ConnectSolutions® LLC was founded in 2007 by Michael J. Fitzpatrick Jr. and Chris Tennant, who met while in management roles on the Acrobat® Connect™ Pro product team at Adobe Systems. Since founding the company, Michael and Chris have been able to augment the ConnectSolutions team with fellow real-time collaboration experts that combined, bring over 60 years of cumulative experience with real-time collaboration technologies.
Michael Fitzpatrick, Jr., Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder
Michael co-founded ConnectSolutions LLC in 2007, and currently serves as president and CEO. Michael has over ten years of experience in software and technology development, specializing in real-time web communication technology. Prior to ConnectSolutions, he led Acrobat Connect Pro product management through twelve releases at Adobe Systems. Before Macromedia/Adobe, Michael managed several web-based collaboration solutions at Siebel Systems. Prior to Siebel Systems, Michael led product management and marketing for Vignette's partner products. Michael holds a bachelor's degree from Amherst College, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and their three children.
Chris Tennant, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder
Chris co-founded ConnectSolutions LLC in 2007, and currently serves as Chief Technology Officer. Chris worked on the Acrobat Connect Pro product for seven years, from 2000 through 2007. Starting in 2000, he managed all development at Presedia, the company whose technology was acquired and eventually became Connect Pro. Chris managed engineering teams through successive acquisitions by Macromedia and Adobe. Throughout his focus was on building and supporting quality software for customer success and through this he became the primary technical expert on the Connect Pro product. Before 2000, Chris was a software engineer for two additional startups, and wrote a database-driven hypermedia authoring tool as part of his doctoral dissertation. Chris is also a co-founder of Secure Diagnostic Imaging, which produces software for remote diagnosis by ophthalmologists. In addition to his interests in high tech, Chris is trained as a lawyer and an anthropologist. After putting himself through college as a contract C programmer, he went on to law school, clerked at the Canadian Supreme Court, and completed a master's in law and and a doctorate in social anthropology, both at Harvard University.
Art Clarke, Vice President of Engineering
Art joined ConnectSolutions LLC in 2010, and currently serves as VP of Engineering. Art has over ten years of experience in software as a service, specializing in audio and video-based services. Art was the co-founder and CEO of Xuggle Inc. from 2007 through 2010, where he co-created Xuggler, the leading technology for Java developers to program with video. Xuggle was acquired by ConnectSolutions in March 2010. Previously Art spent seven years at Tellme Networks, the #1 cloud-based speech-recognition company, in a variety of positions as it grew from $0 in revenue to over $100mm/yr. He served as general manager of Tellme's Core Platform business, created and ran the Client Project Management Office, led account management for Tellme's largest Enterprise customers, and started Tellme's sales engineering function. He originally joined Tellme as part of their founding engineering team working on telephony, speech recognition, and scalability. Prior to 1999 Art worked at WebTV (acquired by Microsoft) and Oracle. Art has a bachelors of English Literature (concentrating in James Joyce) and a bachelors of Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology, and is therefore uniquely qualified to write computer manuals no one can understand.