Senior Vice President, Operations & Intellectual Property Licensing Zvi Ruder’s role encompasses operations, content licensing, partnerships and consulting for Hypatia. His areas of expertise include: information services, digital media, acquisitions and licensing for all types of journal, book, reference and research products for leading Scientific, Technical & Medical [STM] publishers as well for the Life Science and Biotech industries. Dr. Ruder has held executive and senior management roles with leading global organizations as Decision Resources, Inc., Academic Press, [acquired by Elsevier], Springer Science & Business Media, American Institute of Physics, and Kluwer Academic Publishers. His professional memberships in scientific associations consist of: the American Chemical Society, American Physical Society, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the American Association of Professional and Scholarly Publishers.

Moreover, Dr. Ruder was the recipient of the prestigious Bi-National Science Foundation Fellowship and the Rotschild post-doctoral fellowship. He attended both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ben-Gurion University, Israel and holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in engineering. In his spare time, Zvi enjoys fine wine, science fiction and travel. A member of the American Vexillogical Society, he is also a serious collector of books relating to political symbolism.

Senior Vice President and Chief Research Officer (Emeritus) Leslie Ament is a Customer Intelligence Management thought-leader and analyst who focuses on how organizations capture, manage, analyze and apply actionable customer insight to improve customer management techniques, reduce operating expenses and to accelerate corporate growth. Her coverage areas include: CRM, Web Analytics, Business Intelligence, Social Media Intelligence/Search/Text Analytics, Digital Marketing, and Customer Data Management, Governance, Risk & Compliance. She frequently shares expertise on webinars and at conferences such as: CRM Evolution, IBM Information on Demand, SAP Sapphire, SpeechTek, CXFusion and the American Marketing Association, and is published on SandHill.com, destinationCRM, and hosts the Customer Analytics & Insights Channel on the B-Eye-Network.

Ament also serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Applied Marketing Analytics, a practitioner focused publication. Recent keynotes presented to the Marketing and Technology Summit hosted by Direct Marketing News and to Product Camp, hosted by the Product Management Association have included “How CRM, Big Data, and Multichannel Customer Engagement Enhances Profitability” and “Marketing, Big Data, and the Customer Experience”. A hands-on practitioner, Ament has overseen business requirements gathering and implementation of various SaaS and on-premise CRM solutions and managed customer data migration projects prior to becoming an industry analyst. Previously, Ament served on management teams and lead global marketing and market research groups at Demantra, Inc. (acquired by Oracle), Arthur D. Little Management Consulting, Harte-Hanks, Banta Corporation, International Thomson Publishing (Chapman & Hall, UK) and Carnegie Hall, Inc.

Ament is a member of the American Marketing Association, Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals, Customer Relationship Management Association, DataShaping Certified Analytic Professional, Arthur D. Little Alumni Association, Software Industry Information Association and a Board Member of the Product Management Association. She completed her doctorate Phi Kappa Phi at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and her Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees at the Indiana University-Bloomington. Her passions are international travel, spicy food, classical music, jazz, and Chicago-style rhythm & blues.

Global Client Services Director Jim Budkie is a business and marketing executive with over 40 years in the High Tech sector. Jim joins Hypatia Research Group to manage the sell-side (software provider) of HRG’s business, helping vendors understand how to best engage and leverage Hypatia’s research content and insights. Prior to joining HRG, Jim was most recently VP, Product Management at Gartner, Inc., managing their software provider mMarketplace. Earlier roles include CMO for Hitachi Consulting, and a number of executive roles in marketing, strategic planning and product management for NCR Corp. Jim holds an MBA in Marketing from the University of Cincinnati, and a BS and MS in Physics from Xavier University. Jim is a student mentor for Xavier University’s school of business and is a past Chair of XU’s Executive Board of Directors for the marketing department and an adjunct professor of marketing. Jim and his wife, Gail, enjoy travel in North America and Europe, cycling, golf, and spending time with their two children.

Senior Analyst, Information Management, Risk and Security Lisa Vaas has researched and written about technology since 1995, serving as Executive Editor for eWEEK before going on to venues including CIO, ComputerWorld, PC Magazine, IT Expert Voice, Software Quality Connection, Time, Sophos’s Naked Security blog, and the US and British editions of HP’s Input/Output. She’s covered Customer Relationship Management, database technologies, SMBs and their technology needs, a diverse range of information security topics, and careers in the technology workforce.

Senior Analyst, Enterprise Information Management Starting in 1987, Howard Baldwin has covered the impact of technology on business writing about everything from PCs and Macintoshes to games and mainframes, and the chips that run them. With extensive expertise at leading industry publications as: Electronic Business, Electronics Design Chain, ZDNet Tech, M-Business, Line56, PC Computing, Corporate Computing, UnixWorld, Open Systems Today, Macworld, CIO, and Upside, Baldwin’s work as executive editor, senior editor, columnist and author has significantly influenced and educated business leaders for over two decades. In the book publishing industry, Baldwin co-authored Teach Yourself Macintosh in 24 Hours (with Anita Epler; Hayden Books, 1999) and edited Mac OS X for Unix (by Matisse Enzer, Peachpit Press, 2002). He is also the author of Quip City (Robert D. Reed Publishers, 2004) Howard lives with his wife, a physician, and their three cats in the Silicon Valley.

Senior Analyst: Storage & Information Management Sonia Lelii has covered Information Management, Storage & Security for over 15 years–as an analyst and as an award-winning journalist. Her keen insights and bottom-line approach to assessing the business benefits of technology usage continues to influence scores of senior executives. Lelii’s previous roles include: Research Analyst, Information Management & Security, Harte-Hanks/Aberdeen Group, Analyst at The 451 Group, Senior Technology Columnist at VAR Business/CMP Media and Senior Writer/Editor at eWeek, PCWeek/Ziff Davis Media. Lelii holds a degree in Journalism from Temple University and likes to chill with her canines on weekends.

Senior Analyst: Business Intelligence & Analytics Louis Olds has significant expertise in business intelligence, analytics and enterprise software. Prior to joining Hypatia, Olds was VP at KXEN a provider of data mining tools, VP at PeopleSoft [acquired by Oracle], and Senior Analyst at First Nationwide Bank and TMAC. As an independent consultant, Olds focused on helping clients define strategic requirements, understand competitive threats and opportunities, survey the market for compatible technologies and provide guidance for solution features and architecture. Moreover, Olds is experienced in on-demand pricing analytics solutions specific to CPG/Retail industries as well as applications for natural language search and text analytics. He holds a B.S. Chemistry fro m the University of Southern Mississippi.

Senior Director, Corporate Accounts & Hypatia G2M Enterprise Licensing Emma Leeming joins Hypatia with 10 years of experience in Scientific, Technical & Medical [STM] publishing, including acquisitions and licensing for journal, book, reference and research products. She has held positions at Current Science, Academic Press [acquired by Elsevier], Kluwer Academic Publishers, and Springer Science and Business. Emma holds a PhD in Biochemistry, from the University of Cambridge, U.K., and a BSc Honours in Chemistry. Emma spends as much time as possible exploring the outdoors of the Pacific Northwest with her husband and children. She also volunteers as a member of the Board of Directors for the French Immersion School of Washington.

Senior Director Corporate Accounts & Hypatia G2M Enterprise Licensing Menahem Dolinsky a competitive intelligence and information retrieval expert joins Hypatia Research Group to further expand research products and services in the EMEA region. Previously Menahem served as the Israeli academic libraries consortium (MALMAD) manager as well as manager of the libraries system at Bar Ilan University. In addition, he served as an external adviser in the field of competitive intelligence to the Office of the Israeli Prime Minister. Earlier in his career, Menahem held a full time faculty position in the information science department, and continues to teach courses on competitive intelligence. He holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry (B.Sc.) and a master’s in information science from Bar Ilan University, Israel.