Ben Rouse has been working in the enterprise software industry for over 20 years. He started his career as a systems programmer in the supercomputing arena for a major defense contractor, and quickly moved into the enterprise vender space where he has spent the bulk of his career creating, marketing, selling, and supporting cutting edge, enterprise scale solutions.
Ben has served in key executive positions at IBM/Tivoli (enterprise systems management), United Devices (high performance computing), Hyper9 (virtualization management), Journee Software (enterprise data integration), and Convex (supercomputing). He has been a CEO in the software industry for over 7 years, and a board member for over 9 years. He’s raised over $35 million of venture capital, and been acquired by IBM, HP, SolarWinds, and Univa.
The majority of Ben’s companies underwent explosive growth as they evolved from start-up, pre-revenue status into revenue generating companies that served Global 2000 companies across the world. Ben has international experience and travel in over 15 countries, and intimate M&A experience including foreign acquisitions. He has grown an organization from 15 to over 1,100 people, and been General Manager of a $200 million business unit. In the national defense and intelligence areas, Ben has been involved in several “black” projects. As such, he held a Secret security clearance with the U.S. government for 4 years.
Ben has extensive business model design, corporate strategy, pricing strategy, license model, and market entry / expansion experience. As CEO of a startup company, he built and monetized consumer-oriented IT infrastructure that was used by more than 5 million people. As a vice president at IBM, he ran the IBM/Tivoli advisory board that consisted of 15 CIO’s across the world, and participated in many Fortune 500 sales initiatives that culminated in multi-million dollar transaction sizes.
Ben likes to write, and his articles have been published in prominent business technology magazines and online venues such as European CEO, Database Trends and Applications, and Virtual Strategy Magazine. He is currently working on research and advisory projects that include new value creation and delivery models, big data value propositions and correlation threads, and niche social media network opportunities.
Ben holds a Masters in Business Administration degree from Southern Methodist University, and a Bachelor in Computer Science degree from Georgia Southwestern University. On the personal front, Ben is an avid outdoorsman and involved in many facets of the Sport Fishing industry. He enjoys working out, listening to music, playing guitar, comedy, and magic.