Leadership
Todd Wilkens
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Mr. Wilkens has over 18 years of leadership experience in the telecommunications industry, throughout which he honed his expertise and demonstrated his passion for innovative technologies. Before founding Adaption Technologies in 2006, Mr. Wilkens was the Group Vice President of Engineering at McLeodUSA, one of the three largest CLECs in the country. He was responsible for the rollout of McLeodUSA’s 39-market VoIP infrastructure and business products. Prior to joining McLeodUSA, Mr. Wilkens was a founder and COO of Splitrock Services. Splitrock was founded in 1997 as a dedicated Internet and dial-up wholesale network services provider. Splitrock provided network services to leading service providers such as Prodigy, Juno and AT&T.
Bob Ollerton
Founder and Vice President of Development
Mr. Ollerton is a Computer Technology professional with more than 28 years of network and software development experience in the computing/telecom industry. He has extensive expertise in business development, product development, data network applications, engineering, marketing and customer service. Mr. Ollerton was one of the founders of Splitrock Services, Inc., where his innovation and management produced a national IP network and Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms that were consistently ranked as one of the top three networks in the United States. He began the development of prototype VoIP services over Splitrock’s voice modem network. Splitrock was acquired by McLeodUSA in April 2000 and he was retained in the role of Senior Director of Engineering Software Development where he continued his work with VoIP and its associated OSS and SaaS platforms leading to the successful launch and market acceptance of McLeodUSA’s business VoIP product suite. Before joining Splitrock, he held product development positions for Internet Services, Point of Sale Payment systems and mobile wireless communications at Gridnet and 3Com/Primary Access and pioneered x.25 and IP networking at Prime Computer.
Eric Wilkens
Chief Operating Officer
Mr. Wilkens developed his expertise in operational management through numerous senior management positions in telecommunications companies. Before joining Adaption Technologies in 2006, Mr. Wilkens was the Group Vice President of Network Services at McLeodUSA. While at McLeodUSA, Mr. Wilkens had responsibilities for managing all Carrier interconnect agreements, network costs, voice traffic engineering, and network planning. Before McLeodUSA, Mr. Wilkens was Vice President of Network Planning at Allegiance Telecommunications.
Cory Richard
Chief Technology Officer
Cory Richard has over 13 years of experience in the telecommunications industry focused in engineering and management. Prior to joining Adaption Technologies, Mr. Richard was the chief architect for McLeodUSA’s legacy TDM voice, AIN (Advanced Intelligent Networking) and VoIP network engineering. He led the organization responsible for McLeodUSA’s VoIP network design, engineering, implementation and support. To date, the network and products implemented from his organization continue to be largest revenue generating source for McLeodUSA. Before McLeodUSA, Mr. Richard held various engineering and management positions within MCI WorldCom. His areas of expertise include: Voice Network Engineering, VOIP Call Processing (including SIP, H.248 and MGCP), TDM Call Processing (including SS7 and AIN), and Customer Support.
Michael Caldwell
Chief Financial Officer
Michael Caldwell has over 15 years of experience in various areas of corporate finance and accounting including mergers and acquisitions, capital market and bank financings, structured finance and corporate risk management. In his most recent position, Mr. Caldwell served as Chief Financial Officer for Perfect Commerce Inc., a global e-commerce and SRM solution provider.
He possesses a strong track record of completed M&A and project finance transactions totaling in excess of $4.5 billion including his time at Splitrock Services where he worked alongside the Adaption founders His industry experience includes oil & gas, agriculture, telecommunications, investment banking, supply chain consulting, e-commerce and credit reporting.
Eric Strickland
Director of Marketing and Sales
Mr. Strickland has over 15 years of experience in the telecom industry with a wide range of functional experience, now focusing on Marketing and Sales Channel support at Adaption Technologies. His Marketing expertise was refined while at PAETEC, and the former McLeodUSA, in leadership roles focused on Product Development, Product Marketing, Field Marketing, and Strategic Market development. Before McLeodUSA, Mr. Strickland held multiple management positions in Financial Planning & Analysis at Wiltel and Brunswick Corporation, as well as Network Planning roles at MCI WorldCom.
Ricardo Araki
Director Systems Architecture
Throughout almost 3 decades of experience with computer technology, of which close to 20 years in management positions, Mr. Araki has worked on major software development projects in diverse areas such as computer networking, embedded systems, retail banking automation, network management and automated provisioning. He has led technical teams that introduced leading edge software technologies, and leveraged them to successfully build, deploy, and support production systems. His areas of expertise and interest include Service Oriented Architectures, Rich Internet Applications, business process management and automation, pattern-based object-oriented software development, and computing infrastructure virtualization technologies.
Andre Quebedeaux
Director VoIP Integration
Mr. Quebedeaux has over 10 years of experience in the telecom industry focused primarily in VoIP network design, interoperability, integration, implementation, and support. He has extensive knowledge of VoIP related signaling and standards and real world experience with interoperability and integration of complex VoIP systems. Prior to joining Adaption Technologies, he was one of the primary engineers responsible for design and integration of the McLeodUSA's VoIP network and applications. He has also worked for MCI WorldCom where he was focused on evaluation of new technologies and integration of these technologies into existing networks.