User:Markcowan

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'' Mark Cowan is a Canadian deeply involved in many aspects of bringing innovation to market. He is currently the managing director of First Spike. Mark is also associated with a number of philanthropic and charitable causes and is currently active in communities around the world.

Education
Mark Cowan was born in Toronto, Ontario. Mark has degrees and advanced studies in Mathematics, Computer Science, Finance, Project Management, Philosophy and International Relations.

Career Background
During his studies in mathematics Mark was focused in complexity of systems theory, chaos and operational research. His research and focus was linked to the structure of information and its intersection with system design. On the day he completed his undergraduate degree he "surfed the entire Web" in 20 minutes.

At this time he was fortunate to be recruited into a company called Softquad that was focused on SGML standards and tool development and was a founding member of the World Wide Web Consortium - W3. It was during this time he was exposed to the process of standards creation - HTML and the first incarnation of XML.

Leaving for SAP in the mid-1990's Mark was recruited to 'web enable' the core SAP platform - R/3. Working with a small team of developers a number of technical and business innovations were developed. This led to the realization of the Internet enabled supply chain and the development of cornerstone technology and applications that SAP based its company on.

With three partners Mark acquired 5 technology companies in the commercial real estate vertical in early 2000, called The Realm. The objective was unlock a number of inefficiencies through technical innovation and create a service cloud accessible to value chain participants. The first being two core Software as a Service(Saas) offerings - a hosted integration platform (middleware) and cash management. The combination was defined by analysts at the time as the first true industry operating system.

Mark was brought into Adobe Systems at the completion of a strategic decision for the company to enter the enterprise software marketspace. He focused on the development and delivery of the Intelligent Document product suite, partner integrations and the key acquisition of Macromedia. The latter being the cross over vehicle for Adobe's approach to Rich Internet Applications.

Since Adobe, Mark has been focused within First Spike - their first client being RBC Dexia Investor Services with over $3 Trillion dollars of assets under management. Mark was brought in to enable the domains of Enterprise Architecture and provide the organization with the strategic edge in Enterprise Data Management.

Through out his career Mark has been active in the venture funding community helping entrepreneurs bring their products to market and helping investors understand an opportunities potential.

Community
An active member of the communities he is a part of Mark seeks to enable those around him achieve. During his time at SAP he was an active guest lecturer in many universities. With Adobe he was one of three MBA recruiters charged with identifying and shepherding new talent into the organization. Additionally he has sat on a number of patent review committee's.

Standards
Mark's standards work includes the development of several industry specific languages such as Real Estate XML (RE/XML) and the definition of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). He was a founding member of the Oasis consortium's effort to provide a blue print for SOA.

Achievements
In high school he solved the Rubik's cube in 27 seconds.

A company he founded in 2001 - The Organicxchange - continues with its mission of providing friendly infrastructure for people involved in creating sustainable products.

Aside from collaborating on the definition of some interesting information standards he has his name on a number of patented and submitted works in the subject area of distributed system integration, middle-ware and systems design.


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