John M. Potochnak-President and Founder- has been successfully developing computer applications for nearly 3 decades. His first software development assignment, early in his college career, is indicative of John's talent. He was given an informal project to create a financial application for a department at Stevens Institute of Technology. Working by himself, from nothing more than a general outline of his "client's" requirements, John developed an application so advanced and sophisticated, that it was adopted by many departments within the school and remained in use for over 10 years!
John's began his professional computer career developing DEC mainframe operating system software. Within a short period of time, John managed the group responsible for operating systems development. Among his many accomplishments was the design and implementation of the DEC-10 interfaces for IBM disk drives, tape drives and printers.
In 1980, John decided to start his own business to focus on the fault-tolerant market dominated by Tandem Computers. In 1981, he joined Tandem in pre/post sales technical support to enhance his technical proficiency in the complexities of fault-tolerant/transaction processing systems and develop his presentation skills. He became an operating systems specialist.
At the end of 1983, John felt the time had come to leave Tandem, and he formed Digital Arts, Inc.; the company would specialize in the design and implementation of fault tolerant transaction processing systems. During the company's infancy, John operated primarily on his own, to establish relationships. During this time he designed and implemented a layer of the ISO model, an X.400 message switch, various communications systems and financial transaction systems, as well as various database systems. He also managed a number of projects to upgrade and implement transaction-processing systems.
Toward the end of the 1980s, John began hiring the best of the people with whom he had worked. These people became the core of Digital Arts; the designers, managers and implementers who gave Digital Arts the ability to take on larger projects and deliver top-notch solutions to clients.
John earned both his Bachelor of Engineering and a Masters in Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology.
Dan Baldwin - Vice President of Digital Arts, has been working on real-time applications since the early 1980s. When he joined Digital Arts, he added an exciting dimension to the firm's already strong capabilities. His proven track record in project management is complemented by expertise in the Online Transaction Processing environment, and extensive design experience with mission-critical systems on Sun and Tandem platforms.
Dan was the Vice President of Development at EDS's Electronic Funds and Information Transfer division. In this role, he managed an organization with a $40+ million budget including 80 developers with responsibility for one of the world's largest volume financial transaction switches-one that processes more than 3 million transactions daily. In addition to his managerial responsibilities, Dan was actively involved in the design and development of many of the intricacies of this mission critical system.
Dan spent several years at Bell Labs designing commercial email systems, and early in his career, he worked for the Securities Industries Automation Corporation (SIAC) on the development of trading systems for the New York Stock Exchange.
Prior to joining SIAC, Dan worked at Western Union, on the design of its Money Transfer system.
Dan earned his Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany.
Alan Irwin - Vice President of Digital Arts, has extensive experience in telecommunications systems design and network implementation. A recent focus of Alan's has been high-availability IP fax server products based on Sun and PC platforms. Alan spent 12 years prior joining Digital Arts as an independent data communications consultant.
Alan was a lead architect in the design of the EDS middleware product (EON), which provides an application framework for the transport of financial transactions.
Before becoming a consultant, Alan worked at Plessey Telecommunications, where he led groups producing messaging systems for FTC and ITT. Additionally, Alan's early career work was as a telephony signaling system design engineer for British Telecom 's Computer Systems Division.
Alan has a B.S. in Computer Science and Cybernetics from University of Reading, UK.