Principals

Cynthia D Holladay

Founder, Principal and CEO

Cynthia is founder and CEO of UpRight Marketing, a privately-held strategic marketing consultancy that helps organizations achieve sustainable results by tying marketing investments to customer value. Based in San Mateo, CA, the firm provides marketing strategy, customer development, and communications services that help technology and nonprofit organizations close business today and assure profits tomorrow.

Cynthia consults in interim vice president of marketing roles for enterprise software companies in transition and Internet service ventures starting up. She also works with nonprofits and professional services firms to devise strategies and programs to grow their organizations. Prior to founding UpRight, Cynthia served in top executive, marketing and development positions in the technology and nonprofit sectors and has launched over 15 major products worldwide.

At Aspect Communications Cynthia led the development and launch of the industry’s first real-time customer analytics system that began Aspect’s move into the CRM software market. She later led the company’s public relations and communications strategy that repositioned the company from a voice equipment to an eCRM solutions provider. Cynthia was vice president of marketing at Vuent, where she launched the Internet start-up’s collaborative design solution for supply chain manufacturers and developed a partnership with Oracle, who later acquired the Vuent technology. As a database design expert and early employee at BACHMAN Information Systems, she worked with Turing award recipient, Charlie Bachman, to introduce Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) solutions. Funded in part by IBM, Kleiner-Perkins, and AT&T, the company went public in 1991 and was ultimately acquired by Computer Associates.

As two-term president of the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association, Cynthia led the chapter to earn AMA’s highest award for management and leadership in 2001. She currently serves on national technology and marketing councils with the American Marketing Association and is board advisor to several early stage Internet service companies. She is on the marketing council of the Computer History Museum and is chair of the annual Computer History Museum Fellow Awards.

Cynthia is a frequent speaker on industry trends and marketing leadership. Before her technology and marketing career, she was a classical concert pianist with a bachelor of music from USC and a master of music degree from the Boston Conservatory of Music.

Chris Loosley

Principal and CTO

Chris Loosley has a technical background in the design and performance of database systems, and 30 years experience in the field of systems performance and service level management. Since 1998, he has specialized in the performance and usability of Websites and Web-based applications.

As Director, then General Manager, of Keynote's Professional Services business unit between 1999 and 2006, Chris led a team of consultants who worked on all aspects of Web application design, testing, measurement and management. He also created and led the engineering team that developed the Performance Scoreboard, now the company's premier console for analyzing and visualizing Web performance information.

Chris was a founding partner of Database Associates, where he consulted to both software vendors and corporate IT departments on many aspects of enterprise information systems architecture and design, and taught seminars worldwide on client/server and distributed systems. As a Principal Consultant and then Fellow at BACHMAN Information Systems, he led the development of the BACHMAN DBA for DB2, the first of the modern generation of graphical database design tools.

During 16 years with IBM, Chris was first a Sales Engineer in London specializing in IMS performance, then later a developer of the DB2 database system in San Jose, California, where he worked on software performance modeling, measurement, and tuning. Chris worked as a developer on the first releases of IBM's IMS/VS and DB2 database products, specializing in performance measurement and tuning. He later taught the first public classes on DB2 performance for The Relational Institute, and Codd and Date Consulting.

Chris is the author of High-Performance Client/Server, published by John Wiley in 1998, and is well known for his articles and columns in the trade press, and his seminars on performance related subjects all over the world.

Chris has served on the Board of Directors of the Computer Measurement Group (CMG), the industry association for computer performance professionals, and twice served as guest editor for CMG Journal of Computer Resource Management issues devoted to Internet and Web Performance. He holds a B.S. in Pure Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Wales in Aberystwyth.