Our dynamic team.

David Simonson is founder and president of Simonson Technology Services, Inc. (formerly Specialty Systems Inc.). David has been working with computer systems since 1969. His background includes architecture, hardware and software development, sales, marketing, and program management. In addition, David has worked in executive management with Amdahl Corporation, Ingres Cooperation and Schlumberger. He has written numerous software products, technical training courses, and documentation material for high end environments. As a trainer and consultant, David travels world wide to present course materials and help others optimize their IT environments.

Max Bruning has been working with Unix systems since 1976. He has done extensive work as a developer (both applications and kernel), debugger, system analyst, and troubleshooter. As the author of the first device driver course offered at Bell Labs, Max has written several courses, device drivers, and debugged various kernel problems. He has also taught Unix classes and seminars for various companies around the world including Sun Microsystems, AT&T, Lucent, HP, Motorola, Siemens, Unisys, and NCR.

Rod Norden has been working with computers since 1974, when he was responsible for digital image enhancement of 1st Pioneer images of Jupiter as a undergrad at Optical Sciences Center in Tucson, AZ. After graduate school, he worked at Bell Labs on early versions of UNIX. He has worked in both development and training for many companies and Universities, including Xerox Advanced Systems Development in Palo Alto, Tandem Computers, University of California Santa Cruz, and Sun Microsystems. His specialty is programming languages, from C to C++ to Java. He was in the first training class for future Sun Java Instructors in fall 1995, and took the Java technology around the world for Sun until late 1998, when he returned to UCSC. Recently he taught Java J2EE development topics at the 'last start-up' company, iSpheres Corp in Oakland, CA. Now he prepares and teaches custom C++ or Java classes, especially in performance and tuning areas.

Jan Hendrik Mangold is a Sun Microsystems veteran. He has been an instructor since he started as a contractor in Munich in 1988. Since then he has held several different jobs for Sun in Germany and the U.S. Most recently he has been working on web based applications using Apache, PHP, XML and SQL databases.

Mary Rocco has been working for Dave since the beginning. She currently handles all of the business operations, human resources, billing, and scheduling. Mary is the glue that holds STS together. In addition to playing the "Jane of all trades", Mary also looks after Dave to make sure he stays organized.

Denise Johnson has been working at STS since mid-summer 2005 and quickly showed aptitude for crunching numbers soon after. Denise is working closely with Mary, and taking on some of STS' financial management responsibility.