Shannon McElyea brings more than 25 years of experience in high technology and communications with a focus on creating strategic technology alliances for joint sales, marketing and engineering primarily for startup and early stage companies. McElyea has been a significant contributor in three IPO’s and one acquisition by creating the partnerships and programs highlighted in IPO prospectuses. As VP of business development for DeepNines, she worked to identify and develop complementary platform and security partners, fusing engineering, sales and channel contacts. Prior to her work with DeepNines, Shannon was vice president of corporate development for NextHop Technologies as well as DNet. Previously, she spent several years as director of technology alliances with iPass, forging alliances and developing channels with leading network and security vendors for co-marketing, sales, OEM and engineering ventures. During her tenure, iPass received a $50 million investment from Cisco. She also initiated development of the ‘one-click’ VPN dialer, interoperable with all top VPN solutions, and the VPN/Networking Interoperability and showcase lab. Prior to her work with iPass, Shannon was director of new market development and OEM marketing at CyberCash, Inc. (now PayPal) evangelizing and embedding the CyberCash secure transaction software into e-commerce. Prior to CyberCash, she set up worldwide sales channels and orchestrated meetings with key executives of Cisco for Network Translation Inc. (NTI) who developed and manufactured the first NAT based firewall product in the world. This resulted in acquisition of NTI by Cisco, and the product today is the Cisco PIX firewall, the world’s leading firewall.. Shannon also created, and recruited large partners for the reseller channel and technology partners program for Netcom Online Communications, Inc., now ICG, and served as director of sales and marketing for Portal Communications. She spent three years as a software and networking consultant for Siemens, AG and Siemens/Nixdorf in Munich, Germany. Shannon started her career in the late 70s with a nine-year tenure at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Xerox OSD where her primary focus was worldwide network administration, software release management for Mesa OS, application development; she also served as a Xerox Star workstation consultant.