Baynote Names John Kelly Chief Operating Officer and Head of Global Sales, and Mark Tsimelzon as Chief Development Officer

SAN JOSE, Calif., June 13, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Baynote, a leader in personalization for e-commerce retailers, today announced the expansion of its executive leadership team, appointing software industry veterans John Kelly and Mark Tsimelzon to the roles of chief operating officer and head of global sales, and chief development officer, respectively.  

Kelly and Tsimelzon join Baynote at an exciting time: The company closed out 2010 with 75 percent growth in recurring revenues, and in January 2011 received $13 million in Series C financing as well as appointed former SAP executive Doug Merritt to CEO. The Kelly and Tsimelzon appointments will help accelerate Baynote's ability to deliver innovative products and manage growing demand for its e-commerce personalization solutions.

At Baynote, Kelly will immediately focus on the rapid expansion of the company's global sales organization while ensuring organizational alignment across all departments.  With more than 20 years experience in the high technology industry, Kelly most recently held the role of SVP/COO of OnDemand Solutions at SAP with additional leadership positions involving multi-billion dollar revenue generation, sales, consulting, and strategic account management at the company. He was also SVP of the Advanced Product Services and Americas Customer Support divisions at Oracle, directly responsible for revenues of over $2.3B and the delivery of key software and service solutions that included global outsourcing/SaaS. Other key leadership roles included CEO, COO, and vice president at Fortune 250 corporations and emerging companies that included Chevron, Life Technologies, Icarian (acquired by Workstream Corp.), Premenos (acquired by Harbinger), and Cerebra (acquired by Software AG). 

"I'm thrilled to join Baynote and have the opportunity to work for a company that is truly revolutionizing the way business is done on the web," said John Kelly, Baynote COO and head of global sales. "Online retailers today need solutions that allow them to visualize in real-time what visitors are doing on their site in order to deliver a personalized experience that matches or exceeds in-store experiences. Baynote is perfectly positioned to deliver on this demand and I'm looking forward to working with the rest of the team to help more e-commerce companies realize the power of our unique solutions."

A recognized expert in real-time analytics as well as Big Data and specifically Hadoop, an open source distributed computing framework, Tsimelzon will be responsible for new product development, scaling the Baynote platform and growing the company's engineering team. Tsimelzon founded and served as CTO for personalization company CallTheShots (acquired by Akamai Technologies) and real-time analytics provider Coral8 (acquired by Sybase). He also held the role of director of engineering for Hadoop and Cloud Computing at Yahoo!, where he headed several key Hadoop teams. Most recently, Tsimelzon was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, where he investigated business opportunities in the real-time analytics and personalization markets.

"Real-time analytics and personalization have been long-time passions of mine, so joining Baynote is an extremely natural fit and extension on my previous experience," said Mark Tsimelzon, Baynote chief development officer. "Beyond the company's technology and products, I've been extremely impressed with the caliber of the Baynote team and recent market traction. I'm excited to hit the ground running at Baynote and build on the innovative work the engineering team has done already."

"John and Mark make excellent additions to the Baynote management team and will be invaluable to the company as we enter into this next phase of rapid growth," said Doug Merritt, Baynote CEO. "I had the pleasure of working with John previously at both Icarian and SAP and he is hands down one of the most intelligent, hard-working and creative people I know. Mark has an incredible pedigree in real-time data and personalization and will be a huge asset to Baynote as we continue to innovate and evolve our product capabilities. "

About Baynote

Baynote drives e-commerce conversions, profits and productivity up and operational costs down with its breakthrough approach to personalization.  The Baynote Adaptive Web Suite provides robust, real-time intelligence about who your shoppers are, what products they are interested in and why, based on dozens of shopper behaviors that Baynote tracks and implicit shopper conversations that Baynote monitors.  With this intelligence, Baynote matches the right people with the right products at the right time far better than traditional personalization.  Baynote is based in San Jose, Calif., with offices in the U.K. and Germany, and has over 300 customers.

SOURCE Baynote