San Diego's ‘Unsung Heroes’ of tech honored at Top Tech Awards

Thirteen of San Diego County’s technology innovators were recognized at the 12th annual Top Tech Awards which honors the region’s “unsung heroes” of information technology in the areas of business, education, government and nonprofit organizations.

Nearly 1,000 attendees were on hand for the awards ceremony, which was held at the Del Mar Fairgrounds and is the largest annual celebration that honors the county’s outstanding information technology executives.

Dr. Mark Zecca, executive director of educational business systems for the San Diego County Office of Education, received the Lifetime Achievement award. Christopher Petersen, Chief Technology Officer for Scientist.com, received the Cox Business Exemplary award.

The 11 category honorees, selected from 228 nominations, include:

• Private Micro (0-50 employees): Mark Sulzen, SmartDraw, Inc.
• Private Small (51-150 employees): Alexandra Gerritsen, Cali Bamboo
• Private Med (151-300 employees): Geoff Howard, National Funding
• Private Large (301+ employees): Brian Nordmann, Dudek
• Education: Nathan Short, Encinitas Union School District
• Government: Keith Fernandez, San Diego County Sheriff’s
• Start-up: Travis Fawcett, AristaMD
• Nonprofit Small (0-300 employees): Matthew Mower, Point Loma Credit Union
• Nonprofit Large (301+ employees): Naravanadas Vakamudi, Family Health Centers San Diego
• Public Small (0-300 employees): Frederick F. del Rosario, Xeris Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
• Public Large (301+ employees): Mark Kohlheim, CACI

“IT departments are critical to an organization’s ability to be innovative, and the Top Tech awards recognize those exceptional IT leaders who bring innovation to their teams and our San Diego region,” said Duane Cameron, Vice President of Cox Business, which has recognized local technology leaders with the awards since 2008.

Honorees for the Top Tech Awards were nominated by their peers and customers and selected by an independent judging panel.

In addition to presenting sponsor Cox Business, sponsors included RapidScale, ScaleMatrix, Green Rope, Via Technical, and the San Diego Business Journal.

About the Top Tech Awards
Since 2008, Cox Business has lauded the incredible information technology innovators in the San Diego. The Top Tech Awards pay homage to the wealth of talent in our local community who have vision, take risks, and implement new cutting-edge technologies, all in the name of making their organizations more connected, more productive, and more successful. Since its inception, the Top Tech Awards has grown expansively and stands today as the premier information technology event in San Diego. In 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 all presiding mayors of the city declared the event day as “Top Tech Exec Day” in San Diego, recognizing the city’s information technology leaders and their amazing contributions to our community. For more information, visit www.toptechawards.com.

Top Tech Award Honoree Summaries

Top Tech Lifetime Achievement Award: Dr. Mark Zecca, Executive Director of Educational Business Systems, San Diego County Office of Education
Dr. Mark Zecca, who holds a Ph.D. in information technology management, is currently executive director of educational business systems for the San Diego County Office of Education. Among its many roles, the office provides business services — including information technology — to more than 50 public school districts serving more than half a million students. In addition to the Top Tech Lifetime Achievement Award, Zecca also received Top Tech awards in 2010 and 2012. He was also named a Technology Laureate by ComputerWorld magazine in 2013, for his work in enterprise resource planning (ERP) and mobility technology. As a student, Zecca was on the track to become a physician when military service intervened during the Vietnam War. He stayed in the military — active duty and reserve — for 34 years. And it was the military that steered him toward a career in technology. The legendary Navy computer scientist, Adm. Grace Hopper, was one of his instructors in the emerging tech field. Zecca built the first Coast Guard data center in the early 1980s. He retired from the Coast Guard with the rank of captain, and also held the rank of Naval Commodore. Zecca teaches at several postsecondary schools, including the Forbes School of Business and Technology at Ashford University in San Diego. He is also a visiting professor of operational sciences at the University of Montpellier, France.

Top Tech Cox Business Exemplary Award: Christopher Petersen, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Scientist.com
As chief technology officer and co-founder of Scientist.com, Christopher Petersen is part of a small start-up with an undeniably large goal — making it possible to cure all human diseases by 2050. His efforts with Solana Beach-based Scientist.com have garnered him the 2019 Top Tech honor as the Cox Business Exemplary Honoree. Petersen co-founded the business in 2007. Today the company is a 70-person global operation that has created a research marketplace for 16 of the world’s top 25 pharmaceutical companies, 20 large cap biotechnology companies, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, as well as two of the life science industry’s largest U.S. and European group purchasing organizations. Petersen helped grow the company’s sales to $110 million in 2018. Scientist.com anticipates sales in excess of $200 million in 2019. Since its founding in 2007, Scientist.com has raised $32 million in funding from top-tier venture capitalists. Petersen has helped create an award-winning company culture that is the special sauce behind the company’s rapid growth. Despite having the furthest commute to Scientist.com’s Solana Beach office, Petersen, a Coronado resident, is consistently the first San Diego-based employee to arrive on any given day and one of the last to leave. During the summer, he rides his bike 6 miles to a ferry, takes the ferry to downtown San Diego and then takes a train to work, making for a two-hour commute each way. Petersen also won a Top Tech Award in 2014 and has served as a judge for the awards program since then.

Top Tech Award – Nonprofit Small (0-300 employees): Matthew Mower, Chief Information Officer, Point Loma Credit Union
As Chief Information Officer at Point Loma Credit Union, Matthew Mower is part of a community-chartered credit union serving nearly 30,000 residents of San Diego and Riverside counties at six branches. In the past year, he has completed and enhanced core networking technology for the credit union, paving the way for enhanced services and a decrease in capital costs by more than 30 percent. In 2018, Mower also started a telecommunications project that will replace telecom services at all Point Loma Credit Union locations, enhancing services on a fully meshed secure infrastructure. The conversion will decrease telecom costs by more than 40 percent. Services include enhanced video conferencing services, Internet portal for members and team members to schedule meetings, applications to enhance information access and search capabilities. He also created Wi-Fi and mobile access for members and the employee team to use and educate members on uses of remote services provided by the credit union, and enhanced mobile banking capabilities, as well as starting the conversion to a new online banking application.

Top Tech Award – Nonprofit Large (301+ employees): Narayanadas Vakamudi, Chief Technology Officer, Family Health Centers of San Diego
Passion, dedication and love are all words that have been used to describe Narayanadas “Das” Vakamudi’s attitude toward his work. Vakamudi is chief technology officer at Family Health Centers of San Diego, a four-decade-old nonprofit that services more than 190,000 low-income patients annually. Under his leadership, Family Health Centers was able to achieve multiple certifications in 2018 for its products, including ones pertaining to ambulatory services and electronic prescriptions for controlled substances. The center, with Vakamudi’s help, has also developed meaningful stage 2 certified electronic health records, and a patient portal used by 60,000 registered patients. Billing and purchasing systems have been improved, too.

Top Tech Award – Private Micro (0-50 employees): Mark Sulzen, Vice President of Technology, SmartDraw Software LLC
SmartDraw offers software that makes graphics easy for its clients — who include more than 250,000 organizations, and more than half the companies on the Fortune 500. Behind the scenes at its Scripps Ranch office, Mark Sulzen makes it easy to work at SmartDraw. Sulzen, a longtime SmartDraw employee, has provided technology leadership that allowed fellow employees to focus on growth strategies. He has improved the infrastructure from the desktop to the storage fabric with 99.99 percent uptime. Among his recent accomplishments, Sulzen has: upgraded all company workstations to solid state drives for improved office performance; installed an all-flash storage array with more than 100 virtual machines with no down time and vastly increased server performance across the infrastructure; installed a new hybrid storage array in a disaster recovery site to maintain 24-by-7 uptime and provide business continuity options in case of an emergency; configured external apps to use a single sign-on through a third party service to maintain easy to use security for corporate applications; upgraded the company’s main conference room with three 82-inch 4K televisions with Wi-Fi remote access control for laptops and other devices; and passed an annual SOC 2 Type II audit and completed monthly PCI scans throughout the year. With solid IT in place, SmartDraw’s employees have had room to develop, sell and deliver their product, and to grow the business.

Top Tech Award – Private Small (51-150 employees): Alexandra Gerritsen, Vice President of Customer Service & Transformation, Cali Bamboo
Alexandra Gerritsen is vice president of customer experience and transformation for Cali Bamboo, a San Diego-based flooring and decking home improvement company. Prior to joining Cali Bamboo, she served as director of technology and then senior director of operations at Carlsbad-based Buzztime. Gerritsen’s major 2018 projects fall under three distinct categories: business systems, infrastructure and customer experience. She oversaw each task, and in most cases did the initial vendor research, troubleshooting and team member training for each implementation, according to Cali Bamboo’s vice president of human resources, Misty Madrid, who nominated Gerritsen for the award. With business systems, Gerritsen integrated systems for better demand planning and forecasting. With infrastructure, she switched the company to a new phone platform allowing for customers to be routed to their rep quicker. She also mapped out opportunities for technology and artificial intelligence to improve the customer experience.

Top Tech Award – Private Med (151-300 employees): Geoff Howard, Chief Technology Officer, National Funding
On the heels of several impressive years of building out an in-house engineering team from scratch, San Diego tech leader Geoff Howard had an even more exceptional year in 2018. Howard is chief technology officer of National Funding. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in San Diego, National Funding and its 230 employees provide more than $2.5 billion in working capital for more than 20,000 small and medium-sized businesses. For his part, Howard is tasked with moving National Funding’s technology capabilities forward in order to ensure customers get the capital they need quicker, easier and in more customized ways. He also improved internal capabilities resulting in a more streamlined, efficient workday for his fellow National Funding employees. In the past year, he delivered projects that the company, only a few years prior, never imagined, and was rewarded in January with a promotion to his current position. Some of his 2018 achievements include delivering customer experience and digital channel innovations supporting a 300 percent increase in traffic; transforming the digital sales experience for customers with the creation of an E2E digital loan process that increased digital data capture by 400 percent and enabled customer checkout experience to go from hours to minutes; and implementing a modern omni-channel customer experience with the implementation of cloud-based telephony and texting solutions, reducing call transfers by 85 percent and adding a new communication channel critical to conversion.

Top Tech Award – Private Large (301+ employees): Brian Nordmann, Chief Information Officer, Dudek
Nearly four decades after its founding, one Encinitas-based business is keeping up with the times with the help of one Brian Nordmann. Nordmann is chief information officer of Dudek, a well-established planning company founded in 1980. At Dudek, Nordmann works alongside environmental planners, scientists, engineers and contractors who help clients plan, design, permit, construct and manage projects that improve communities’ infrastructure and natural resources. Since joining Dudek in late 2017, Nordmann has led a number of IT initiatives aimed at transitioning IT from a reactive support function to a proactive and strategic partner in driving business opportunities while providing frictionless IT services to staff. Among those successful initiatives spearheaded by Nordmann in 2018 was a complete refresh and standardization of all legacy wired and wireless networking at all 15 Dudek offices — including a migration from traditional MPLS to SD-WAN. He also implemented a new innovation platform which explores potentially disruptive technology that may impact Dudek and its clients. Nordmann also established an executive briefing series to educate Dudek’s leadership and board on emerging, disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence. He also established a new approach to identifying cybersecurity risks and prioritizing security-related initiatives, rolling out new phishing training and security awareness programs to Dudek’s staff.

Top Tech Award – Public Large (301+ employees): Mark Kohlheim, Vice President, CACI International Inc.
As vice president of CACI, Mark Kohlheim is part of a company that provides information solutions and services in support of national security missions and government transformation for intelligence, defense and federal civilian customers. It is his job to strategically assess the future needs and requirements that U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps clients will need in three to five years. Kohlheim advises CACI on the technical direction, skill sets required, and investments required to make sure CACI stays ahead of its competitors while satisfying customer needs. For his efforts, Kohlheim was selected for the 2019 Top Tech award in the large, public company category. During the past year, Kohlheim delivered eight percent year-over-year growth — twice the corporate growth target. Kohlheim was also the lead architect of CACI’s $960 million win of a cyber mission engineering multiple award contract and a past Top Tech Award recipient.

Top Tech Award – Public Small (0-300 employees): Frederick F. del Rosario, Director of Information Technology, Xeris Pharmaceuticals Inc.
When Frederick F. del Rosario joined Xeris Pharmaceuticals Inc. less than a year ago, the company had no IT department, no system and network infrastructure, and limited applications. All it did have was corporate email. The Sorrento Valley-based company — currently focused on developing and commercializing diabetes/hypoglycemia injectables — has tripled in size since del Rosario joined it in mid-2018. During his short tenure, del Rosario has contributed to the design and build out of a new San Diego office with laboratory benchtop workspace; implemented a robust infrastructure to accommodate both the San Diego and Chicago locations; and provided for a video conferencing system to streamline communication between sites and save on travel costs. He has also developed and launched a corporate intranet as a corporate communication tool and onboarding resource, and implemented a security suite of tools to harden the company’s new infrastructure. To support the company’s exponential growth, del Rosario and his team used technology and process to simplify employee onboarding. The IT department partnered with human resources and developed tools such as the corporate intranet, and automated workflows help expedite the hiring and onboarding of all these new employees.

Top Tech Award – Education: Nathan Short, Director of Information Technology, Encinitas Union School District
As director of IT at the Encinitas Union School District, Nathan Short has “gently pushed the envelope” of adopting new technologies, which improve working and teaching conditions. He introduced wireless document cameras and presentation equipment, for example, and upgraded the district’s server infrastructure. Short has also improved technology in special education, which serves students with disabilities. He has successfully stretched dollars and resources, and saved $1 million through commonsense shuffling of the district’s iPad inventory between all schools to accommodate specific grade levels, extending device utility by several years. Short cut budget by $250,000 in 2018 — a cumulative $750,000 over the past two and a half years — by extensively training existing staff as an alternative to outsourcing and adapting job roles to accommodate district needs. He has improved customer service by putting all staff in the field and leaving call centers unmanned with voicemail and help desk ticketing systems. Short has provided seminars to help colleagues at other school districts, addressing topics such as operational security, data breach strategies, disability access law compliance, cost cutting techniques and team-building. In 2018, Short was named school district employee of the year. The Encinitas Union School District serves 5,400 students in preschool through sixth grade.

Top Tech Award – Government: Keith Fernandez, Manager of Technology, San Diego County Sheriff’s Department
Behind the uniformed law enforcement tasked with protecting county residents, is a slew of support staff protecting them, including ones in IT. Keith Fernandez is manager of technology for the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. The department and its 4,000 employees provide general law enforcement, detention and court services to a service area that’s approximately 4,200 square miles. For his part, Fernandez works tirelessly to future-proof the network infrastructure and provide cyber security. Fernandez is a creative thinker leveraging technology to deliver sensible business solutions and his responsibilities range from design, development and implementation for the network and security of the agency’s infrastructure. Among his accomplishments in the past year were Fernandez’s support of key information systems that service all law enforcement and justice agencies in the region; continued business continuity and disaster recovery planning and designs to ensure 99.9 percent in the event of network failure; and the achievement of 100 percent IT project performance to budget and schedule by outsourcing the provider. Keith strives to challenge his team to think more innovatively by leveraging new technologies and his focus for his team is to do more with less.

Top Tech Award – Start-up: Travis Fawcett, Director of Software Engineering, AristaMD
As the director of software engineering at AristaMD, Travis Fawcett is a leader in building things from the ground up. The La Jolla-based company’s eConsult Platform provides solutions to primary care providers with regard to clinical workup checklists and the ability to conduct electronic consults. Fawcett launched many new initiatives for AristaMD in 2018. First, he broke down the political barriers of two teams, product team and engineering, who had previously worked in a more siloed approach, according to Casey. Second, he implemented an entire data warehouse for the company from the ground up over the course of three months. Third, he proposed a new direction for engineering in splitting the application into “micro” services. The first portion of this was released in January 2019 and has energized the engineering team, who can now quickly and collaboratively develop with the product team and release code to production in under five minutes.