The Founders
The four HSG founders have a
wealth of business and technical experience that spans across the government,
several startups and the Fortune 500. View the
signing of the corporate formation
paper in the Albums section of this site.
Jon Foster, CEO,
20+ years of experience
Jon was the Director of Enterprise Architecture and
applications development at Cardinal Distribution. Jon led the development of
seven major systems and applications architectures that are considered key
components of Cardinal’s revenue growth from $7B to over $50B in seven years.
During his tenure, Jon
architected and led the development of the warehouse automation system that
ultimately shipped over $100B in product, the customer service system that has
handled over 10 million phone calls, and has helped open 15 new distribution
centers. Prior to Cardinal, he worked as a Product Development Manager at 3Net
Systems, a startup speculative software company building medical systems. He
also worked for the County of Sacramento, CA in software and infrastructure
development.
Gordon Helm, COO,
21+ years of experience
Gordon is also the President and CEO of Helm Technical
Services (HTS) – an IT staffing company. He brings over a decade of experience
in running a strong and competitive technology-staffing firm that has also
successfully executed Y2K mitigation projects for Cardinal and Silicon Graphics,
Inc. He architected and developed a Y2K mitigation tool used extensively
throughout the HP 3000 user community. Gordon began his career as a software
developer for Amfac Distribution and then moved on to Telos Consulting Services
before starting HTS, now one of the top staffing companies in Sacramento.
Ken LaCrosse, CTO,
22+ years of experience
Ken was the architect and senior developer of the
Cardinal Health Enterprise Alert and Response System, a product which provided
the complete systems awareness and auto-recovery for all of the architectures
built by Foster’s teams. At 3Net Systems, he was the VP of R&D and a member of
the core technology team. Ken’s work in and around the healthcare industry for
the past two decades gives him a unique insight for solving business problems
with the right technology.
Al McAlister, VP of Software Development,
20+ years of experience
Al was one of the most senior developers in
Cardinal’s IT organization for seven years. Al laid the keel on most of
the new technology solutions at Cardinal and he led the adaptation of new and
emerging technologies. He was previously the Manager of Systems
Programming at 3Net Systems and is an expert in Java and C++ as well as n-tier
client/server development. Al currently focuses on Open Source
technologies.
Helm
Solutions Group
