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Randall Severy President and CEO CyberTeams, Inc. (301) 473 7778
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| Work Experience | Education | Personal | Professional Skills | Favorite Quotes | Interests | Artemis Role |
CyberTeams, Inc. in the summer of 1996. He came up with the initial idea for the company at the end of June, 1996 while on an airplane returning from the Artemis '96 conference in Houston, Texas. The conference focused on the business aspects of the Artemis Project, and included a lot of discussions on the commercial companies that will form the revenue-producing component of the project. Those discussions provided the spark that set in motion several months of planning between Randall and Greg Bennett that led to the founding of CyberTeams, Inc.
The strategic plan for CyberTeams came from the experiences Randall had gained in leading the Artemis Electronic Communications Technical Committee. To solve several of the communications problems of the Artemis Project, Randall began to develop new software tools to support large distributed teams of people. He and Greg formed CyberTeams to develop and market those products.
To support a large number of users spread out across the Internet, all of the CyberTeams products are web server-based and are accessed through any standard web browser. Randall began product development of the first CyberTeams product, WebSite Director, a web site management system, in the fall of 1996. The demand for a smaller scale version of that product to support document sharing among teams led to the development of WebSite Director Lite, which was completed in March of 1997. The full commercial version of WebSite Director was completed in October of 1997. Randall continues to work on the development of future releases of WebSite Director and the second CyberTeams commercial product, Team Director.
Prior to founding CyberTeams, Randall spent most of his career at GE Information Services (GEIS) in Rockville, MD, the computer and information services component of the General Electric Company. Randall started working for GEIS in the summer of 1983 while still in college. With very little prior computer experience, Randall joined GEIS as a summer intern doing data entry work in an order processing group. He soon became curious with what was going on behind the data entry screens, and with the help of a mentor from the Information Systems (IS) department, started writing computer software to help with the order processing efforts. The following summer, Randall returned to GEIS as a summer intern, this time working as a programmer in the IS department.
The following year, in 1985, the IS group grew impatient waiting for Randall's graduation in 1986, and offered him a full-time programming position along with tuition reimbursement to help finish college in the evenings. With the rapid deployment of PCs within the company, the programming position quickly evolved into a PC Specialist position, and Randall spent the next several years supporting PC (and later Macintosh as well) computer usage throughout the company, along with a variety of PC programming tasks. Before long, the Local Area Network (LAN) came to the PC world, and Randall installed the first LAN in GEIS, based on technology from Corvus Systems. During that time, he joined the General Electric PC Coordinator program, representing GEIS. To improve the communication between GE components, Randall established a series of mailing lists and bulletin boards. In 1989 he received a corporate award for his work.
By 1989 Randall was itching for a new challenge, and took a new position in the Exposure and Risk Management Development group, writing the PC front-end software to an international banking application running on the GEIS mainframe computers. As the size of the PC development project grew, additional people were hired into the group, and Randall took over the PC development team as Project Manager in 1991.
The PC interface to the banking application, known as the Risk and Exposure Management system (RXM), originally developed in the DOS environment, soon expanded to support the Windows and Unix environments. Randall's original design for the software, which separated the platform-specific code from the main application functionality, allowed the porting of the RXM User Interface to multiple platforms with a very small amount of effort. Randall's five-person team was able to enhance and support the RXM UI on eight different operating platforms (various dialects of the DOS, Windows, and Unix environments) using a single code base.
In addition to his development work, Randall continued to oversee multiple Novell and Windows NT servers, several Unix servers (HP, Sun, and Linux) and workstations, communications servers and WAN gateways, with dial-in and dial-out LAN connectivity. In 1992 GEIS joined the on-line world with a low-speed Internet mail connection, and Randall soon started exploring the new frontier of newsgroups and mailing lists. When the World Wide Web exploded on the scene, it didn't take long to work its way into the GEIS internal LAN. Randall established the second Web server within GEIS on an HP server in 1993. In 1994, low-bandwidth desktop videoconferencing swept through the Internet with the release of Cornell's CU-SeeMe software. Randall put together a proposal for using CU-SeeMe on the GEIS Wide Area Network to connect field offices working on the RXM project. A pilot project was completed in 1995, with tests of LAN-based videoconferencing between Rockville, Nashville, and Dublin, Ireland.
Georgetown Day School and later Georgetown Day High School in Washington, D.C. He started college at Bennington College in Vermont in 1981 but found that the unstructured style of Bennington did not give him enough focus, so after a year he transferred to St. Mary's College in Maryland. After three years there, a job offer from General Electric proved too good to pass up, so he finished up his degree at night from the University of Maryland in College Park. He received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in 1990. Believing that education never really stops, Randall has continued an active training regimen, including management training and technical training courses in a variety of areas. He then set his sights on completing the Microsoft Technical Certification program. Randall received the Microsoft Product Specialist certification in 1995 and later completed 4 of the 6 exams needed for the Systems Engineer certification.
He grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. Several years after his mother's death in 1978, his father remarried and the family moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland just as Randall was leaving for college. Upon returning from college in 1985, he lived in Gaithersburg, Maryland for a while, then moved to Rockville, Maryland. In 1989 he moved to Mt. Airy, Maryland. In the summer of 2000 he ended up in Frederick, Maryland.
In early 1999 he took over the helm of the ASI Leadership Council in an effort to bring some sense of order to the ASI leadership team. Later that summer, at the Artemis '99 conference, he founded the Artemis Project Business Team, a group composed of the leaders of the Artemis Project program participant companies. In the summer of 2000, Randall helped found the Moon Society, a new organization formed to provide a broader forum for moon-related projects. As a penalty for his role in that effort, he was drafted as Chairman of the Board of the Moon Society.
Randall Severy founded