Sparkling Logic

Founded in 2010, Sunnyvale California

Sparkling Logic was founded by a team of leading decision management experts to help businesses and governments all over the world improve their process for capturing, managing, and improving decisions.  The challenge the founders set out to address was how to make decision management more widely accessible and available.  Based on years of experience and representing next-generation decision management technology, Sparkling Logic SMARTS™ was introduced to the market in April, 2011.

Business rule management has made great strides to give business experts control of automated decision logic but still demands significant upfront work before business experts can take control of decision logic.  Innovations in SMARTS empower business experts to begin capturing and managing decisions immediately by providing the complete context they need with business data and performance metrics and an innovative technology called RedPen^™ that allows them to capture business rules without first defining their complete business domain model or learning a special syntax.

SMARTS makes decision management available to companies and projects of all sizes as a cloud service.  Previously decision management technology required a significant investment in time, money, and human resources.  SMARTS effectively lowers the barriers to entry so that organizations can realize the benefits of decision management- increased control over the business outcomes of automated decisions and increased agility to enable response to the economic, regulatory, and business environment.

"The decisions we make define who we are as people or as businesses; instead of shooting darts in the dark, everyone should be given the opportunity to know, to understand, and to improve."

--Carole-Ann Matignon, Sparkling Logic CEO

Carole-Ann Matignon - Co-Founder, President & Chief Executive Officer

Carole-Ann is a renowned guru in the Decision Management space. She created the vision for Decision Management that is widely adopted now in the industry.  Her claim to fame is managing the strategy and direction of Blaze Advisor, a leading BRMS product, while she also managed all the Decision Management tools at FICO (business rules, predictive analytics and optimization). She has a vision for Decision Management both as a technology and a discipline that can revolutionize the way corporations do business, and will never get tired of painting that vision for her audience.  She speaks often at Industry conferences and has conducted university classes in France and Washington DC.

She started her career building advanced systems using all kinds of technologies -- expert systems, rules, optimization, dashboarding and cubes, web search, and beta version of database replication. At Cleversys (acquired by Kurt Salmon & Associates), she also conducted strategic consulting gigs around change management.

While playing with advanced software components, she found a passion for technology and joined ILOG (acquired by IBM) where she developed a growing interest in Optimization as well as Business Rules. At ILOG she coined the term BRMS while brainstorming with her Sales counterpart. She led the Presales organization for Telecom in the Americas up until 2000 when she joined Blaze Software (acquired by Brokat Technologies, HNC Software and finally FICO).

Her 360-degree experience has allowed her to gain appreciation for all aspects of a software company, giving her a unique perspective on the business. Her technical background kept her very much in touch with technology as she advanced.

She also became addicted to Twitter in the process. She is active on all kinds of social media, always looking for new digital experience!

Outside of work, Carole-Ann loves spending time with her two boys. They grow fruits in their Northern California home and cook together in the French tradition.

Carlos Serrano-Morales - Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer

Carlos has spent a fair part of his professional adventures in the Decision Management world. He worked on major European technology projects as well as at the European Space Agency. He joined AI pioneer Neuron Data in its early days, worked on Nexpert, expert system leader, and then was at the origin of Blaze Advisor, which helped bring about the BRMS revolution to business applications. He was responsible for all Decision Management technologies at FICO, as well as the company's Enterprise Architecture group. He is a passionate development and product leader.

He has two kids he is extremely proud of, and who are on their way to becoming major players in the endeavors they choose for themselves.

When he is not involved in his work or his kids, Carlos loves listening to music (a little peculiar in his choices), reading Latin American, French or American literature (in particular short novels), watching movies (mostly French) and driving through the curves on Skyline or any challenging road. He is waiting for the post-mid-life crisis to hit hard, then buy a motorbike and do his own "long way down" trip.

Carlos also encourages all to participate in and contribute to humanitarian causes to help relieve the hardship that is everyday life for so many, in particular kids. A dollar spent for the education or preventive medical care of a young kid in Haiti is worth a world in long-term benefits for the kid and society.

Of course, Carlos is passionate about anything related to Decision Management.

Johan Majoor - Vice-President, Software Development

Johan has been the driving force behind the engines that drive a variety of Decision Management technology solutions.  Working, as a technician, on high powered custom research lasers at the institute for fundamental research on matter in the Netherlands he realized that he had a great passion for developing programs for analyzing the vast amount of data the research produced. He started his career in software in the Netherlands developing the algorithms and engine of USoft, a data driven database oriented rules engine. Later he joined Neuron Data / Blaze Advisor to take over the responsibility for the object oriented Java based engine. He designed and created a scalable server side solutions around complex decisioning algorithms and has extensive experience with the RETE algorithm and many of its derivatives.  For over 20 years he has been working in development and as a leader to create products that can handle the demands of the modern enterprise. He loves working with large scalable systems that require high throughput and is motivated and driven to push their boundaries.

Johan is now heading the development of Sparkling Logic’s decisioning technology for both cloud and classic deployments and simulation environments.

Marc Lerman - Vice-President, User Experience

After graduating with an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (UK), Marc began his career at Neuron Data, where he worked on the Nexpert rules engine and Open Interface, a cross-platform UI toolkit. At Blaze Software, then Brokat Technologies, then HNC Software, and finally FICO, he was one of the lead technical architects of the Blaze Advisor IDE. He also designed and implemented the rule, decision table and decision tree, as well as parts of the web-based rule management editing experiences.

His time spent as a consultant made him better grasp the concerns and issues of government and large institutions, in terms of software development, methodologies, and production systems.

For the past 18 years, Marc’s passion for modern user interfaces has remained unchanged. His responsibility at Sparkling Logic is to enable fluid, rich and engaging user experiences that make users smile.

Colleen McClintock - Vice-President, Products

Colleen has been a leader in Decision Management since the early 90's when she co-created a system called KARMA (Knowledge Acquisition and Rule Management Assistant) to provide business experts with direct ownership and management of business policies independent of the software applications that implement them.  She later joined ILOG to lead the product management and marketing team for JRules, which grew and evolved from a simple Java rule execution component to the market-leading BRMS, acquired by IBM in 2009.  At IBM, she worked with IBM Research on next-generation decision management projects and on decision discovery and documentation for IBM's cloud BPM offering, Blueworks Live.

Beyond her work at Sparkling Logic, Colleen enjoys Crossfit and yoga.

Patrick Perez - Strategic Advisor

Since 1999 Partrick has been an Angel investor for more than 25 start-ups and a Consultant for Large players in the US & Europe - including Vodafone the Mobile world leader, Vivendi, and Universal Music Film TV and Games.  He specializes in the convergence of multi-platform web Content / Community / Commerce and contributes to the rising of a Web 3.0 that combines Semantic & Social Web.  In 1985 Patrick was the co-Founder, CEO and Chairman of Neuron Data in Palo Alto, CA.  Nueron Data became the world leader in Expert Systems with NEXPERT -renamed Blaze Advisor.  Patrick was a Director of ND till its IPO on the NASDAQ in 2000 under its new name Blaze Software, now part of FICO, NYSE.  In 1984 at BBDO, Patrick was the Creative & Strategic Planner for the launch of the Apple Macintosh in Europe.

Larry E. Rosenberger - Strategic Advisor

Larry Rosenberger assumed the role of Fair Isaac’s first Research Fellow in October, 2007 and currently fulfills that role on a half-time basis, continuing a 36 year career with the company that began in 1974.

From 1999 to 2007, he led Fair Isaac’s Research Unit, focused on early stage innovation in predictive and decision analytics focused on helping consumer products and services clients make better decisions on their prospects and customers.

From 1991 to 1999, he served as President and CEO. During that time, Fair Isaac experienced consecutive years of record growth, with annual revenues increasing from $31 million to over $276 million. Prior to that position, he led the Engineering, R&D Division focused on the technical development, production and marketing of the company's most advanced products, such as TRIAD adaptive control and the FICO Score as well as advances in predictive analytics methodology.

Larry holds a B.S. in physics from MIT and an M.S. in physics and a M.S. and an M.Eng. in Operations Research from UC, Berkeley.

In the for-profit world, he currently serves on the boards of three early-stage privately-held companies: chairs Global Analytics (San Diego), ECCOgen (San Francisco), GMH International (Boston).

In the non-profit world, he currently serves on the boards of The Buck Institute for Education (Marin County), Swords-to-Plowshares (San Francisco), and Envision Schools (San Francisco Bay Area).

In addition to board work, he informally advises seven organizations – four for-profits: Sparkling Logic, Crimson Informatics, Scorelogix and DeMyst – three non-profits: chairs the Advisory Board of the IEOR Department at UC Berkeley; E3; 10,000 Degrees.

He co-authored: “The Deciding Factor: The Power of Analytics to Make Every Decision a Winner” (2009).

Larry and his wife, Diane, have two sons and four young grandchildren.

Dr. Charles Forgy, PhD - Strategic Advisor

Dr. Charles Forgy received a BS in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1972, and his Ph.D. in 1979 from CMU. A student of Allen Newell, he received his Ph.D. based on the Rete Algorithm. Dr. Forgy remained at Carnegie Mellon post-graduation and worked on further improvements to OPS. He was co-principal investigator on a DARPA funded contract to develop parallel hardware for production systems.

In 1983 he founded Production Systems Technologies (PST) to develop and sell rule-based software, where he developed Rete II, a more efficient successor to Rete. Rete II enabled rulebased programs to run between 50 and 100 times faster than the original Rete algorithm, with the performance gains increasing with the complexity of the rules.

Dr. Forgy was also Chief Scientist with Rules Power where he developed Rete III extensions for rulebased Workflow systems. After Rules Power was bought by Fair Isaac (FICO), he adapted the Rete III engine for FICO Blaze Advisor. More recently, Dr. Forgy has developed Rete-NT, a more advanced inference algorithm than Rete 2 or Rete, and has created a parallel rule engine used by some of the clients of PST.

Dr. Forgy now licenses the Rete-NT algorithm to Sparkling Logic. He also contributes his considerable experience to the R&D efforts of the company.