The Team

The Exalead team is singularly focused on developing and delivering the industry's leading information access platform so organizations can achieve competitive advantage.

Alain Cotte, CEO

Alain Cotte is Exalead's Chief Executive Officer and an advisor to the Qualis Group, Exalead's parent company, focusing on strategy, acquisitions, and operational management. Mr. Cotte began his career with Bossard Consulting (now Gemini Consulting) and later joined the Finon Sofecome Group as General Director. Mr. Cotte has a diploma from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Métiers.

François Bourdoncle, Exalead Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer

François Bourdoncle, a pioneer of the search engine software market, co-founded Exalead in 2000 to revolutionize the search engine software market. Mr. Bourdoncle, who has an extensive background in engineering and research and development, played a leading role on the LiveTopics project for AltaVista while at Ecole des Mines de Paris. He was also a senior researcher with Digital Paris Research Laboratory and Digital Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California. Mr. Bourdoncle earned a PhD. in computer science from Paris-based Ecole Polytechnique and is an author and a frequent speaker at industry events.

Patrice Bertin, Exalead Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer

Patrice Bertin, co-founder and CTO, leads the evolution and development of Exalead's information access platform. Mr. Bertin has extensive experience in information access architecture design and implementation from his leading work at Alta Vista and other major software companies. Bertin has a PhD. in computer science from Paris-based Ecole Polytechnique.

Guillaume Mainbourg, Assistant General Manager

Guillaume Mainbourg is Assistant GM of Exalead France and is responsible for driving the company's overall business and marketing strategy and operations. With over 20 years of IT experience with firms including Accenture and Ernst&Young, Mr. Mainbourg served as Chief Information Officer of TOTAL, and most recently, as a vice president at Cap Gemini. He is also an IT professor and vice president of the board of directors at Ecole Centrale Paris. He graduated from Ecole Centrale Paris and holds a degree in economics from the Sorbonne University.

Maud Ankaoua, Director of Finance and Operations

Maud Ankaoua joined Exalead as Director of Finance and Operations in 2002. Prior to Exalead, Ms. Ankaoua held executive positions at companies including Athanor, a major French advertising agency. Ms. Ankaoua earned a BA Honors in European Business and an MBA in International Finance at Nottingham Polytechnic in addition to a diploma from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, France's premier institution for political science, public administration and international relations.

Morgan Zimmermann, VP Business Development

As VP of Business Development, Morgan Zimmerman leads Exalead's new strategic market development initiatives. Prior to Exalead, Mr. Zimmerman led the telecom division at Cril Telecom Software, a French ISV in the telecom infrastructure planning industry. Within 5 years, he transformed the company from a French niche player to a worldwide leader in transmission planning through agreements with major infrastructure vendors and tier 1 pan-European and international operators.

Gregory Grefenstette, Chief Science Officer

Grefenstette, who received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh, has been a fixture of the information retrieval and natural language processing fields since 1988. A highly cited author and frequent member of international conference committees, he possesses 15 patents in the U.S. More recently, Grefenstette worked as a senior expert at CEA (the Atomic Energy Commission). Before that, he worked as an engineer at Honeywell Bull and as a principal scientist at Xerox Research and Clairvoyance Corporation.

Regional Sales

Kristine Kirchner Bouvier, Managing Director, France

Kristine Kirchner Bouvier leads Exalead sales in France and has been working in the IT sector for more than 20 years. Ms. Bouvier's held senior executive positions at major software companies including SAP as well as IBM and Oracle where she was vice president of Sales and vice president of Partner Sales, respectively. Ms. Bouvier has MBA degrees from INSEAD's Executive Program and EM Lyon Marketing.

Paul Doscher, Chief Executive Officer, United States

Paul Doscher joined Exalead as the CEO for North America in 2008. A software veteran in the IT industry, Mr. Doscher was most recently CEO of Jaspersoft, where led the company to become the worldwide leader in the open source business intelligence market. Mr. Doscher has also held executive management positions with leading high-tech companies including VMware and Oracle.

Raymond Bentinck, Managing Director, UK and Ireland

Raymond Bentinck serves as Managing Director in the UK and Ireland. Responsible for the development and direction of the company's overall business in this region, he has over 15 years of senior management experience in leading software companies including Verity, Computer Associates and IBM. Mr. Bentinck has an Honours degree in Computer Science from Aberdeen University.

Johan van Klinken, Managing Director, Benelux

Johan van Klinken serves as the Managing Director of Exalead in the Benelux. He is responsible for the development and direction of the company's overall business, direct and indirect sales and marketing strategy in this region. After over fifteen years of experience in the IT industry at companies including KPN and BroadVision, Johan van Klinken joins Exalead from IBM, where he was responsible for the software business in Public Sector, The Netherlands.

Irja Wichert, Managing Director, Germany and DACH region

Irja Wichert leads Exalead's operations in the DACH region. Ms. Wichert moved to Exalead in 2009 following a 20-year career in sales and consulting management in the enterprise software industry. Most recently, Ms. Wichert was Sales Director at Vignette and Managing Director at Tower Technology. Earlier in her enterprise software career, Ms. Wichert worked at Banctec and Filenet. She holds a Degree in Process Technology Engineering.

Jean Michel Bocchi, Managing Director, Spain and Portugal

Jean Michel Bocchi joined Exalead as Managing Director for Spain and Portugal in 2008. Mr Bocchi has more than 20 years experience in European Corporate Sales and Marketing, developing and managing Direct Sales and Indirect Channel Business Operations in both Spain and France at leading companies like Microstrategy and Cognos.

Rosagrazia Bombini, Managing Director, Italy

Degreed in Mathematics, Rosagrazia has over 20 years of experience in sales, with specific experience in direct and indirect sales, combined with a successful track record in team management. She started with IBM, she also worked with Sequent, a US company focalizing on Data Warehouse projects. And in 2001, Rosagrazia opened the Italian operations of Vignette.