Alan Croll, Chairman and CEO of eknow inc, has over 35 years experience leading businesses through M&A, reorganizations, and other strategic transformative activity to achieve sustainable profitable growth 

Alan's change management and organizational transformation skills were honed during 21 years at Digital Equipment Corporation where he was instrumental in the growth of the global professional services business to over $2B. He was one of the principal executives in the planning and implementation of the internal merger of two services businesses into a single, multi-billion dollar organization. While managing a $450M line organization, he also served as leader of the Quality Leadership initiative across the North American services organization.

After leaving Digital, Alan served in a series of executive roles including VP of Professional Services at SAGA Software, President of CSSi, a subsidiary of Nichols Research Corporation, and COO at eMotion. In these roles, he worked on both sides of M&A transactions, strengthening his skills in post-merger integration and gaining experience in the sale and divestiture of an operating division.

Alan's passion for quality and integrity in leadership led him, along with two colleagues, to launch a monthly executive leadership breakfast group that has been operating for more than 14 years and includes over 1,300 subscribers in the Washington, DC area.

He earned his BS in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University, his MS in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and completed executive programs at Columbia University Graduate School of Business and a Harvard-based program sponsored by Digital Equipment Corporation.

Mr. Manuel Sanches is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of the University of California, San Diego, where he studied cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence and computer science, and received the Honor of Highest Distinction from the University. He is currently Founder, President and CTO of eknow inc. 

Mr. Sanches' career spans nearly 25 years in technical, management and executive roles based in the U.S., Europe and Latin America. But the common thread of Mr. Sanches' career has been applying software design and cognitive science to enterprise management challenges of increasing scope. Mr. Sanches founded eknow with Mr. Dell (in late 1998) and began operations in 1999. Mr. Sanches developed the company's then-radical "software-as-a-service" or "cloud-based" business model, and is responsible for the design, engineering, and management best practices behind eknow Integrator. 

To Mr. Sanches and eknow, restructuring and M&A – particularly complex post-merger integration – represent the greatest management challenges most organizations attempt, yet they are the most poorly served by technology. Existing software and methods are grossly inefficient, difficult to use, require inordinate IT and/or M&A consulting expense, are not tailored to critical elements of M&A and large-scale initiatives, fail to integrate every contributor into the process, and reflect false assumptions about users, processes, and value drivers in the real world. Mr. Sanches' vision has been to address these shortcomings in an easy to use, highly automated and flexible web-based tool. Mr. Sanches' vision is realized in eknow Integrator, the first and only such application a decade ago, and now the most mature and easy to use in 2010. 

At eknow, Mr. Sanches also personally supports many of the company's key clients, helping them leverage Integrator to better execute their mergers, acquisitions and other large-scale initiatives, sometimes over several years. This repeated long-term collaboration has given Mr. Sanches unique real-world insight and continues to drive the evolution of eknow Integrator.

Mr. Dell focuses on strategy and business development as well as serving as eknow's chief  evangelist for "M&A done right." M&A is a fundamental part of business with tens of thousands of deals equating to multi-trillions of dollars in transaction value in a typical year. Mr. Dell notes that although M&A has high potential value it is fraught with risk, and the failure rate is significant. This is often due to the fact that most M&A activity is executed manually using outdated tools and methods. Over the past decade, Mr. Dell has interacted with countless professional corporate M&A practitioners, major research firms, M&A consulting firms, M&A academics and authors to help communicate that there is a better way to execute M&A. He is very active with M&A conferences, webinars, and newsletters.

Prior to co-founding eknow, Mr. Dell worked with blue-chip corporations such as, Procter & Gamble (P&G) and Dow Jones & Company (DJ) in the US and abroad. During Mr. Dell’s 15 years at DJ, he held senior management positions in several regional hubs, including Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, and New York. He has also had wide exposure to the European market. Mr. Dell is a graduate of Northwestern University and completed an executive program at Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

Mr. Balog brings more than 20 years of proven senior executive experience helping B2B SaaS companies achieve annual growth rates from 20% to 200%. Mr. Balog’s financial experiences include, mergers & acquisitions, corporate divestitures, industry roll-ups, IPO filings, venture capital financing, and strategic corporate development programs. Mr. Balog has been involved in numerous M&A transactions on both the buy side and sell side and he has been the integration manager for several of these initiatives. Mr. Balog specializes in the formation of consultative sales programs and strategic partnerships that increase market share and create new markets, and in the identification, negotiation and integration of M&A candidates.

Mr. Balog most recently served as the Vice President of Product Management & Marketing at PrecisionIR Group, an investor communications company. Prior to PIR, he held various sales and executive leadership roles including Vice President of Sales at Vcall; COO at Communicast (which he sold to PIR); and Vice President of Strategic Development at communications technology provider, Premiere Global Services. 

Mr. Balog is a graduate of the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University where he studied international business and marketing.

Mr. Balog’s M&A experience enables him to fully understand the myriad of issues facing a corporate development officer and integration manager. This unique background enables him to provide guidance and internal insights on how eknow clients can maximize the returns from their M&A initiatives.

Mr. Kirsh's career spans 25 years of software product design, product management, and product marketing. He has been a key player at several technology companies, including Trace, TV Answer, Bell Atlantic Video Services, and NetChannel, and was instrumental in the acquisition of NetChannel by AOL in 1998.

At AOL, Mr. Kirsh oversaw the software user interface design of AOLTV, then managed the design, development, and marketing of multiple revisions of the Mac version of the AOL client software. In his role at eknow, Mr. Kirsh spearheads web, email, and print-based marketing efforts aimed at bringing the benefits of M&A automation to the attention of industry practitioners.

Mr. Kirsh is co-inventor on four patents, is a graduate of the University of Virginia (with Distinction), holds an Executive MBA from The George Washington University, and is a member of the Beta Gamma Sigma business honor society.

Mr. Marantz is a seasoned executive with 30 years of senior management experience at a variety of technology and telecommunications companies. Mr. Marantz has served as the Chief Financial Officer of Yurie Systems, Hayes Corp., Integrated Telecom Technology, and the Palaver Systems Division of Litel Communications. He has a wealth of experience in merger and acquisition assessments and implementations, including his role as the Director of Mergers and Acquisitions for Global One, a joint venture among Sprint Corp., France Telecom, and Deutsche Telekom. Mr. Marantz’s active guidance ensures that eknow can capably address the needs of its Fortune 1000 senior executive clients. Mr. Marantz is a graduate of MIT, and holds a Masters from Stanford University School of Engineering, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.