CURRICULUM VITAE
When Innovation meets Passion
“My greatest pride is to be able to simplify complex challenges and help my business partners and customers make the right decisions. My goal is to provide the essential link between the business and the technological side of a business.”
Marc Lachapelle
“Marc Lachapelle has an uncanny knack for perceiving design options for customers, and for creating practical system architectures. These skills have enabled Elix to close important sales, deliver on time and on budget, and to maintain impressive margins.”
Francois Rainville, former business partner
Marc Lachapelle
+1 (514) 691-6272
I am best known as one of the three member management team that acquired PRIMA from IST and Cossette in 1992. It subsequently became Elix (2000) and then BCE Elix when it was sold to Bell Canada in 2007.At that time BCE Elix had grown from a team of 3 owners and 2 employees and sales of $500K to a team of over 160 employees with offices in Montreal, Quebec, Toronto, and the US and sales of up to $60M I served as chief scientist and product architect during the firm’s successful growth into an international leader in telephony technology.
Solutions for large telecommunications operator (eg Bell, Telus, ATT) are notoriously complex and require complete reliability. I designed the architecture, lead the technical sale for Quebec Telephone Call Center and supervised the realization. It was the world’s first call center deployed on Nortel Central Offices. I also designed, lead the technical sale, and supervised the realization of BC Tel’s Calling Name Display platform. It was the first Unix platform deployed at BC Tel and the specifications were filled with numerous requirements of performance of reliability. Our customer was named BCTel employee of the month and the system payback was in only 3 months. BCTel recommended us to many other potential customers. Selling Teleglobe’s Canada a SS7 Win2k billing system was complex since Teleglobe’s only other Win2K platform was a dismal failure. The platform we delivered was extremely successful, so much that Teleglobe chose to cancel their service contract and paid by the event. Microsoft invited us to present our work to a large group of their customers. HP-Compaq’s Telecom’s division also invited us to present our solution.
Aside from being a software integration firm, we developed software products that were commercial successes. I designed, developed, maintained, and installed a voice mail system capable of handling 48 simultaneous ports. At Services Correctionnels Canada we succeeded after being picked up after the previous supplier failed. Using my electronics engineering experience I solved the electrical interferences problem to make it work that made the previous supplier fail. This customer was so satisfied that they selected to pay us by the event feeling secure enough to operate without a support contract. Another customer was GTIS(Canadian Government Telecommunications and Information Services). The system they bought replaced Bell’s Octel system at a fraction of the cost. I found a bug in the DMS public switch and helped my customer manage a difficult situation that would have affected a very large number of customers
Another product is Opus Maestro. We invented an entirely new integration technique for OPUS Maestro. It was recognized as the first IVR integration platform in the world to use of-the shelf ActiveX components without modification. OPUS Maestro won Product of the year and was considered by Microsoft to be their Interactive Voice response Toolkit
I designed Desjardins bank IVR system, a transactional IVR worth more than $1M. This complex and innovative system (AccesD) I designed and oversaw was a great success. In later evolutions of the system, I designed Desjardin’s Mondex smart card trial a first in the province.
While I worked for ME(Montreal Stock Exchange) I designed and implemented a fault tolerant quote management system. This system was essential to ME new automated trading system. I also built the link between ME and the Boston Stock Exchange. This link help ME become a leader in new trading products.
I used my telecommunications and engineering background to solve firmware problems and the telecommunications boards we were using. It was complex because many suppliers were involved and our customers were all over the globe. This lead me to adapt our systems in Africa (Tunisia, Morocco), South America (Bolivia, Columbia).
During my college years, I worked in research labs. More than helping me pay for my tuition it allowed me to be exposed to some of the brightest minds. I was able to develop the ability to conciliate theory and practice. I worked hard making research concepts a reality. In the mean time I developed many skills including an affinity to use debugging tools and techniques. Being methodical was an essential survival skill . This ability helped all along my career. Being able to train my engineers to use test tools helped solve many complex integration challenges. Elix Innovations (Montreal, New Jersey, NewZealand). Oracle, Speechworks
My research experiences lead me to take part in several Intel research projects. The projects I was involved in included automatic speech recognition, and digital system processing and early VxML development. I had to interface, in Intel’s name, with many partners and suppliers. We were responsible to anticipate technical trends, and table on important opportunities and their implications
Currently I work on two provisional patents. I also designed and a prototype for a new application platform targeted at the home market. Since I have always aimed at efficient solutions, I used the most up to date open source software. The platform will serve as a good leverage for off the-shelf technologies. For this project I built a totally inclusive framework of a company. It included marketing plans, company infrastructure, maintenance plans. It was picked up by a publicly listed company but was abandoned when the company failed to raise the required capital.
In short my high-tech technical background coupled with my engineering approach enabled me to achieve very interesting results.
Significant Accomplishments
From 2010 to 2012
Business Coach
- During my 12 years at PRIMA/Elix I was exposed to the many challenges an entrepreneur will face. Growing from 5 employees to 225 is exciting but also very hard. It is easy to make mistakes. This experience coupled with my constant desire to better understand the people behind technology allow me to be a great help with entrepreneurs.
From 2005 to 2012
Independent consultant
- Helped customers with computer forensics needs. My knowledge of Linux based operating systems helped clarify for the customer numerous traces and helped oversee the new security procedures. My recommendations have been followed and solved many security concerns
- Oversaw the redesign of a customer computer system architecture to be highly available using Linux clustering techniques and off-the-shelf components. It replaced a clumsy replication scheme
- Designed a new computer telephony integration system for a customer. Using off the shelf components the customer will save large sum of money.
- Lead the technical aspects of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance for emails and voice mails using Microsoft Exchange
- Lead the technical aspect of the integration Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging, open source IP Pbx, and Nortel Pbx. Using the latest version of MS Exchange helped us simply the design
- Successfully represented a customer in negotiations with a supplier allowing his customer to save more than $50K
- Acted as a crisis management technologist for a large telecommunications company managing a team of up to 5 engineers, and handled direct customer interaction
From 2005 to 2009
Founder
Newco
- Developed a revolutionary new platform. This Linux based platform brings highly available and highly scalable architecture to the house using latest clustering techniques. This platform was picked up by a publicly listed company.
- Prepared preliminary business plans, marketing plans, support plans, productions plans for his new platform
- Stayed up to date with all the recent technology developments and attended numerous Webinars, tutorials, etc.
From 2001 to 2003
Chief Scientist
Elix Innovations
- VxML browser prototype using Speechworks, and CT-Media. This Win32 based platform was made to demonstrate Intel’s CT-Media platform suitability for ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition). It was demonstrated at many trade shows and was part of Oracle’s strategy for Unified Messaging
- I lead for Intel many investigations and prototypes to build the next-generation toolkits for IVR system. I was an essential part of an Intel team responsible to select the right speech recognition platform for Oracle Unified Messaging platform.
From 1991 to 2001
Founder,Vice-president, Technology, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Scientist
Elix
- Chief scientist and product architect for Elix. Developed an international reputation in the industry for the depth of his knowledge in the emerging field of Computer Telephony and related technologies. Elix technology partners, including Intel, Speechworks, Nortel, have come to rely on his technical judgment and insights.
- In brief I was responsible for the convergence of messaging, voice and computer systems in a rational manner. I had to have a vision to prevent cost and schedule overruns that happen often when multiple technologies are integrated together. The growth of PRIMA/Elix show that I was successful at that.
- I designed and implemented products for the company, notably PRIMA-Message, that were commercial successes.
- My knowledge of computer science and telephony, DIALOGIC environments, Genesys and Nortel allowed me to participate in important integration projects at clients such as the Canadian Government Telecommunications Agency, Quebec Telephone , COTAS (Bolivia), Desjardins and Visa Desjardins.
- I designed and realized many products including PRIMA’s flagship PRIMA-Message sold in many countries. I managed most of the telco related projects we delivered.
- I was in charge of handling the technical emergencies and was always the most senior technical executive facing crisis.
From 1990 to 1991
Technical Specialist and Senior Analyst
Mosaic GL
- Developed an environment under which software could be developed for three different platforms.
- Developed a real-time scanning platform for extra-large army maps.
- Established standards for development to help maintain portability between the different architectures.
- Active participation in the development of the VideoScan system a sub-contract of the US Army.
From 1987 to 1991
Technical Specialist and Senior Analyst
Montreal Stock Exchange
- Responsibility for all communications; designed and developed a system to read stock-quotes in real-time; supervised the development of trading applications.
- I was part of the clustering and real-time experts group
- Being senior I had to support junior and intermediate programmers.
- Supported users in telecommunications protocols and was the only member of the programming staff able to handle test equipment.
From 1986 to 1988
Les Consultants GENICOM
Software development Manager
- Coordinates a team of 3 engineers. Design and implementation of the SAFEWORK software on Windows 1.0 which was later sold to CATIA systems
- Design and program 3D solid-modeling algorithms on Windows
From 1984 to 1986
Research Assistant
Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal
- Debugging and maintenance of an experimental Digital Signal Processing Machine. While this machine was the subject of many patents the fact that many graduate students worked on it made working on it a real exercise in being methodical and organized.
- Design and maintenance of a dedicated link between the experimental DSP and a VAX750. I had to reverse engineer undocumented systems to succeed.
- Design and develop ray-tracing software. With my partner we successfully implemented many leading research papers.
- Develop automated 3D models generation software for a research project
- Extensive research in software algorithms dedicated to optimize computing efficiency. Results include going from one month computing time to 2 hours. I started my quest for efficient programs at that time.
- Research in non-iterative 3D surfaces intersection using leading mathematical tools and techniques and in surface mapping techniques for 3D models.
From 1980 to 1981
Quality Control Officer
Canadian Marconi
- Applied military standards(MIL-SPECS) to avionics production
- Validated established procedures were followed, an essential key to aviation security
Education
Electrical Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal, 1986
The Art of the Start by Entrepreneurship Quebec, 2006
Tries to learn something new everyday…
Professional Skills
Open Source Software integration
High Availability systems
Linux High Performance Clusters
Information Systems Management
Telecommunications Networks (SS7, SIP, GSM, etc) .
Interactive Voice Response Systems and Computer Telephony Integration
Database systems (MySQL, PostGres, ISAM)
Systems Architecture
Computer security
Network performance
Speaking appearances
Intel Tech Summit 2000
Intel Tech Summit 1999
ETCF 2001
Computer Telephony 1999
Technical Skills
Operating Systems
DEC VAX/VMS
Linux (mainly Red Hat Enterprise)
Win32 platforms(win98, Win2K, Vista)
Linux Clustering
Virtualization platforms(VirtualBox, VMWare, Xen)
Development Environment
Visual Studio
Eclipse
Google Android
Telephony
PC based cards(DIALOGIC, Asterisk, etc)
PSTN Gateways
Major telecommunications Protocols: T1, ISDN, E1 R2MFC, SS7(ISUP and TCAP, etc)
Open source SIP based telephony solutions
Networks
IP v4 and IPv6 suite of protocols
SIP
Network analysis
Languages
C, C++, some Java, assembly languages, HTML, XML,Unix shells, etc.
Application Software
MS-Office suite of tools
Content Management Systems
siPx (Open Source Pbx)
Personal
¨ Single
Fluent in French and English
Interests: Training, Motorcycle, Flying
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