Xtract adds new members to the management to lead sales, product management and services teams

Helsinki, Finland and London, England -- 5 May 2009 - Xtract has announced that it recruited three new members to its management team. These new members form a critical part of Xtract's drive towards global market leadership in social intelligence solutions and services.

• Gerry Gross – Vice President, Global Sales
Gerry Gross brings 20 years of executive sales and marketing experience in ICT business sector. At Xtract, Gerry has complete revenue ownership and is responsible for building and managing the global sales and partnerships’ team. Prior to Xtract, Gerry championed the worldwide sales efforts at First Hop, prior to its acquisition by Airwide Solutions. He has also held executive management positions at Surfkitchen in London and Beenz in New York City and strategic sales positions at Sprint Corporation in the US.

• Sari Aapola – Vice President, Product Management
Sari Aapola has been appointed VP of Product Management at Xtract, responsible for product strategy, product marketing and product lifecycle management. A seasoned executive in the ICT sector, Sari’s most recent roles were as VP of Marketing and Product Marketing at Basware and before that at Tecnomen. Both are public companies belonging to the group of Finnish success stories in international software product and services business. Sari’s most recent project has been authoring a book on ‘Sustainable Thought Leadership’ published by BookSurge.

• Mikko-Pekka Bertling – Vice President, Services
Mikko-Pekka Bertling has been with Xtract for the past two years. In his new role he is responsible for Xtract’s Social Links On-Demand solution, professional services, training and consulting. He brings a long experience in pre-sales for Active Data Warehousing and Customer Relationship Management Solutions. Mikko-Pekka has also worked as a hardware and architecture advisor and has managed Professional services’ operations in Finland and the Baltics. Mikko-Pekka started his career at IBM where he served in product development, product management and sales roles. Later on, he held several senior positions at CMA Teradata. Prior to joining Xtract, Mikko-Pekka was ADWH and CRM solutions’ expert and pre-sales owner of loyalty factory solutions at CapGemini.

"These key appointments maintain our tradition of hiring only absolute top-level executives with unmatched professional experience and market insight," said Timo Laaksonen, CEO. "Xtract works on social intelligence technology, solutions and services that bring immediate and tangible value to our customers. Furthermore, our solutions enable the development of completely new kinds of mobile and internet on-line services and customer engagement models that can revolutionise the way that companies serve their own customers – targeted, personalised, timely and proactively. This is a new market where one can succeed only with the right combination of experience, insight, leadership, drive and innovativeness. I believe that with the addition of Sari, Mikko-Pekka and Gerry we are ideally positioned to have what it takes to become the undisputed market leader in our focus business."