Robert Markell

ADVISORS

Bob is currently a private investor and advisor to a number of companies.  He is an accomplished senior executive and technologist with over 35 years experience.  During his career, he has served as a senior technology executive at a number of Technology Companies including IBM, UNISYS, Candle, and Programart Corporation.  Bob is an expert in product development and research, quality and project management, organizational development and customer support.

He has had P&L responsibility for substantial organizations spanning multiple locations and product lines.  He has played an instrumental role in the development and support of some of the most successful products known in the computer industry.

Most recently, Bob was Vice President of Product Development at Programart Corporation where he dramatically increased the output and dependability of the R&D organization.  He rebuilt the management team and doubled the size of the group enabling the company to keep pace with technology changes critical to support the company’s products, which are licensed by most of the Fortune 1000.  Bob’s work helped set the stage for the successful acquisition of the company by Compuware Corporation. 

At Candle Corporation as Vice President of the Product Group, he managed an organization of 400 with a budget in excess of 42 million.  This group had responsibility for the development and customer support for the industry-leading suite of performance and systems management software products.

At UNISYS as Vice President & General Manager of Applications Development, Bob was responsible for 1000 developers in five sites. Here he completely turned around a failing organization, guiding it to a leadership position in quality and customer satisfaction.

During his career at IBM Corporation, Bob was Division Director – Mid Range Systems (VP level position) where he was responsible for systems software strategy for OS/400, VM/370, and DOS/VSE.  Here he had direct management responsibility for 500 programmers and engineers.

As Vice President – Entry Systems, Robert had P&L responsibility for all Personal Computing Software Products.  He directly managed all development activities and the marketing, financial, and product planning staffs consisting of over 1200 programmers in 2 sites.  During this time, Bob negotiated projects with several independent software vendors, including the widely publicized joint development agreement with Microsoft.

As Director MVS Systems Development, he managed key system strategies across 7 locations, developing components of IBM’s primary large processor operating system MVS.  MVS is one of the most successful and widely adopted software products ever developed. In addition, Bob held the positions of Director, Corporate Technical Staff and Senior Manager, MVS Development.

Bob is a graduate of Providence College with a B.A. in Mathematics and a graduate of the summer executive program at University of Southern California