Star Executive Profiles

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Mike Winn

Chairman
Mike has 40 years' experience in the technology sector starting out as a programmer then systems analyst before moving into sales and finally management. Mike has worked in a number of director roles for technology companies such as CompuServe and Apricot/ACT. He has also lead a number of private and publicly quoted technology companies in CEO roles for both British and American based firms. His leadership experience helped to grow these businesses and become the market leaders in their specialist fields.

Mike's last position was as Group CEO of a software and services company, DST International, which he grew from a 70 man private company to over 2,000 employees worldwide with 20 international offices.

Paul Watson

Interim CEO
Paul has been a member of the executive team since August 2004 and joined Star as part of the acquisition of 4th Contact in 2003, where he was CEO. Having spent his early career in Mining and Financial Services, Paul then founded one of the UK’s first Software as a Service businesses, 4th Contact in 2000, delivering Employee Benefit and HR services to organisations such as Walt Disney, Hitachi and The London Stock Exchange.

Paul is responsible for solution development and product management at Star. As a technology visionary he leads a team responsible for customer focused product innovation. Paul’s team has devised a roadmap of services specifically designed to stimulate one of the most exciting growth phases Star has seen as it embraces cloud computing by delivering On-demand Business ServicesTM to UK companies.

John Leese

Chief Financial Officer
John joined Star in 2005, having started his corporate career at Content Technologies in 2000 where he managed its operational finance team through a period of significant change, including its £600 million acquisition by Baltimore and subsequent sale to Clearswift in 2002. John joined Star from Clearswift where he was Group Financial Controller. John began his career at Deloitte & Touche, where he qualified as a Chartered Accountant. He then moved to Ernst & Young, spending over three years on the West Coast of the US in its Software Industry Group.

Ben White

Co-Founder & Non-executive Director
A well known entrepreneur, Ben and his brother Jos founded Star in 1995 as one of the UK's first ISPs. Ben served as Star's CEO from 1995 to 2000 and 2006 to 2008, establishing the company as one of the UK's largest ISPs and, in his second term, driving its evolution towards a more broad-based communications company. Ben led a management buy-out of the company in 2007 and in November 2008 appointed Ricky Hudson as its new CEO.

Ben founded MessageLabs and served as the CEO until 2006 where he built the company into a global market leader in messaging security and a true pioneer in the exploding Software as a Service ("SaaS") industry. Towards the end of 2008 MessageLabs was acquired by Symantec for approximately $750M, marking the second largest transaction for a private company in the history of the IT security industry.

Stephen Chandler

Non-executive Director
Stephen is an experienced executive and corporate financier with a career spanning accountancy, investment banking and operational management within technology businesses. Stephen began his career at Deloitte where he qualified as a chartered accountant in 1994. He moved on to UBS Investment Bank in 1995 where he advised a number of the world’s leading technology and telecoms businesses on capital raising and M&A activity. In 2000 he joined MessageLabs Group serving as CFO of Star until 2004 and MessageLabs until 2009. Stephen holds an honours degree in Economics from the University of Exeter and is a member of the Securities Institute.