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Who We Are

Engineering first.

Message Systems is a leading provider of message management solutions for service providers, social networks, major brands and e-centric companies, as well as carriers and ISPs that manage large volumes of email. Our scalable, customizable next-generation platform was designed from the very start to be open and extensible, giving you the flexibility and insight needed to clearly differentiate yourself and gain a competitive advantage today and in the future. But what sets us apart goes beyond superior technology - the Message Systems solution also features the unmatched expertise of a world-class support team. Driven by a commitment to the best responsiveness and support, and equipped with a deep understanding of the entire email and digital messaging process, our passionate, dedicated experts make it easy to accomplish business objectives and maximize the value of your message management platform. That might be why we’ve never lost a client.

Find out more about our company heritage and who leads us today:

Message Systems History
Message Systems Leadership

Message Systems History

Message Systems originated in 1997, when CEO George Schlossnagle was working at OmniTI, a web development and infrastructure firm, with his brother Theo. In supporting clients that were sending up to 50 million emails daily, they experienced firsthand the scalability and rigidity issues inherent in open-source solutions of the day. With no good commercial solution alternatives, the result was non-stop maintenance. George realized there was a market opportunity for a product that would solve all the extensibility, management, and scalability issues with one comprehensive platform. And he knew they had the technology and expertise to build it – he and Theo both had backgrounds in software development and were active in scaling open source web technologies. Plus, they had already built some of the largest email systems in the world.

In 1999, George and Theo began building a standards-compliant MTA that could eliminate racks of email servers running general purpose versions and reduce operating overhead by a factor of 10. They established partnerships with anti-virus, anti-spam, reputation management, and other integrators to develop an end-to-end email solution like none other. The first beta of their groundbreaking message management engine – Ecelerity – was released in 2001, and they made their first sale the following year. In 2004, the company started expanding from only outbound email and moving toward a solution that also benefited carriers and service providers. True to its engineering heritage, the company has continued to innovate over the years in introducing a series of industry firsts. Today, Message Systems offers the most robust, flexible, high-performance message management platform on the market. Our technology manages billions of emails every day for some of the world’s largest carriers, service providers, social networks and other enterprises.

Message Systems Leadership

Our leadership team is comprised of innovative thinkers and industry leaders whose diverse skills and backgrounds mesh seamlessly yet foster a healthy variety of views. Together they form the best of class in the industry. Driven. Focused. Tightly synchronized in their quest to help our clients expand the boundaries of digital messaging.

George Schlossnagle, President and Chief Executive Officer

George brings a unique perspective - and deep passion - to the world of digital messaging that drives not only the continued success of Message Systems and its clients but also the future of our industry. As a top-notch technologist in his own right, George has a dynamic vision for how technology can be harnessed to advance digital messaging for the benefit of all stakeholders and enhance the customer’s ultimate experience.

Complementing this vision and the company’s technology heritage are his values regarding people - our own team, the clients we serve, and the interests of the broader community in which we live. This leadership inspires all that we do at Message Systems -- from the nature of the products we build and the service we afford clients to how we transact business and pursue our roadmap for transforming the future digital messaging.

Before co-founding Message Systems in 1997, George was lead systems administrator at iVillage. He also served as Director of Operations and principal architect of technical changes at Community Connect, Inc., where he helped increase traffic 100-fold and vaulted the company into the top five Nielsen ranked sites in member loyalty.

George is an internationally recognized expert in the PHP language, has published numerous technical articles and a critically acclaimed book on the topic, and has spoken often at industry events.

After earning an M.A. degree in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University and a Sc.M. degree in mathematics from Brown University, George served as a teacher in the Peace Corps for two years.

George is highly regarded within the industry and is frequently tapped by the media and analysts to share his informed and visionary views on how technology is shaping the future of digital messaging. See recent article.

Dave Lewis, Chief Marketing Officer

As Chief Marketing Officer, Dave brings an extraordinary aptitude for forward thinking, strategic planning, and exploration of new opportunities to Message Systems. In his capacity as CMO, Dave is responsible for executing an overarching strategy that ties together the company’s inbound and outbound digital messaging businesses and accelerates growth through innovative, holistic product solutions. Dave is the steward of the underlying principles for the newly launched Message Systems brand.

His vision and penchant for identifying new, untapped areas of growth for digital messaging have earned Dave a top spot among the leaders in the email industry. He possesses an unrivaled ability to size market opportunities and to bring those initiatives to market for the benefit of our clients.

Dave has over 30 years of marketing, services and business leadership in both corporate and entrepreneurial environments, including serving as vice president of marketing for Bizanga, a provider of anti-spam infrastructure to ISPs and telcos in North America and Europe. Before Bizanga, he was responsible for market and product strategy at StrongMail Systems, and served as vice president of deliverability management and ISP relations for email service provider Digital Impact (now Acxiom/Digital), achieving the highest email delivery rates in the industry

Dave is a recognized industry thought-leader and has frequently spoken and written on the challenges and opportunities of the digital messaging medium. For the past three consecutive years, BtoB Magazine has named him as one of the most influential people in email marketing, a recognition that stems from his overall industry leadership as well as his championing of consumer empowerment. Dave currently chairs the communications committee for the Online Trust Alliance. See recent article.

James Elder, Chief Financial Officer

James Elder brings 14 years of accounting and finance experience to the Message Systems team. These are important disciplines that James brings to the Message Systems leadership team, especially during a time of growth and expansion. His expertise in the area of financial modeling and analysis, process improvement and redesign, cash management and technology integration, add up to an extremely valuable pay off for Message Systems and our clients.

James has developed a talent for proactively identifying and resolving problems, implementing solutions, and defining and implementing enhanced accounting and operations processes. His creativity and workflow acumen are maximizing efficiencies in our internal processes– leaving our sales representatives and sales engineers more time to focus on client needs. Prior to joining Message Systems, Elder filled financial and accounting roles at 180s, Aether, Black & Decker and Deloitte & Touche.

Sherry Schlossnagle, Chief Operations Officer

Sherry provides administrative oversight for Message Systems and is responsible for keeping our infrastructure, premises, and processes operating flawlessly. Sherry’s fundamental belief is that our internal processes should contribute to successful client interactions, not drive them.

An educator by profession before entering the technology sector, Sherry has a BA degree in Sociology from Vanderbilt University and teaching certification from George Peabody College for Teachers. In addition to her teaching experience, she has worked on various grants involving education projects, as well as managed a Masters degree program for the University of Southern California.

Barry Abel, Vice President of Field Operations

Barry brings 20 years of enterprise software sales, product management and marketing experience to Message Systems. As the leader of our sales teams, Barry has worked with some of the largest senders and receivers of email on the planet. He has been directly responsible for the adoption of Message Systems technology that enables billions of messages to be successfully delivered every day. Barry encourages his team to focus on one of the supporting timbers of our brand - listen to what the client is saying, assess how we can meet that expressed need, and offer a solution that brings results and unique value.

Barry’s expertise has been requested for speaking engagements at numerous venues, such as Email Experience Council (eec), ClickZ, DMA, Email Insider, Inbox and ESPC deliverability boot camp. Previously, Barry was director of sales at Mindfabric, Inc., a supplier of enterprise-class natural language processing, knowledge management and business rule processing solutions. In this role, he was responsible for recruiting the company's first key reference customers, partnerships and venture capital initiatives. Prior to Mindfabric, Barry held executive sales, marketing and business development positions at high-tech companies including Critical Path, PeerLogic, International Computers Limited (ICL) and Cap Gemini America.

David Harvey, Vice President of Business Development and Partners

David’s focus is on forging mutually beneficial partnerships with enabling system integrators, consultancies, resellers and distributors for all Message Systems solutions. David’s dynamic style and solid background in messaging software, telecommunication and managed service companies worldwide brings an understanding of both enterprise and service provider environments as well as the global challenges inherent in our industry. His commitment to our partner-centric ethic and his solutions based approach to his initiatives resonates strongly with both our current and prospective partners.

Before joining Message Systems, David ran Alliances for Bizanga, a provider of anti-spam infrastructure to ISPs and telcos in North America and Europe. Prior to that, he managed indirect and carrier sales for Savvis, a leading provider of IT Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and managed hosting and fully managed network solutions. Previously, David was with Cable & Wireless in a variety of sales, business development and general management roles across multiple continents. Before Cable & Wireless, he was responsible for new vendor management at Azlan Europe for high tech companies expanding into the EU marketplace.

Brodie Wise, Vice President of Product Management

Brodie Wise, Vice President of Product Development

Brodie brings 16 years of management, business development and product management experience and a keen understanding of enterprises, consumer markets, carriers and service providers to his role as Vice President of Product Management. Brodie drives his product management initiatives with a simple mantra - focus on the customer first.

His diverse background working both in small and large organizations, and experience creating new product lines and driving evolution of new product offerings, enables Brodie to view product development from a number of vantage points. Prior to joining Message Systems, Brodie filled product and management roles at Nii Holdings, Sprint Nextel, Aether Systems, and several education companies.

Wez Furlong, Chief Software Architect

Wez Furlong leads our team of exceptional engineers who design new features and refinements for all Message Systems products - from the core platform to need-specific technology solutions to enhance and improve the performance of our client’s digital messaging programs. Prior to joining Message Systems, Wez supported the engineering efforts for our affiliate company OmniTI. Wez was principal of his own small software consultancy based in England, developing Internet and desktop applications for clients as far away as Japan and Australia.

A strong proponent of OpenSource, Wez has made major contributions to the PHP programming language core in the form of the streams and database abstraction layers, and is author of a number of extensions. Wez helps to maintain the php.net server infrastructure and takes an active role in fostering the PHP extension developer community.

Wez enjoys sharing knowledge, and this has manifested in the form of a number of articles for php|architect and PHP Magazine, Oracle Technology Network and IBM developerWorks. He can often be found speaking at PHP and OpenSource conferences worldwide.

Alec H. Peterson, Vice President

As the head of our technical services group, Alec is responsible for delivery of all client-facing technical services - a critical aspect of the Message Systems offering and our brand. With over 13 years experience in network engineering and design, Alec brings a solid technical acumen and appreciation of client needs to his role. He instills in his team a passion for delivering on our core promise of stellar technical support from initial engagement and installation through post-sales support and ongoing professional services projects.

Prior to joining Message Systems, Alec was the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Catbird Networks, and was the co-founder and Director of Network Engineering at UltraDNS Corporations. Alec began his career at Erols Internet/RCN Corporation where he was instrumental in the firm’s expansion of its national network.

Joal Barbehenn, Corporate Counsel

Joal serves as Message Systems in-house counsel on all legal matters, including review of client contracts, formulization of international initiatives and protection of intellectual property (IP) rights. Joal’s focus is to enable the Message Systems team to effectively, efficiently and accurately serve all aspects of our client relationships. He is committed to weighing our need for prudent business practices with our goal of delivering outstanding client service.

Joal brings a broad range of experience on various legal matters to the Message Systems team, including mergers and acquisitions, intellectual property transactions and corporate governance. Prior to joining Message Systems, Joal worked in the Business Transactions Group of Venable LLP where he represented several mid-sized and large software, technology and bio-science businesses. Before joining Venable LLP, Joal served as a judicial law clerk to Maryland Court of Special Appeals Judge, Lawrence F. Rodowsky.