement, M&A and preparing companies for IPO. He is an MBA graduate of Harvard Business School and earned a BA in Economics from Stanford University. During the past twenty years, his client roster spans entities ranging from IBM and AT&T to the World Bank and regional governments. William is aslo a specialist in the energy sector and consulting architect for several projects in international banking development. Mr. Knoke was also the key strategist rated by The Wall Street Journal as among the top ten stock-market performers of all American companies. William has an intimate exposure to a variety of industries including energy, computers, electronics, medical technology, defense, aerospace, consumer-products, banking and insurance.  As a sought-after keynote speaker at national conventions and international conferences, ranging from banking, insurance and telecommunications to senior members of government, William has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Forbes, Success, and other publications, and has appeared on over 50 television and radio interviews in the United States, Canada and Western Europe. Being a native-born Californian, William speaks four Western European languages, has dual citizenship with both the United States and France, and has worked or traveled in 64 countries. He currently lives in Southern California.

Donald Lin, PhD, Vice President, Medical Device Technology

With over twenty years of exepience, Dr. Donald Lin served as Chief Software Architect, Chief Intellectual Property Officer and Chief Technical Officer for eight consecutive years at Cardiac Science. He played a significant co-founder role in bringing Cardiac Science from a start-up stage to NASDAQ national market. As a technology acquisition authority, Donald heavily involved in 5 acquisitions then including Cadent Medical, Artema (Denmark), Survivalink, Compliance, and Quinton Medical, all that grew the company revenue to 1500% in 2 years. During his earlier technology career, Don also held senior software engineering positions at Del Mar Avionics. He co-authored software guidelines for the Nuclear Regulatory Committee and also served as an expert consultant of DeMatteo Monness LLC, an institutional brokerage firm. Dr. Donald Lin received his BS in Electrical Engineering from Beijing Normal University in Beijing, China, an MS in Computer Engineering, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Michigan. He is well recognized as a national expert in the field of software and medical devices and currently holds 8 US patents.


Billy Nguyen, MS, Vice President, Information Technology

Billy Nguyen has twenty years of experience in architecting, mentoring, developing and designing of enterprise business applications, systems, infrastructure for diverse industries such as manufacturing, defense, security, media and mortgage banking. He was Chief Architect at LendingTree, President and CEO of Advanced Concept Solutions, a surveillance software company. Billy has also held VP of R&D at Advanced Technology Center, VP Information Technology at Mag Innovision where he provided market insight, recognizing opportunities and applying best business solutions to offer competitive technology advantages to corporations. Billy holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from UCLA and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from University of Southern California.


Corporate Management

General Counsel