Andy Kulakowski
President & Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
Andy recently celebrated his 30th year at Fresche! Over the years, he has held a series of senior positions in customer service and call center management, including Vice President of Customer Support and Product Services, and Chief Operating Officer.
As President/CEO, Andy spends his time setting corporate goals, maintaining Fresche’s global leadership position in IBM i modernization and management and maximizing the company’s shareholder value. Andy achieves his goals by establishing a clear strategic direction and a solid and original corporate vision.
He also finds pride in building an all-star management team, cultivating a strong company culture, and he constantly strives to build a thriving work environment. When he’s not working hard at Fresche, he’s working hard on his extraordinary, yet fictional, NHL career.
Robert Héroux
Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
Robert has extensive international experience in sales, marketing, distribution channels, business development and leadership development. This experience built over 30 years at IBM, of which the last 16 were in senior sales and marketing management positions at the global level, has allowed him to be recognized as an expert in the areas of client value creation, business growth, organizational and leadership development.
Robert has trained and coached managers and executives around the world, and taught courses at the MBA and executive MBA levels. He also served on the board of directors for various companies and associations over the years.
Brendan Kay
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Brendan has over 30 years of experience with midrange, mainframe, cloud and desktop computing. Since starting in 1985 as a mainframe computer operator, he has worked exclusively in business computing. Initially, Brendan worked with large industry players, but then co-founded looksoftware in 1996. He helped build looksoftware from zero revenue to sustained and significant success and was closely involved in technical direction, business development, sales, marketing and governance. In 2014, looksoftware was acquired by Fresche Solutions and Brendan was appointed an executive VP focusing on business and technical strategy before becoming the company’s first CTO in 2016.
Brendan’s success was built upon the belief that the best solutions are simple, effective and sustainable. In addition to many years as director of development, he has worked as customer support manager, head of sales and marketing, chief architect of business strategy and CEO of looksoftware.
Today, Brendan uses his broad experience and his deep understanding of the IBM i market to ensure that Fresche is entirely aligned to provide effective and practical solutions to IBM i customers.
Patrick Thibault
Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
Patrick’s role includes coaching, mentoring and strategic planning. His goals are to help his team at Fresche grow their skills and be successful, increase sales velocity, achieve operational excellence and accelerate value creation for our shareholders.
Previously, Patrick was a partner at Deloitte in the Financial Advisory Services department where he led the performance enhancement practice in the province of Quebec. Before Deloitte, he was CFO and EVP operations of MEI Computer Technology Group Inc., a Montreal-based software firm selling to manufacturers in the consumer package goods industry. Throughout his career, he gathered extensive experience in performance enhancement, strategy, financing, mergers, acquisitions and divestitures mandates in North America, Europe and Asia.
Patrick is a cycling enthusiast and he is looking to be the first “clean” athlete to win the triple crown, the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia and the Road World Cycling Championship in one year, all while wearing Fresche’s jersey.
Executives
Maria G. Anzini
VP, Human Resources
Fresche has been Maria’s home for over 28 years now. A true believer of continuous improvement, she has applied her passion for learning in a variety of technical and executive management roles.
Previously, Maria was the VP of customer support, where she learned the ins and outs of customer satisfaction from a product point of view. She was then appointed VP of application services, where she laid the same foundation but from the services side. These days, as the VP of human resources, she leverages all that she’s learned so far to help our most valuable assets reach their full potential in a culture that she is proud of, in 3 different continents and 17 different time zones.
Jennifer Fisher
VP, Ecosystem & Strategy
Jennifer is responsible for all aspects of the ecosystem, including all channel partners, VAR’s, CSP’s, ISVs, MSP’s, all aspects of influencers to our community and our strategic relationship with IBM. Prior to that, she was VP of Global Sales & Marketing where she was responsible for driving IBM i application modernization and management sales and marketing strategies as well as our partnerships with the larger IBM i community. In her 25 plus-year career at Fresche Solutions, Jennifer has held positions that span, business line sales, growth initiatives, marketing and strategic disciplines.
Chris Koppe
Senior VP, Transformation & Modernization Services
Chris is widely recognized as a thought leader in IBM i modernization and is a regular speaker at conferences, events, and in webinars. Since joining Fresche in 1988, he has helped hundreds of companies worldwide develop and execute successful IBM i management and modernization strategies, across a variety of platforms, languages, databases, and technologies. This insight has allowed Chris to accumulate a wealth of best practice expertise that covers everything from planning to deployment, project governance, audit and recovery for large-scale IBM i management projects.
Michael Killian
VP, Sales
Michael has been in IBM i industry since 1987, the year the AS/400 was born. His passion is working with the Fresche team and providing consultative guidance to teammates and clients to ensure that they can turn possibilities into valuable results. He has a varied educational and professional background; he’s gone from being involved in the travel to finance to tech industries, from working in collections to marketing positions, from paragliding certifications to an MBA, and from sales to more sales! Michael is not as successful with his other passion, his two spoiled-rotten pups; he has yet to get them to do anything productive other than reminding him when it is feeding time!
Jeff Lovette
VP, Sales
Jeff joined SoftBase in 1999. His extensive experience in the software industry has been integral to the company’s growth and ability to maintain high profitability. With his ability to nurture and grow key partnerships and other industry relationships, Jeff continues to expand the company’s footprint globally. Through multiple mergers and acquisitions, Jeff has gained years of experience in creating strategic visions for growth. Jeff has a B.Sc in Business Administration, major in Computer Information Systems from Western Carolina University. Outside of work, Jeff spends every minute he can with his wife and two sons enjoying life. He also enjoys hiking, camping, and golfing.
Marcel Sarrasin
VP, Marketing & Business Development
Marcel came to Fresche Solutions as part of the Quadrant Software and BCD acquisition where he was the VP of marketing and business development. He adds a deep understanding of the IBM i market to the executive team from his 15 years in the midrange market. Marcel filled many roles with BCD including product manager, technical support manager and trainer and uses that experience to help ensure we are delivering value to our clients. He has a Bachelor of Commerce (Honors) degree with a double major in MIS and marketing from the University of Manitoba. He coaches soccer and enjoys playing hockey and mountain biking.
Robert Rheault
VP, Application Services
Rob joined Fresche in 2012 as the director of application services and is enjoying every minute of it. He was recently appointed VP, thanks to the experience he gained working at IBM for 18 years. While at IBM, he worked in a variety of management and IBM i support roles. He was an ISO auditor at IBM for 10 years, and his last years there were spent working as the iSeries team coordinator at IBM Rochester, MN. In university, Rob studied computer management and while at IBM, he completed a variety of IBM i skills training, and even got his ITIL foundation certification. Rob has two beautiful teenage daughters who are the center of his life. When he’s not working, he enjoys running and every kind of skiing – water, cross-country and downhill.
Didem Cataloglu
VP, Professional Services
Didem joined Fresche in 2005 as a delivery leader in our professional services group. Today, she leads large teams in developing strategies, building plans, and delivering large, complex projects successfully. Her mission is to help her clients create value for their business and support their organizational success. Didem started her career as a software developer, so she understands both the business and technical requirements that make projects successful. Didem holds a degree in computer science from the University of Ottawa and an MBA with an IT & management concentration from Cass Business School in London, UK where she mastered the skill of leveraging IT to create business value.
Emmanuel (Mani) Tzinevrakis
VP, Pre-Sales Solutions
Mani is a software engineer with extensive experience in leading roles in sales, engineering, customer support and delivering services and solutions to clients across the globe.
Mani joined Fresche Solutions in 1988 and pioneered several key positions including product support specialist, escalation center manager, and project manager. He introduced the Project Management Institute’s professional practices to Fresche’s services delivery methodology. Today, Mani leads a global team of pre-sales specialists who help our clients find creative solutions to meet their business, technology and organizational goals. As an IT strategist, he works with our clients and facilitates visioning, strategizing, and planning for their mission-critical IBM i business applications to maximize organization impact, value creation and ROI.
Mani is passionate about working collaboratively with people to maximize their personal value, achievement and happiness.
Garry Ciambella
VP, Engineering
Garry joined Fresche in 1981, when he was actually doing RPG conversions on IBM System 3, 34s, 36s and 38s and HP 3000! Since then, he has managed development projects through a wide spectrum of technologies, starting with the company’s former fourth- generation language suite in SPL on the HP 3000, though the ‘Windows client-server period’, to BI tools, web development tools, mobile apps, RAD tools and more. Now, he focuses on IBM i discovery, application maintenance and database tools. One of his main pre-occupations is application transformation technology for Synon, RPG and COBOL. Pretty much every software title since the 90s has come out of one of Garry’s teams.
Garry studied business administration at Dawson College, and computer science at Université du Québec à Montréal. When he is not at work, Garry is usually playing guitar and / or singing rock and pop ‘covers’ in a number of music venues in the city. He has a 6 piece band and an acoustic duo that play the Rolling Stones’ most popular tunes.
Gavin Rogers
VP, Engineering
Gavin wrote the very first version of Newlook back in 1995 from pictures of screens in an IBM CUA manual with initially no live access to an IBM i (they were called AS/400’s then). He co-founded Looksoftware in 1996 and since then, we haven’t been able to get rid of him.
He currently manages the Melbourne development team, but still loves to keep his hands dirty in code. He has a passion for UI/UX interface design and Artificial Intelligence -Newlook’s recognition engine itself was an early attempt to categorize a screen’s components how a human would see it. Gavin is a firm believer in simplicity and prefers to get things done rather than talking about them. He also has a very bad memory, which the other developers make the most of.
Gavin is an active member of the local S.E.S (State Emergency Service) and can regularly be seen running around in orange wielding a chainsaw. Outside of work, he enjoys travelling, camping, not cooking, watching movies/documentaries and spending time with his family. He has three grown-up children and plays a mean game of chess.
Marc Hunter
VP, Engineering
Marc came to Fresche Solutions as part of the Quadrant and BCD Software acquisition. He cut his teeth 25 years ago developing BCD products on an old B10 above a garage. Today, he leads the Fresche development teams in the Sidney, Franklin, and Asheville offices. Marc is passionate about software development and problem solving, and has taken multiple products from conception to successful launch. As a serial tinkerer, Marc is always exploring new ways to bring value to customers and is constantly seeking to improve development processes. Outside of work, Marc and his wife manage a three ring circus – life with five kids! He also coaches a FIRST Robotics team.