Executive Team

Alexander Mintz, CEO

Alexander Mintz co-founded Zircon Computing in 2005 to address the needs of the adaptive distributed computing market. He provides strategic direction as well as operational and technical leadership at Zircon Computing, the first company in the world to provide enterprise-class adaptive distributed computing solutions that can be deployed from the desktop using existing hardware and software.

In 2002, Alex co-founded TAF Co., a software development and services firm specializing in high performance computing solutions for the financial services industry. TAF Co. created and supplies one of the most advanced algorithm trading and execution systems for the world's largest investment banks and hedge funds. Along with unique IT expertise in the financial industry and a track record of timely delivery of customized execution systems, TAF Co. offers a technology platform that facilitates the rapid development of powerful distributed applications that maximize the utilization of available hardware.

Prior to founding TAF Co., he served as an Executive VP and Global Head of Derivatives Technology in KBC Financial Products, where he managed teams of technologists in the bank's New York, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo offices. KBC enjoyed tremendous growth during this time as a direct result of the explosive growth of the financial products under the development and support of Mr. Mintz and his derivative technology team.

Alexander joined KBC from Bear Stearns Inc., where he was an Associate Director and managed the development of Bear Stearns' Risk Analysis and Control System, the flagship product of its professional clearance department. Prior to Bear Stearns, he managed consulting teams at BlueStone International that delivered outsourced turnkey software projects to companies including JPMorgan, SIAC, Intel, The New York Stock Exchange, Hewlett-Packard and AT&T.

Alexander Mintz is a graduate of St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, Russia, 1986.

Andrew Kaplan, President

Andrew Kaplan co-founded Zircon Computing in 2005, and provides strategic direction as well as day to day operational and technical leadership. Zircon is the first company in the world to provide enterprise class adaptive distributed computing solutions that can be deployed right from the desktop using the existing hardware and software environment.

In 2002, he co-founded TAF Co., a software development and services firm specializing in high performance computing solutions for the financial services industry. TAF Co. supplies one of the most advanced algorithm trading and execution systems for the world's largest investment banks and hedge funds. Along with unique IT expertise in the financial industry and a track record of timely delivery of customized execution systems, TAF Co. offers a technology platform that facilitates the rapid development of powerful distributed applications that maximize the utilization of available hardware.

Prior to founding TAF Co., Andrew served as a Senior VP in KBC Financial Products, where he managed KBC's IT team in New York. In this role, he led teams responsible for building and supporting electronic market-making systems, real time derivatives portfolio risk analysis engines and order management systems.

Andrew Kaplan joined KBC from Bear Stearns Inc., where he was a Vice President and a senior developer in the Risk Analysis and Control System development team. Prior to Bear Stearns, he co-founded and served as CTO of Hekker, Ltd. an advanced technology company focused on consumer response systems. At Hekker, he led extensive product deployment projects for customers such as Norelco, American Standard and Molson.

Andrew is a graduate of Moscow University, Russia, 1984.

Dr. Douglas C. Schmidt, CTO

Dr. Douglas C. Schmidt is a Professor of Computer Science at Vanderbilt University. He leads technology strategy and solutions, community development, and external strategic partnerships at Zircon Computing. He has published 9 books and over 400 technical papers that cover a range of research topics, including patterns, optimization techniques, and empirical analyses of softwar frameworks and domain-specific modeling environments that facilitate the development of distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) middleware and applications running over high-speed networks and embedded system interconnects. Dr. Schmidt also has served as a Deputy Office Director and a Program Manager at DARPA, where he led the national R&D effort on middleware for DRE systems.  In addition to his academic research and government service, Dr. Schmidt has two decades of experience leading the development of ACE, TAO, CIAO, and CoSMIC, which are widely used, open-source DRE middleware frameworks and model-driven tools that contain a rich set of components and domain-specific languages that implement patterns and product-line architectures for high-performance DRE systems.

Dr. Grigory Vilkov, Managing Partner

Grigory Vilkov co-founded Zircon Computing and joined it as Managing Partner to lead Zircon's International division. He provides strategic direction as well as day to day operations and technical leadership at Zircon.

Grigory began his career in derivatives trading and risk management more than 10 years ago. Since then he has been active in various sales and trading roles, successfully managed a private fund trading derivatives in emerging markets and carried out several information technology assignments in the fields of advanced communications, parallel processing and high performance computing.

Since 2002 Grigory has combined his study towards a PhD degree in Finance with a number of venture-backed projects, including development of an Asset-Backed Securities Platform by the firm Securitisation Consulting GmbH, and development of a high performance correlation trading strategy for an algorithmic hedge fund.

Grigory Vilkov received his PhD at INSEAD and his MBA at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business Administration. His academic focus and research interests are in the area of empirical asset pricing, use of derivatives in corporate finance and risk management. He is currently an assistant professor at the Goethe University of Frankfurt and visiting lecturer in the ESMT Full-time MBA program. His work in asset pricing has been presented extensively, and published in the Journal of Finance.

Ron Guida, Director

Ron Guida joined Zircon Computing in 2007 as Director of Worldwide Sales and Marketing.

Since 1981, Ron has helped launch and grow a number of technology companies such as VENUSA, Covalent Systems, Bluestone, u1.net, ETSEC and Optaros. Over his career, Ron has helped to penetrate key accounts such as GE, The Vanguard Group, CNN, JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, the Walt Disney Company, Keystone Foods, and The NYSE.

At Zircon, Ron leads the day to day sales and marketing activity, and is helping to grow the direct sales, partner, and channel programs.

He is an active member of several charities, including Eagles Fly for Leukemia. Ron is a graduate of Drexel University, Bachelor of Science, Business, in 1981.