Interesting and diverse people gravitate toward CipherSpace. Our mission on this crew page is to introduce you to the person, not simply a list of past accomplishments. We will be highlighting a few folks at a time. Our hope is to give you a glimpse of why it is enjoyable to interact with CipherSpace — either as a customer or a colleague. Maybe we’ll see your face in this group one day.
Bill Cole has worked in IT for over 2 decades, after years of flirtation with theatrical design and biochemistry in his misspent youth. He has been a software engineer, BBS sysop, independent IT consultant, multimedia developer, IT manager, policy enforcement director, and system administrator at companies of a wide variety of type and size, including an early 90’s Internet startup, non-tech small businesses, a non-profit, and the US parts of two Global 500 corporations: DaimlerChrysler and Volkswagen.
Bill has had a strong focus on email, spam control, and security, with a knack for problem analysis. He is an official contributor to the Apache SpamAssassin project, a minor contributor to the OpenNebula cloud orchestration system, and a very minor contributor/chronic nuisance to many other open-source software projects.
Outside of work, Bill puts most of his time into caring for his disabled son, making coffee & sandwiches for his brilliant & beautiful wife, and enjoying the anonymity of having a very common name on Twitter. He is a pro-Oxford comma and anti-hate.
Mathias may say he does “bits and bobs” but that’s an understatement. His expertise crosses over many areas – business, engineering, marketing, technology and management, for starts. He’s also fluent in four languages. On a given day you may find him consulting with a customer as a technical advisor, working with sales on product documentation, training partners and customers, making presentations, implementing solutions, or speaking with clients — in their language.
One of Mathias’s great qualities is his spirit. He is always positive, eager to take something on, or stay late to bridge time zones. “No problem” appears to be his mantra. Whether he’s managing projects between the sales and technical teams or troubleshooting a client’s issue, his cheery, can-do attitude is a valuable trait.
Though he takes calls while walking his dog, he’s not all work. After hours he is a media and film buff, tv-series too — only if they are good. Staying fit and social, Mathias also manages to attend Country Line Dancing as much as possible.
Try to put Miheer in a mold, and soon you will be reshaping the mold itself unless it is that of a single-malt! His legendary love for single-malt is only second to his passion for building IT infrastructure and his tenacity in keeping it secure. Miheer is well respected for his ability to visualize and design optimized solutions for complex problems. In 1994 he profoundly impacted India’s technological landscape by working with the government to launch India’s first ISP. He continues to work in the trenches with his team, crafting resilient technological solutions for corporations both large and small. After successfully running his venture in the United States for over a decade, Miheer made the move to Switzerland in 2012 to establish a CipherSpace presence in European markets. When this die-hard geek, entrepreneur by profession, and natural problem solver is not deeply immersed in technology, he is very likely catching up on episodes of SNL – with a glass of single-malt of course.
Since the internet was young, Nikesh has been involved with IT infrastructure. There’s little he hasn’t seen or done. But more astonishing is how much he remembers. It’s handy when you need an obscure bit of information about a server that was set up two years ago. Less handy if you are debating him about anything – he will usually be correct.
Nikesh has expertise in network architecture design, system administration, implementation of distributed systems, security infrastructure, database administration, and knows more about networking operating systems, communication hardware, and internet applications than fit in on this page. While it’s not technically rocket science – he can do that too with a degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Southern California.
At CipherSpace he handles all of the above and manages people and projects smoothly and efficiently. A great mix of geek and diplomat, Nikesh truly enjoys meeting and working with people from different geographies and cultures.
After a day migrating clients to the cloud, budgeting, pricing and deploying data centers you might catch him watching sports with his son – recalling stats from every game played by the USC Trojans or the Ferrari F1 Team!
Cleo is a Designer for lack of a better description. She’s actually some combination of artist, empath, violinist, typographer, illustrator, high-tech/low tech enthusiast, and oyster farmer. She majored in Graphic Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. There, she was the first to use computers (Apple II) with her senior thesis (an animated shell form) which lead to a number of early computer adventures.
She joined the Digital Typography group at Stanford University as one of four pursuing a Masters in what computers could do for type under the guidance of Donald Knuth and Charles Bigelow. At Stanford, she designed a 1100 character font of Egyptian Hieroglyphs while working at various Silicon Valley start-ups at the time – Apple, Adobe, NeXT. At Adobe she designed Sonata, a font of music notation. At Apple, she is known for creating the eWorld interface – Apple’s online service.
In keeping with a great lack of definition and love of high-tech/low-tech, she hit the road for 10 years traveling throughout India & Nepal, Indonesia, South America, Europe to the Middle East – creating advocacy websites for Non-Government Organizations.
Her roots are in New England where she maintains an old farmhouse and lives/works off the grid on a small island in Maine. She has been with CipherSpace since the early days combining her many hats to work on internal projects as well as client websites and design.
Jigar loves data – if he were an artist, his sketchbook would be a spreadsheet. Not only has he helped large companies sort through years of pricing data to improve margins and revenues – he uses big data in his free time to track things for fun, like campaign promises.
He sheds the geekiness, however, when he interacts with people. Not only a good listener, he is also perceptive, inquisitive, and thoughtful. With a combined background in computer science and management, this wide set of skills would usually be enough for any organization but he ices the cake with a sort of fearlessness about getting things done. That also means he creates more time in a day to take on other unexpected skills, like learning Hindustani vocal training with his daughters.
