Leadership

Faraz A. Syed, President
Recognizing a need in the rapidly growing mobile industry to provide the first truly affordable mobility quality management service, Faraz founded Keynote DeviceAnywhere™ (originally called Mobile Complete, Inc.) in April 2003. Faraz spearheaded Keynote DeviceAnywhere's evolution from being a technology provider for testing to its role today as a comprehensive mobile testing, monitoring, and quality management environment. Today Keynote DeviceAnywhere serves more than 2000 enterprises around the world.

Prior to launching Keynote DeviceAnywhere, Faraz was the Director of Solutions at Brience, a mobile WAP applications company, and a Technical Architect at KPMG Consulting. While employed with Brience, he experienced the difficulty and expense required to develop new mobile applications when teams often had to travel abroad to set up testing labs and independently purchase new handsets. The challenge facing the industry presented Faraz with the vision for founding Keynote DeviceAnywhere. Faraz has also held technical positions at Oracle, KLA Tencor and AMD. He holds a MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the lead singer for a local rock band, Kaif.

David J. Marsyla, Chief Technology Officer
David is a hands-on CTO who also maintains a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities in the mobile industry, David is the technical mastermind behind Keynote DeviceAnywhere's innovative approach to mobile handset testing. He has more than 15 years of technology architecture, management, and implementation experience, with seven of those in business and technology strategy in the mobile space.

Prior to founding Keynote DeviceAnywhere, David was the chief architect at Brience, a mobile applications company, where he was responsible for the design and implementation of Brience's market-leading mobile server platform. Prior to Brience, David founded "Market Shark," a provider of online stock portfolio management for active stock traders, and personally created the technical analysis solutions for the firm. Previously, David held various leadership and technical positions at Informix Software, Microsoft and Cray Research. David holds a BS in Computer Science with an emphasis in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. He enjoys sailing and long bike rides.

Christopher C. Callahan, Vice President of Sales
Chris brings more than 17 years of sales business management experience to the company and oversees all sales strategy and activity in North American, European and Asia Pacific territories. He manages both the direct sales campaigns as well as channel sales. His background includes building and leading sales organizations, as well as selling software solutions for the enterprise and wireless marketplace. Chris has worked for Cyclelogic, Portal, Clear Sky Mobile Media, Tornado Development and Premier Technologies. He holds a marketing degree from West Florida University.

Mark A. Dirsa, Senior Director of Finance
Mark serves as the Senior Director of Finance, bringing 20 years of financial and executive management experience to Keynote DeviceAnywhere. He most recently served as the Vice President of Finance of Radiocentral and as CFO of Alexa Internet, where he successfully negotiated and sold the company to Amazon. Prior to Alexa, Mark worked for seven years as Vice President and Senior Relationship Manager at The Dai-ichi Kangyo Bank, Ltd., where he started the high-tech corporate finance practice in San Francisco for the largest commercial bank in the world. Mark holds a BA degree in Economics from the University of Connecticut.

Robert Kleinschmidt, Senior Director of Engineering
Robert brings more than 20 years of years engineering management experience covering a wide range of products and disciplines with a strong background in enterprise product development, engineering process, QA, automation, and system virtualization.

He joins us from Oracle where he was a Senior Director of Engineering responsible for Software Engineering Tools and Infrastructure. Robert’s past roles include Senior Director at Evant, Geac, Extensity and SGI. He was responsible for development of the Merchandise Planning, Promotion Management and Event Management portions of Evant's enterprise offering, had responsibility for development of the Extensity Application Suite portion of Geac's BPM offering, and at Extensity he directed Release Engineering, QA Systems Testing, Infrastructure Tools, QA Certification Testing and Performance Engineering. While at SGI he created the SGI connectivity group which integrated workstations into the enterprise. Robert holds a BS in Computer Science from Arizona State University.

Leila Modarres, Senior Director of Marketing
Leila comes to Keynote DeviceAnywhere with more than 10 years of extensive marketing, communications and public relations experience. She leads the marketing and communications team and is responsible for developing and articulating the value of Keynote DeviceAnywhere’s solutions and brand as well demand generation and market visibility activities worldwide.

Prior to Keynote DeviceAnywhere, Leila held management roles at several high growth technology companies – from startups to multinational corporations. Most recently Leila was Senior Manager of Strategic Partner Marketing at Virtual Iron, a provider of server virtualization solutions, where she focused on establishing revenue generating partner marketing programs with strategic partners including Intel, IBM, HP, AMD and others. Prior to Virtual Iron, Leila was Manager of Marketing at PanGo, an RFID technology startup acquired by InnerWireless. Leila spent six years in the public relations arena at Porter Novelli where she supported various companies including EMC Corporation, Agilent Technologies, Analog Devices, Nuance Communications and others.

Leila began her career as an editorial assistant at the Harvard Business Review. She holds a BA in Communications from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a BS in Economics from Boston University.

Rachel Obstler, Senior Director of Product Marketing
Rachel brings to the team more than 10 years of experience in the wireless industry, having worked for companies ranging in size from startups to multinational corporations. She most recently managed the wireless data quality products at Telephia, Inc., a market research firm focused on the communications industry. She also has experience managing the products of various wireless technology companies, including Metawave Communication (smart antenna technology) and Enuvis (location technology). Rachel spent three years working with Lucent Technologies, where she managed and launched a billion dollar product line of CDMA Base Stations. She holds a BS in Management Science from MIT and an MBA from Stanford University and is an avid ice hockey player.