Rave Wireless: Tom Axbey Joins Rave Wireless as Chief Executive Officer
Apr 23, 2008
Framingham, MA – Rave Wireless, the leading provider of reliable safety applications for mobile users, today announced the appointment of Tom Axbey as chief executive officer. Axbey brings more than 20 years of operational and leadership experience ranging from early stage companies to large, global software businesses. Most recently, he served as senior vice president and general manager at Micromuse, a provider of business-critical software to telecommunications, finance and public sector clients. Micromuse was acquired by IBM, where Axbey led the successful integration and subsequent growth of the IBM Tivoli/Netcool business prior to joining Rave Wireless.
“Tom's expertise in scaling business operations makes him the perfect fit to lead Rave through its next stage of growth,” said Ajay Agarwal, managing director at Bain Capital Ventures. “His experience in selling mission critical systems to enterprise clients was very attractive to Rave. Our clients have come to depend on Rave's reliability and scalability with respect to our award winning mobility and safety applications.”
Rave Wireless distinguishes itself by being the only company to deliver a two-way mobile safety solution, with Rave Alert for campus administrators to send outbound emergency notifications, and Rave Guardian for students to send a personal inbound request to campus police whenever they feel threatened or need help. In addition, the company is working towards a future where all aspects of campus life are made better through the delivery of timely and relevant information via mobile devices. Clients of the company's Rave Campus solution have received accolades for their programs in mobile learning and student services, and are often referenced as examples of how to mobile-enable large, distributed populations of users.
Axbey takes the helm at Rave Wireless at a critical time in the company's growth. In the past year since the tragic incident at Virginia Tech, universities nationwide have scrambled to bolster their emergency notification capabilities, many adding text and voice alerting to their communications arsenal. However, given a handful of highly-publicized incidents in which universities have had failures or performance problems with their chosen alerting system, it has become clear that not all systems are created equal and that reliability and performance are critical factors. Rave Alert is engineered from the ground up to deliver the most reliable and best-performing solution for sending text, email, and recorded voice alerts to the entire campus community or select groups of people.
“I'm excited to join Rave Wireless because I see a company with an exciting vision, award-winning products and strong client and partner relationships,” said Axbey. “Mobility in every aspect of computing has changed the way universities and corporations communicate and organize.As such they need to understand how they can communicate critical information in a reliable, secure way to a group or the entire organization and also leverage the mobile handset as an individual, personal safety device. Using the mobile device to improve safety is the foundation for an on-the-go lifestyle informed by timely and relevant information.”
Prior to Micromuse/IBM, Tom was the senior vice president of worldwide operations at Quallaby from its inception to its acquisition by Micromuse. Axbey was also vice president of marketing and business development at American Internet and spearheaded the business partnership with Cisco that resulted in the subsequent acquisition.