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Management Team

Learn more about the Mandriva's management team.

Jacques Le Marois, Chairman, Co-founder

A graduate from two prestigious French schools, the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Collège des Ingénieurs, whose MBA he completed, Jacques Le Marois is a pioneer of new technologies. He has worked for L'Oreal, Pechiney and Accenture before creating several internet services like GeneaNet and GeneaBank, two successful businesses dedicated to genealogy. After being involved in the beginnings of the Internet in France, he focused on the Linux market, helping increase its penetration among corporate customers. Jacques Le Marois is used to handling large-scale projects. When he was 26, he was involved in the launch of a new entity of the Danone Group.
Jacques is one of Mandriva's three co-founders.

François Bancilhon, Chief Executive Officer

Prior to joining Mandriva, François Bancilhon gained extensive experience in successfully managing software companies as well as developing businesses in the information technology sector. He is a founder and was CEO of O2 Technology -- an object-oriented database company that he successfully merged with Unidata in 1997.
In 1999, he founded and ran as CEO Arioso, an ASP company that provides Human Resource and benefit management services to small and medium-sized businesses in the US. More recently, he was Chief Technology Officer of SomaLogic, a Biotech company based in Boulder, Colorado. He is also a founder and Chairman of the Board of Xyleme -- an XML tools company based in Saint-Cloud, France.
François's career began in the academic world, both in Europe and in the US, in the field of relational and object-oriented databases.
Graduate of the "Ecole des Mines de Paris", François holds, among other academic works, a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

David Barth, Chief Technical Officer

David Barth, formerly CTO at IdealX, the leading French Open Source integrator, has spent the last five years developing professional solutions for large corporate and public sector customers. He brings more than 10 years of experience in Linux and Open Source software development and deployment. David worked extensively with the Samba community to convince enterprises to migrate to free software and contribute developer time for improving the software. He led many challenging developments including Jabber, PostgreSQL and Erlang technology projects.

David holds a Master in Computer Science, high performance computing, and a Master in Economics.

Thierry Bossut, Administration & Finance

ESC Reims graduate and certified public accountant, he joined the Mandriva team in March 2000. He was supervisor at the Ernst & Young auditing cabinet, and lately held the post of Administrative and Financial Director at IDP, a New Market listed company at the Paris Stock Exchange working in the field of digital television.

Gaël Duval, VP Communication, Co-founder, Creator of Mandriva Linux

A graduate of the University of Caen, where he studied networks and documentary applications, Gaël Duval is one of France's Linux pioneers. In addition to his technical skills, Gaël Duval also has excellent communication skills, allowing him to create a network of developers and users throughout the world. These two facets of his personality helped provide the impetus to create Mandriva Linux in 1998 (at age 25).

Paul Guillet, Sales

Paul Guillet is Director of Sales at Mandriva. Paul has been involved in Linux business since 1995, was the director of "Les Logiciels du Soleil/KHEOPS" one of the biggest Linux resellers in France, until he co-founded and became CEO of IDEALX SAS in 1999. Paul joined Mandrivasoft on early 2003.

Régis Wira, Quality Assurance and Technical Support

An ESEAT Rennes (Military School) graduate, Régis joined the Mandriva team in July 2000, as Senior Project Manager. He set up the Laboratory of Tests and Certifications. After one year as Deputy manager of the R&D department he now heads the Quality Assurance and Technical Support department. Previously he worked for the French Army as IT Manager and was in charge of Technical Support and technological watch for 10 years.