Koolu - Works Everywhere

President

Jim Despathy brings 35 years of business development and management experience to the Koolu team. As president of The Cushing Group, an international consulting and training company, Jim developed and managed an organization of consulting engineers that delivered customized object oriented software solutions and training to customers around the world. Under Jim's management and direction The Cushing Group grew from a four person training company to a multi-million dollar operation with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Nashua, NH. The Cushing Group’s customers included Wells Fargo Bank, DirecTV, Fidelity Management Group, Xerox Corporation, NASA, NTT (Tokyo), ABM/AMRO (Amsterdam), Kaiser Permanente, CitiGroup and Prudential Resource Management. In 1998, Jim managed the sale and transfer of the Cushing Group to Ciber Corporation (CBR) in Denver.

Jim has extensive international management experience from his 18 years at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) where he managed several distributed international organizations in Software Engineering/Product Management, Software Services and Field (hardware) Services. Just prior to joining The Cushing Group, Jim was Chief of Staff and Manager of Planning and Operations, Corporate Engineering Service organization which provided Internationalization services, Educational services, and Software Quality Management support for the DEC’s engineering organizations worldwide.He was the first non-European representative to X/OPEN, an EEC sponsored consortium of computer manufacturers, focused on driving the UNIX operating environment towards Open Standards. Jim spent two years working with hardware manufacturers across Europe on the standardization issues with the goal providing cross platform application support with the UNIX environment.Jim earned his undergraduate degree from University of New Hampshire (Durham) and holds an MBA – Management from Rivier College (Nashua, New Hampshire).Jim volunteers for the American Cancer Society where he chaired the Relay for Life Fund raising events for the City of Manchester in 2005 and 2006. He is a member of Rotary International and the NH Professional Photographer Association.