Mellis and Associates, Inc.

George C. Cowsar

George Cowsar has spent his career on the cutting edge of systems and development technology. Most recently he has developed Windows Mobile and iPhone multimedia applications, and lead an effort to use Amazon EC2 resources to measure and improve the scalability of J2EE-based web applications. In other recent projects George served as Software Architect while developing an extensive dynamic Ruby on Rails application with support for Flash, Quicktime, and MPEG video for animated text and graphics for web presentations.

George has extensive experience in computer vision and digital image processing for surveillance and industrial monitoring, including object recognition and tracking, from his architectural and managerial work at Detigo Systems. At Cisco Systems, he served as architect and team lead for the IP/TV streaming video product line, with technical contributions in RTP/RTCP, RTSP and RTSP protocols and applications.

Prior to Cisco he worked on web browser technology for Network Computing Devices, and did extensive development on networking and host connectivity protocols and operating system internals such as dynamic linking, IPC, and real time messaging infrastructure for Apple Computer.

Other commercial software that George has developed include WinTerm (shipped with Microsoft Windows,) the Visible Computer 8086, and the Visible Computer 6502.

George studied Electrical Engineering at Texas A & M University.

Michael R. Jordan

Mike Jordan has spent decades working with the latest cutting-edge technology in a number of fields. He most recently managed educational software product development at seven sites for Cengage Learning, introducing the Scrum framework and agile development practices as well as structured security methods. These Cengage SaaS products included homework, assessment, outcomes management and reference material applications for higher education. Mike has managed software development, documentation, QA, testing, SaaS operations and security at a number of companies in such diverse fields as SaaS (Cengage Learning and PlaceWare), game systems (3DO), high-performance systems (Ridge Computers) and embedded systems (Network Computing Devices).

Mike is a software developer at heart and prior to his management experience worked on software in research and simulations at GE; compilers, design automation and operating systems at Honeywell working on Multics; transaction-based file systems and early laptop computers at Gavilan Mobile Computers and embedded systems at Network Computing Devices.

Mike has provided security expertise for companies ranging from large financial services companies to online game startups. These reviews have dealt with topics including security architecture, risk analysis, code review and third-party suppliers. Mike has held the position of CISO for a major SaaS company. His SaaS and Security experience has included Forensics, Incident Response and Security Planning.

Mike is a Certified Scrum Master. Mike is a current member of the IEEE, ISACA (Silicon Valley Chapter) and ACM. You can find out more about Mike at LinkedIn or on the Multicians web site. He graduated from Arizona State University with a BSEE degree (before they had a Computer Science program).

Mark K. Mellis

Mark specializes in Information Security Architecture and Operations consulting. In his most recent consulting project for Mellis and Associates, Inc. client Cengage Learning, he served as the Infrastructure Architect, Operations Director, and Information Security Officer for a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) web application, with responsibility for the specification, architecture, design, implementation, operations, monitoring, security, and ultimately the decommissioning of the infrastructure for a suite of products that served more than 70,000 students. These J2EE applications used Apache httpd, tomcat and JBoss Java application servers, Sun's Java 5 64 bit jvm, MySQL and Oracle 10g databases, VMWare virtualization, and RedHat Enterprise Linux on Intel hardware co-located in a commercial Internet data center. In addition to the production, staging, and development environments, Mark also designed and implemented the distributed collaboration environment used by the product marketing, support, development and QA groups. This collaboration environment employed Atlassian's Jira, Confluence, and Crucible products, as well as a Subversion source code repository, and was used effectively by more than a hundred individual contributors working for eight companies in nine states and four countries.

Mark's Information Security consulting career spans a period of fifteen years and hundreds of engagements, during which he has served clients in the higher education, financial services, manufacturing, and high-tech sectors, including more than 50 of the Fortune 500 in the US, Europe, and Australia. These engagements encompassed application security assessments, incident response, architecture reviews, firewall design reviews for Cisco, Juniper, Checkpoint, and Sonicwall firewalls, firewall policy and process design, incident response planning, intrusion detection design and implementation, information classification policy and process design, secure collaboration design, cryptography management best practices, and interdisciplinary troubleshooting. His expertise spans core Internet technologies such as the Domain Name Service (DNS,) email protocols such as SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 and their encrypted variants, the underlying transport protocols TCP, UDP, and IP, the secure shell protocol ssh, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL,) and network time protocol NTP.

Prior to focusing on consulting, Mark worked as a software developer for Stratus Computer and Silicon Valley startups Ridge Computer, Mips, and NCD. Mark began his career as a nuclear power plant operator on U.S. Navy submarines where he held a SECRET security clearance.

Mark has written for TechTarget and Usenix's newsletter ;login, and has taught for Networld+InterOp and USENIX.

Mark holds the CISM certification and is a member of the ISACA (Los Angeles Chapter,) the IEEE Computer Society, and USENIX. He studied Physics at the University of Washington.

Jeff Rudy

Jeff Rudy has held a number of Executive positions in software development and product management for SaaS based collaborative applications and software development tools. His SaaS based experience includes leading the IT effort for large scale deployments of HR based applications to a broad range of Fortune 500 clients in Financial Services, Consulting, and consumer products. In development tools, Jeff has led the development of a suite of enterprise security tools for Web Services and SOA based environments which won awards from Network Solutions for the best SOA security tool and SD Times for best security testing offering. He also led the efforts for the first versions of Borland's leading Java Development environment Jbuilder and enterprise tools including Delphi Enterprise.

Throughout his career, Jeff led the formation of key intellectual property and joint development agreements with industry leaders companies including Oracle, Microsoft, Sun, HP and General Dynamics. In addition, he serves as an expert witness related to patents and trade secrets in the areas of networked applications, collaborative applications and conferencing software. At PlaceWare (acquired by Microsoft), as VP of Product Management and Strategic Alliances, he created major revenue streams by licensing software to OEM partners and was the focus for due diligence related to corporate acquisitions.

Jeff has developed Security policies and procedures to meet the requirements of both startup organizations as well as major public companies. These policies cover all levels of security including network, data, and physical security as well as disaster recovery planning.

Jeff is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University in Math and Computer Science and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School Of Management.

George B. Smith

George Smith's career in computing has deep roots in its fundamentals while embracing the latest technologies that promise to carry the Internet into the next decade.

George most recently served as half of a two person Mellis and Associates, Inc. team that installed, configured, and operated a cloud computing environment for Cengage Learning, supporting distributed collaboration amongst software developers, managers, support personnel, and educational assessment applications for more than seventy thousand end users. He implemented the vital performance monitoring infrastructure that extended the open source monitoring tools MRTG and Nagios to expose critical parameters in the underlying J2EE applications, Tomcat and JBoss application servers, Apache web servers, and MySQL databases. George also extended the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Kickstart environment to allow extremely rapid system installation and configuration in an environment where all significant system administration functions were conducted remotely, including reboots and software installations and updates. This included building and maintaining custom RPM packages and local mirrors of vendor repositories.

Prior to his work on the Cengage Learning project, George served as a senior individual contributor to the SNMP efforts of both Redback Networks and Lucent Technologies, designing, implementing, extending, and testing the crucial monitoring and configuration subsystems of their infrastructure products used in Central Offices by communications carriers worldwide. This work included development of SNMP MIBs and subagents, and integration of proprietary management interfaces for 802.1Q, ATM, and frame relay circuits, and configuration and monitoring of IP address pools for Redback, and both enterprise-specific and host resources MIBs and subagents for Lucent.

Earlier in his career, George participated in porting of the Unix operating system to new hardware and compiler tool chain development for projects at Stratus Computer, Inc. and National Semiconductor, as well as tool support for National's family of speech synthesis products.

George is a graduate of San Diego State University in Computer Science.