Zazi Forum

Larry Mercer provides senior technical management, software architecture, design, and consulting services based on over 30 years of experience in the implementation of a broad range of software oriented products and services for both Government and commercial sectors.

Mr. Mercer is currently self-employed and head of Summerwood Technologies, a consulting firm providing software engineering and product development services to municipal governments and commercial customers. His undergraduate studies were in Math/Computer Science at Purdue University and graduate studies in Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is a member of the board of directors for Infovision Software.

Upon graduating from Purdue University with a degree in Math/Computer Science, he began his technology career as a U.S. Navy officer responsible for developing command and control systems, radio navigation systems, compilers, and operating systems for the Fleet Computer Programming Center, Atlantic.

After leaving the Navy, he spent 10 years with Systems Consultants, Inc. providing technical services and management on a diverse set of projects. He led the development of a suite of distributed, real-time simulation/stimulation components and data reduction software for the Trident submarine’s Land Based Evaluation Facility. He directed Systems Consultants early efforts in support of the ADA language definition. For 5 years he headed Systems Consultants’ Microprocessor Technology Group and was responsible for the development of a variety of real-time manufacturing and system control products for both commercial and government use. He architected and managed the development of System Consultant’s commercially available microprocessor based cross compiler and hand-held meter reading product lines.

In 1985 he joined Fujitsu Systems of America, a world-wide provider of retail hardware and software applications, ATM, and specialized mobile computing solutions. As Director, Software Development his product development team was responsible for providing technical services and new products to Fortune 500 customers. He created and managed an R&D team that successfully developed and introduced object-based software products for retail point of sale systems.

In 1993, he joined Expersoft Corporation as Vice President, Engineering and managed a team that created CORBA based real-time object-oriented software development environments and toolkits for genetic learning, fuzzy associative memory and other knowledge-based problem-solving paradigms.

Starting in 1996 he was Vice President and Chief Technical Officer for SVI Retail, Inc., formerly Applied Retail Solutions, Inc., a multi-channel application software technology and services company for the retail industry. In charge of the Product Management, Development, and Professional Services groups, he led the definition, development, and deployment of a new suite of in-store retail applications and associated business processes that were deployed into over 100,000 Fortune 500 customer systems.

Beginning in 2000, as Vice President, Development and Engineering Services for Cayenta, he provided business development, product development, and engineering services management for the Enterprise Application Integration and Mainsaver computerized maintenance management development groups. These multidisciplinary groups were responsible for providing engineering services and products to a wide variety of Fortune 1000 customers.