Apptera Appoints Marketta Silvera as Chief Executive Officer

Apptera Appoints Marketta Silvera as Chief Executive Officer

Industry Visionary Tapped to Lead Burgeoning V-Business Company

SAN BRUNO, Calif., Jan. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Apptera today announced the appointment of Marketta Silvera as the company's new chief executive officer. Silvera brings more than 25 years of proven leadership and technology experience to Apptera, where she will provide the corporate vision for new enterprise solutions and head the execution of the company's business growth strategy. She will also serve as a member of the board of directors of Apptera. Silvera replaces Lorraine Hariton, who was the company's chief executive for the past 18 months.

Silvera is a speech technology pioneer, and as president of Votan Corporation, a leader of early speaker-dependent and speaker-independent recognition technologies in Silicon Valley, she brought innovative speech solutions to U.S and global corporations as well as telecommunications providers -- including Bell Labs and RBOCs. Subsequently, these capabilities have become mainstream software and service offerings in the telephony, healthcare and industrial enterprise markets.

In the past year, Apptera shipped its first commercial products, signed marquee customers and alliances, launched a full suite of packaged speech applications and raised $8 million in financing. "Marketta's leadership will be invaluable to Apptera as we take our vision to the next level," said Rick DeGolia, Apptera Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer. "Apptera pioneered the packaged speech applications revolution, and Marketta's talent and experience in the industry will enable the company to focus on solving mission-critical problems in the enterprise world."

Silvera has previously held corporate officer and top executive positions in three technology companies. In the past decade, as an entrepreneur and CEO, she founded the first network-based Internet security company, Pilot Network Services, where the company's engineering team invented patented technology to protect enterprises against criminal hackers. She raised capital, established technology leadership in the marketplace, expanded the business to national and global markets and took the company public. Prior to that, Silvera headed VoiceCom Systems, a leading voice messaging and IVR systems provider, where her team acquired two key competitors and more than quadrupled revenues within two years. During her previous leadership assignment at Votan, the company launched the first voice recognition-based voicemail systems, fully configured with PCs and integrated with PBXs.

Silvera is a board member and past president of AVIOS, an international voice technology society, as well as a frequent speaker at technology and investment banking conferences, and has contributed articles to both local and national publications. She holds a bachelor of science degree in economics from Turku School of Economics, Finland, with course work in St.Gallen, Switzerland and graduate studies in mathematical economics at Syracuse University in New York.

About Apptera

Apptera's suite of highly configurable, packaged speech applications enrich the caller experience and greatly reduce time-to-market of voice self-service solutions. Apptera significantly lowers the traditional deployment cost and maintenance complexities associated with custom speech offerings, enabling enterprises to deploy speech at one-third the time and cost. The company's VoiceXML-based applications are platform-independent and ship with an intuitive, browser-based studio for easily adapting applications to specific business requirements. All applications are pre-tuned, ready to deploy out of the box, and can be easily modified and managed in-house. Founded in 2001, Apptera is a privately held Silicon Valley-based company funded by Walden International, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Alloy Ventures. For additional information, Apptera can be reached at 650-635-0600 or www.apptera.com.


Source: Apptera

CONTACT: Jodi Guilbault of Apptera, +1-650-635-0617, or
jguilbault@apptera.com

Web site: http://www.apptera.com/


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