Team
Peter Alfred-Adekeye - Founder & CEO
Peter is the CEO and founder of Pingsta - He is responsible for the overall strategy and direction of the company and leads the core technology and infrastructure on which Pingsta is based. Prior to Pingsta, Peter founded Multiven and before Multiven, he spent five years at Cisco in various technical and non-technical leadership positions within Cisco's advanced engineering and technical services organization in the UK and in San Jose, California. Peter holds a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in Civil Engineering from the University of Ife and has completed several executive development education from Stanford University. He is a certified Kepner-Tregoe Program Leader, a master-troubleshooter and an internetwork expert. Peter enjoys running, martial arts and travel.
Deka Yussuf - VP of Marketing & Business Development
Deka is the Vice President of marketing and business development at Pingsta. She is responsible for overseeing Pingsta's monetization strategies, corporate branding and communications. In addition, Deka focuses on business development activities and strategic partnerships . She has over eight years experience in brand development, marketing and online business strategies for leading consumer companies ranging from Diesel jeans to Cisco. Deka holds a bachelor's degree with honors in marketing from San Francisco State University. To decompress, Deka enjoys working out, yoga and hiking.
Tobi Knaup - Lead Software Architect
Tobi is the lead software architect of Pingsta. He oversees the platform development and new product design and architecture. Tobi also guides the site's infrastructure to ensure seamless expansion and scalability. Tobi holds a Masters degree in electrical engineering and information systems from Munich University of Technology (TUM) and loves all kinds of music, skiing, mountaineering and traveling the world.
Ashley Lovato - Community & Public Relations
Ashley is in Pingsta marketing, public relations and partner management. She is responsible for developing online sponsorships, strategic partnerships, media relationships and overall marketing communication. Ashley holds a B.A. degree in Communication Studies from San Jose State University. In her downtime, Ashley is a community fitness bootcamp instructor and enjoys exploring the California outdoors.
News
Pingsta Introduces a Subscription-based Network Support Service for Small and Medium Businesses
Redwood City, CA - October 7, 2008- Pingsta - the online collaborative platform for internetwork experts - today launched ICE Pro™, an online subscription service that provides small and medium businesses with on-demand access to premium network engineering resources. Pingsta ICE Pro™ provides carrier-class consulting and break-fix operational support that helps businesses manage complex Internet Protocol technology, lower operational costs and increase productivity.
As small and medium businesses become more reliant on web-based applications to support their day-to-day operations, the network has become an essential resource for them. Pingsta ICE Pro™ represents a Network-Intelligence-as-a-Service model that enables fast-growing businesses to tap into an existing pool of expert-engineering talent, without the costs and distractions of owning and maintaining internal resources.
“In a climate where IT talent acquisition is a difficult and costly exercise, the need for an on-demand solution that provides complete network ownership and peace of mind to small businesses is paramount” said Deka Yussuf, VP of Business Development. “When people need electricity, they do not build a power plant to get it. They plug into the electricity grid through the socket on the wall and only pay per usage. Pingsta ICE Pro™ allows businesses to access network expertise in the same way.”
In order to save costs, small and medium businesses used to rely on ad-hoc relationships with consultants with very little networking experience to navigate through complex technologies. With ICE Pro™, a monthly subscription fee of $60 grants them the ability to purchase consulting and break-fix tasks as needed. These tasks are resolved by industry-expert engineers who specialize in a multitude of networking technologies, such as LAN, VPN and VoIP.
Some of the key features of ICEPro™ include:
- Multivendor and Multi-technology Support
- Task Management
- Multivendor Knowledge-Base
- Unlimited Storage
- Secure Encrypted Communication
- Intelligent Task Assignment
- Service Level Management
Pingsta ICE Pro™ is currently available worldwide. Supported vendors include: Cisco, Juniper, Foundry, and Alcatel-Lucent.
About Pingsta
Pingsta is a collaborative platform for the world's Internet experts. Pingsta celebrates and facilitates social and intellectual collaboration amongst all the experts that invented and continue to sustain the various components that make up the Internet. Pingsta members include inventors, fellows, professors, distinguished engineers and technical leaders from over 50 countries.
Pingsta's Inaugural Hall of Fame Members
- Concept of network computers began in the early 1960s at MIT
- DoD Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA now known as DARPA) took over networking research in 1962
- In 1969, ARPANET launched a 4-node INTERNETwork connecting SRI (Palo Alto), UCLA, UCSB & University of Utah
- At 10:30pm on October 29, 1969 Charlie Klein (at UCLA) and Bill Duval (at SRI in Palo Alto) sent the first Internet computer-to-computer message Ð The intention was to type ÒL-O-G" but only "LO" made it across before the remote device crashed.
- 1972 - The first email was sent
- July 1987 - The modern Internet is born from NSFNet
- July 1, 1988 Ð The T1 backbone went live, IBM with the Nodes, MCI with the links and Merit made it all work - growth rate was about 20% per month
- Aug 6, 1991 - Tim Berners-Lee of CERN launches the first website.
- 1997 - NSFNet is decommissioned and Network Solutions was contracted to manage domain name registration
- Today, 2008 - Over 2 billion people are online with excess of 500 million devices - not including laptops, servers and PDAs which probably add another 1+ billion devices
One of PingstaÕs core objectives is to celebrate all those that have helped to create (and continue to sustain) the Internet. As such, It is with great pleasure that Pingsta hereby honors the following fifty extraordinary engineers by bestowing upon them the inaugural Pingsta Hall of Fame membership for their various contributions to the development of the Internet:
- Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (deceased)
- Ivan Edward Sutherland
- Donald Watts Davies (deceased)
- Paul Baran
- Leonard Kleinrock
- Robert W. Taylor
- Lawrence G. Roberts
- Charlie Klein
- Bill Duval
- Vint Cerf
- Robert Elliot Khan
- Dave Walden
- Douglas C. Engelbart
- Dan Murphy
- George O. Strawn
- Doug Gale
- John Connolly
- Gordon Gallup
- Eric M. Aupperle
- Hans-Werner Braun
- Stephen Wolff
- Ira Richer
- Jane Caviness
- Karen Sandberg
- William Yeager
- Andy Bechtolsheim
- Tom Rindfleisch
- Les Earnest
- Len Bosack
- Sandra Lerner
- Kirk Lougheed
- Jeff Mogul
- Bill Nowicki
- Benjy Levy
- Philip Almquist
- Greg Satz
- Noel Chiappa
- Robert Metcalfe
- David Reeves Boggs
- Chuck Thacker
- Butler Lampson
- Tim Berners-Lee
- Robert Cailliau
- Marc Andreessen
- Eric Bina
- Larry Smarr
- Tony Johnson
- Bill Joy
- Ken Thompson
- Dennis Ritchie
Please join Pingsta in saluting these exceptional individuals and their contribution to the development of mankind.
Sincerely
Peter Alfred-Adekeye
CEO, Pingsta
Pingsta helps network pros land consulting gigs
Online group seeks expert network engineers for consulting work - By Tim Greene
Network World , 04/24/2008
An elite social-networking site for network engineers is expanding into consulting on IT projects for businesses and service providers.
The site, Pingsta.com, has been in beta for about a year now, assembling a stable of about 500 networking professionals it deems worthy to be considered experts, says Deka Yussuf, marketing vice president for Pingsta.
The site is now testing a service called Pingsta ICE in which it pairs customers who need help on IT projects with qualified networking experts from among Pingsta.com members.
When requests come in for help, Pingsta's software sorts them and notifies members with the best qualifications. The first to respond wins the engagement. Customers pay pingsta.com, which takes a portion of the fee and pays the engineer who does the work.
Some work is done on a flat-fee basis, and other types are negotiated based on the size of the project, Yussuf says.
Initially, experts were selected by Pingsta staff and invited to join, but now the site lets interested parties submit résumés that are screened to determine whether applicants will be granted membership, Yussuf says.
Ronald Jean, a network engineer for Verizon Wireless, joined Pingsta recently after learning about it during a discussion on the business-networking site LinkedIn. He says he uses Pingsta as a way to discuss networking issues with other experts, learn about problems and bugs, and get a global perspective on the industry. "It seems to be a very powerful tool that will get more powerful as more people join," Jean says.
Current qualified experts hold industry certifications such as CCIE and JNCIE, and they are categorized based on this expertise and the types of gear they are qualified to work on. So far, Pingsta staff vets applicants. "But we want to get to the point where it's a self-regulated community," Yussuf says.
Each member is allowed to invite three other people to join. Most of the members work or have worked in service provider organizations, and many are retired. "This is a way for them to extend their intellectual legacies," she says. "Maybe they worked for 10 or 20 years at Cisco. What do they do now?"
From Pingsta's perspective, it runs a consulting service but doesn't have to pay salaries. "It's a very interesting model from the perspective of sales and marketing expenditure," Yussuf says.
The company is privately funded but is considering seeking venture capital, she says. It hopes later this year to have customer case studies it can make public.
The company was founded by CEO Peter Alfred-Adekeye, an engineer who has worked for Cisco, IBM Global Services and AT&T. He is also CEO of a service company called MultiVen specializing in network maintenance, operations and optimization that he started after leaving Cisco.
Alfred-Adekeye also in 2006 set up The African Network, an organization that promotes entrepreneurship in African and elsewhere by people of African descent.
Pingsta Unveils its Intellectual Commerce Ecosystem - Pingsta ICE™ - the Next Generation Service Delivery Engine for the Networking Industry
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. - April 15, 2008 - Pingsta - a collaborative platform for the world's internetwork experts - today announced the launch of Pingsta ICE™, Pingsta's Intellectual Commerce Ecosystem. Pingsta ICE™ provides network equipment manufacturers, IT service providers and enterprises worldwide with the next-generation network engineering service-delivery engine on a per-task basis, for break-fix, consulting and research and development challenges. Pingsta ICE™ clients leverage Pingsta's coalesced intelligence to augment their in-house talent and surge engineering capacity at the push of a button - efficiently, transparently and cost effectively.
Over the past few years, network equipment manufacturers and IT service providers have struggled to acquire and retain the top talent needed to expedite new product and technology development as well as support services delivery cost-effectively and their previously adopted model of offshore outsourcing has failed to resolve this dilemma. Pingsta ICE™ provides a holistic solution to these challenges by allowing network equipment manufacturers and IT service providers to leverage Pingsta's global community of expert engineers transparently.
"Pingsta ICE™ is the logical answer to the human, intellectual and financial capital challenges facing the networking industry today" said Peter Alfred-Adekeye, CEO and founder of Pingsta. "With Pingsta ICE™, network equipment manufacturers and service providers reduce their operational expenditure without compromising expertise and customer satisfaction. Additionally, Pingsta ICE™ provides the entire telecommunication industry with the collaborative talent-on-tap model necessary to accelerate the pace of innovation required to build and sustain tomorrow's networking products efficiently."
"By creating an intellectual capital economy within the Pingsta community, Pingsta ICE™ provides network engineers with an unprecedented opportunity to monetize their knowledge, expand their technical horizon, and work from anywhere in the world, anytime" said John Baekelmans, Pingsta technical advisory board member.
Pingsta ICE™ has already signed up its first customer, Multiven - a leading global provider of premium network maintenance services - and has commenced worldwide customer executive briefings and demos.
Pingsta is a collaborative platform for the world's Internet experts. Pingsta facilitates unprecedented intellectual collaboration amongst all the experts that invented and continue to sustain the various components that make up the Internet. Pingsta members include inventors, fellows, professors, distinguished engineers and technical leaders from over 50 countries.
Pingsta Launches mySolvr™ - an Open Repository of Comprehensive and Validated Internet Infrastructure and Application Intelligence.
Redwood City, CA - April 2, 2008 - Pingsta - the collaborative platform for the world's internetwork experts - today announced the launch of mySolvr - an openly-available repository of comprehensive, organized and validated internet infrastructure and application intelligence. Through the use of open collaboration, mySolvr aggregates re-usable intellectual capital that enables Internet Protocol network infrastructure and applications to function seamlessly irrespective of the underlying hardware, software or technology.
This multi-faceted knowledge base is designed to provide network engineers and end-users alike with concise validated internet infrastructure and application intelligence that will help them better plan, build, operate and optimize their networks which will improve the availability of the Internet as a whole.
"With the ongoing growth and pervasiveness of the Internet from the enterprise to the networked home, there is a need for an openly-available Internet knowledge-base that is comprehensive, organized and validated." said Peter Alfred-Adekeye, CEO and founder of Pingsta. "Every single day, enterprise networks and the Internet infrastructure experience preventable degradation and outages that impacts revenue, productivity and end-user experience negatively. MySolvr provides network engineers with a single platform to concisely document their best practices so the world can benefit from their collectively re-usable intellectual capital."
MySolvr is populated by Pingsta's expert members and a global audience of volunteer network and application engineers and enthusiasts. MySolvr entries are categorized into one of the following five knowledge bases:
- Solutions - concise answers to network hardware, software and application problems
- Networkpedia - network encyclopedia
- Bugs - a repository of all known internet software and hardware defects
- How Tos - Internet cookbooks and best practices
- Quick Tips - Expert tips
MySolvr is aggregating content for all network equipment and application manufacturers worldwide including Cisco, Juniper, Motorola, Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia, and Ericsson.
About Pingsta
Pingsta is an online collaborative platform for the world's Internet experts. Pingsta is facilitating unprecedented intellectual collaboration amongst all the experts that invented and continue to sustain the various components that make up the Internet. Pingsta members include inventors, fellows, professors, distinguished engineers and technical leaders from over 50 countries.
Pingsta and mySolvr are registered trademarks of Pingsta, Inc. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.
