Brent C. Williams

Brent C. Williams, prior to joining Benchmark in March 2007, spent eight months as Managing Director of Research at Hapoalim Securities USA, a startup division of the largest bank in Israel. His 10 years of experience covering software companies also includes six and a half years at KeyBanc Capital Markets, and three years at Needham & Company. His coverage list has included database vendors, middleware/connectivity vendors, operating system vendors plus leading business intelligence software vendors. He also managed other senior analysts focusing on enterprise applications and other infrastructure software segments. Mr. Williams has been involved with the software business since the late 1970s. He has built innovative products, ranging from manufacturing and financial applications to clinical medical software on a variety of platforms, from PCs to mainframes. For several years, he was an engineer at Ingres Corporation, which was then the second largest developer of relational database software. After several years of marketing experience at Ingres and startups, Mr. Williams became an industry Analyst at IDC, leading the PC software research team when Microsoft was introducing Windows NT, its initial enterprise operating system. After IDC, Mr. Williams moved to Gartner Group, where he was a Senior Analyst in the software development technologies group, covering software development tools and technologies. Mr. Williams earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California at Berkeley.