|
Product-Strategies is a consulting service offered by John Higham. He offers the insight derived from his many years as individual contributor and executive manager of engineering and marketing operations in the Bay Area.
During his career in the Bay Area, John has been with four companies, leading engineering, marketing and business development, with most of his time in the position of Vice President of these operations. All these companies were venture capital start-ups that successfully went public. All had extensive international components to their business as well. His expertise has been in balancing market needs with engineering and business constraints, to successfully create hardware and software products that have the ability to scale, and managing the associated organizations through the transitions of that growth process.
John joined his first company, Measurex, close to inception and left after their revenues were over $300m a year, and were a NYSE company. Measurex was eventually acquired by Honeywell/GE. After Measurex, he joined two friends to raise venture capital from TVI and Kleiner-Perkins, to co-found Impact Systems. After that company went public, it was acquired by Voith Gmbh of Germany. Both Impact and Measurex were in the industrial automation space, involving computer systems, sensor design and hardware development. Two years after Impact went public, John joined Octel Communications, the leading provider of voice mail systems at the time, as VP of Engineering just after Octel’s IPO. For four years at Octel, during a period of high growth in revenue and profitability, he grew their engineering group from 40 to 200 people, including acquisition of an Israeli company.
John left Octel to get back to the start-up environment, and was put in touch with Omnicell through the venture firm Sutter Hill, just as Omnicell’s founder, was raising his first round of money. John lead the engineering group for 10 years, then headed marketing and business development for 2 years. Omnicell was recognized as the fastest growing company in Silicon Valley for the 5 year period 1994-98, and has been a pioneer in the automation of pharmaceuticals and supply management in acute care hospitals. They went public in 2001 (OMCL:NASDAQ), and have cumulative revenues from the products John helped create, of over a billion dollars. John recently left Omnicell, after twelve great years, to once again work with early stage companies. He is on the boards of two start-up companies at the present time, and consults with others.
John’s college education began in England at Cambridge University, where he graduated with a first class BA degree in engineering, and industrial management, followed by a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University, New York. He has ten U.S. patents on supply and pharmaceutical dispensing and industrial automation to his name, as well as thirty technical publications, and is co-author of a book on automation.
|
|
|