James Donelan

Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Computer Software industry

May 2009 – November 2011 (2 years 7 months)

Lithium provides a revolutionary Social CRM platform enabling enterprises to interact with their customers on the social web. Lithium powers online customer communities for enterprises, allowing them to drive word-of-mouth marketing, reduce costs with peer-to-peer support, and accelerate innovation by tapping new ideas directly from the customer base.

Lithium is funded by leading venture capital firms Emergence Capital Partners, Shasta Ventures and Benchmark Capital.

I'm responsible for leading the architecture of Lithium's SaaS-based social CRM platform supporting over 180 enterprise communities, 20+ million users and over 2 billion page views a month, including large scale customers such as AT&T, Sony, Linksys, Salesforce, MTV and Paypal. I also run the engineering team responsible for the development of the Lithium technology platform.

July 2008 – January 2009 (7 months)

CTO for an early stage startup developing a trip planning and social travel platform - funded in part by the Irish government.

Partnered with Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Ireland (DERI) to develop shared IP including a semantic web-mining engine and user recommendations platform for the travel space.

Developed using 100% Ruby on Rails and combining innovative features including trip planning, recommendations/advice, booking and social features. Deployed using cloud based computing including Amazon EC2 and S3.

Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry

May 2007 – April 2008 (1 year)

Established startup and developer of a SaaS-based enterprise travel platform used by the largest airlines and travel companies in the world including American Airlines, Virgin America and JetBlue.
• Provide oversight of a mid-sized technology organization (20+) including in-house, remote and consulting teams. Responsible for technical strategy, planning, engineering, budget and hiring. Actively involved in equity funding including leading technology discussions with VCs and board members.
• Lead the architecture and engineering of core platform handling millions of transactions/day and over $1 billion in combined travel booking revenue/year.
• Provide leadership for all technology decisions including UI/Ajax, application framework, persistence, caching and supplier integration. Developed on 100% open source using lightweight Java, Spring and Tomcat/JBoss.
• Lead the adoption of Ruby on Rails for new Web 2.0 embeddable travel widgets and social networking tools.

Public Company; 201-500 employees; EPNY; Computer Software industry

February 2005 – May 2007 (2 years 4 months)

Principal Architect for Epiphany/INFOR CRM enterprise product lines.

Reported to CTO and VP Engineering, responsible for leading architecture and engineering in a number of key efforts including core J2EE platform, service enablement, BPM integration and UI frameworks.

Lead the architecture for the "Open SOA Platform" for all CRM products with a $20mm budget. Comprised of both tooling and runtime platform features for service modeling, development, BPM, and ESB integration.

Principal architect for the "E.piphany CRB Platform" – a metadata-driven J2EE and .NET suite for application development including UI framework, screenflow, platform services, ORM persistence, EAI and web services.

Lead the technology integration (through 2 acquisitions) and OEM partnership with JBOSS and other vendors.

Epiphany was purchased by SSA Global in Sep 2005 and subsequently purchased again by INFOR in 2006.

Public Company; 10,001+ employees; SCHW; Financial Services industry

May 1997 – December 2004 (7 years 8 months)

Lead the architecture and engineering of enterprise-wide J2EE and .NET trading systems in the US, Europe and Asia - across key enterprises including Global Technology, Architecture, Frameworks and Desktop Technology.

Provide hands-on technical leadership and mentoring to 20+ person engineering teams. Responsible for the delivery of software architecture specifications, sizings and project deliverables. Implemented software-development best practices including AGILE, SCRUM, XP, Continuous Integration and automated build/test systems.

Architect for one the largest online securities trading systems in the world schwab.com with over 7mm active users. Integrated with mainframe, exchanges (NASDAQ, NYSE) and a variety of enterprise systems.

Lead the design and development of the International Order Routing System – a global trading/FX hub integrating international broker-dealer systems in Europe, US and Japan and enabling multi-country trading.

1996 – 1997 (1 year)

IBM spin-off providing workflow-based IT consulting to banking and insurance companies in Ireland and the UK.

Public Company; 10,001+ employees; HPQ; Information Technology and Services industry

1993 – 1995 (2 years)

Software engineering of sales, order management and logistics systems at Compaq’s European, Middle East and African (EMEA) HQ’s in Germany.