Aktana Expands Leadership Team to Advance the Evolution of Commercial Engagement for Life Sciences

— New team members bring expertise across analytics, artificial intelligence, global SaaS operations and customer success from time spent at Salesforce, IBM, PayPal and Oracle

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today, Aktana, the pioneer in intelligent engagement for global life sciences companies, announced it has added experienced executives with significant scientific, product development, operational, and organizational expertise to its management team. The recent additions bolster the company’s ability to provide life sciences teams with a thoughtful blend of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and human intelligence that allow clients to put the customer at the center of their commercial strategy.

“Life sciences commercial teams face a more complex and competitive environment than they ever have before,” said David Ehrlich, CEO, Aktana. “Customer behaviors and expectations have changed so rapidly that commercial teams are scrambling to adapt. Our leadership team now has the diverse skill set and industry experience to help customers with any challenge they face, whether they are technical in nature, like AI methodology and data assimilation, or operations-oriented, such as global scalability and change management. We’ve always sought out problem solvers who can take every element into context as they support our customers and these new leaders are some of the best of the best.”

The expanded management team now includes:

• Pini Ben-Or, Chief Science Officer. Pini joined Aktana from NICE Actimize, where he served as Global Head of Analytics and led the development of the company’s analytic decision engine platform. His extensive expertise in technology and analytics includes designing and implementing analytic systems and capabilities to support risk management, marketing, customer service, fraud detection, and credit operations.

• Colm Callan, Chief Financial Officer. Colm was previously Chief Financial Officer at WageWorks and PayPal’s Product & Technology division. In both positions, he successfully created an environment focused on customer success by rebuilding his teams and their service culture. He also served as Senior Director, Corporate Development at eBay, where he actively led cross-functional teams in the identification, evaluation, and execution of acquisitions of both public and private companies globally, as well as at Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch.

• Kate Terrell, Chief People Officer. Kate was previously Chief Human Resources Officer for Driscoll’s, the world’s berry company. She also held several leadership roles at Whirlpool, including managing human resource strategy and execution for its global product development organization. Kate has expertise across talent, culture, learning, change management, and organizational effectiveness based on more than two decades at leading companies, including Accenture, Limited Brands, and Whirlpool.

• Mike Weber, Vice President, Product. Mike has spent the last 18 years bringing SaaS products to healthcare and life sciences organizations and patients, starting in the early years of Electronic Health Records, population health analytics, virtual visits, and multi-channel engagement with providers and patients. Prior to Aktana, Mike was Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce, and an early founding member of the Salesforce Industries business unit with a focus on product management, ecosystem partners, and go-to-market strategy for healthcare and life sciences and Salesforce Health Cloud. Prior to Salesforce, Mike held Product leadership roles at Quantros (patient safety and risk management), Mirixa (care management, acquired by Cardinal Health), and Product Management, Implementations, and Client Services roles at RelayHealth (acquired by McKesson/Change Healthcare).

• Vishal Saxena, Vice President, Global SaaS Operations. Vishal is an entrepreneurial and information technology leader with over 20 years of industry experience. His expertise spans public and private cloud, data centers, network engineering, DevOps, systems engineering, site reliability, storage, and more. Prior to joining Aktana, Vishal was Senior Director Cloud Engineering & Operations at OpenText, leading and managing the Cloud Engineering and Operations for the eDiscovery SaaS service. Before OpenText, Vishal was at Oracle for more than 10 years serving in various roles. In his last role as IT Director, he was responsible for building a global high-performance team, leading the Cloud Development and Operations organization.

• Alan Kalton, Vice President, Customer Success, EMEA. Alan is a leadership and global analytics professional, dedicated to leveraging technology and analytics to improve healthcare delivery and drive efficiencies into life sciences commercial execution. He joins Aktana having worked for global clients in analytics and commercial leadership positions with EY and IBM/IBM Research. Most recently, he was the Chief Commercial Officer for BroadReach, a company focused on leveraging analytic solutions to improve public health service delivery in developing markets. Alan’s more than 25-year career has included roles with GSK and Novartis, as well as leadership roles in a medical technology and medical publishing companies.

• Eric Yip, Vice President, Engineering. Eric is an accomplished technology professional with 30+ years of experience in software engineering, including leading, building, and mentoring multi-cultural teams in the United States, China, India, Germany, Russia, and Canada. Prior to joining Aktana, Eric worked at SAP SuccessFactors for over 13 years, most recently as Senior Director of Engineering – overseeing two teams: Developer Productivity, a team to provide infrastructure, tooling, automation, and governing process to empower engineering, and Platform Framework, a team to build frameworks and core services serving as a foundation for the rest of engineering to develop scalable and reliable software. Before SAP SuccessFactors, Eric held numerous leadership roles at E-Trade Financial, Formtek Incorporated, Objectivity Incorporated, and HBO. Eric also has expertise in product and software development, and agile methodologies including TDD, CI/CD, and Scrum Practices.

About Aktana

Aktana is a pioneer in intelligent engagement for the global life sciences industry. Its proprietary platform harnesses machine learning algorithms to enable commercial teams to seamlessly coordinate and optimize multichannel engagement with healthcare providers. Committed to customer success and innovation, Aktana supports more than 250 brands worldwide to capitalize on data investments, drive productivity, and continually enhance campaign performance. More than half of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies are Aktana customers. Headquartered in San Francisco, Aktana also has offices in Philadelphia, London, Barcelona, Tokyo, Osaka, Shanghai, Beijing, Sydney, and Sao Paulo.

See intelligent customer engagement in action: aktana.com/resources/rethink-how-life-sciences-commercial-teams-work
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Contacts

Jill Bongiorni

1.516.729.2250

jill@torchcomllc.com