About EMS
Executive Management Team
EMS has assembled a dynamic cross-disciplinary management team to bring new data center solutions to market, establish strong partnerships with industry leaders, respond to customer needs, and achieve positive financial results.
Tony Cole – Chief Executive Officer
With a career spanning 20 years within the high-tech industry, Tony Cole has a proven track record with partner relationships, large account sales, management, and sales leadership.
As Chief Executive Officer at EMS, Cole oversees the company's domestic and international operations focusing on growing revenue and profit results. He also oversees engineering, finance, marketing, technical support and sales team leadership.
Before that, Cole served as Vice President of Domestic Sales at Elliptical Mobile Solutions, where he established channel partner relationships with such major companies as Insight, Max Power, GreyBar, Synnex and many more. Under his leadership, EMS had sales to major clients some of which include: AOL, Royal Caribbean, IBM, NATO, the Canadian Government and Military and the US Government and Military.
Prior to joining EMS, Cole served as V.P. of Sales Development for Insight Enterprises, Inc., a $4.1 billion provider of brand name computing products, software and advanced IT services. While there, Cole was responsible for significantly growing revenue and gross profit for the company and its key partners. He also worked to create a comprehensive management system to drive team success inclusive of talent management; territory assessment and planning; account strategy and planning; margin improvement; partner management; and pipeline and forecast processes. Earlier, Cole served as area V.P. for Insight’s Enterprise West Area where he built an outbound sales team and transitioned an existing inside sales team to grow business in Western Area Enterprise clients.
Prior to that, Cole was the Director of Sales, Global Accounts for Comark, a technology solutions provider with $1.5 billion in revenue when it was acquired by Insight in 2002. While there, he was a founding member of the Global Accounts Division designed to penetrate Fortune 100 clients and clients with international requirements. In this capacity, he developed contractual relationships with enterprise accounts and built account teams to support new wins. Within two years, he grew revenue from $0 to $100M and increased active accounts by 3,000 percent.
Cole holds an M.B.A. in New Venture Management from University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn., and a B.A. in Economics from St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minn., where he graduated Cum Laude.
Joe Robbins – Founder, Chairman of the Board
With a career spanning 2 decades in high-tech, Joe Robbins is considered one of the industry’s true innovators. In 2005, he founded Elliptical Mobile Solutions where together with colleagues he pioneered “In Motion Engineering,” a patented adaptive suspension technology that offers significant efficiencies in the mobilization of electronic rack-mounted equipment.
Robbins also patented a closed loop cooling method that reduces the energy required to cool and maintain IT equipment by up to 80%.
Today, the dramatic cost benefits of these innovations are being recognized and implemented in data centers around the globe.
Prior to founding EMS, Robbins served in the United States Air Force and worked in a variety of information technology-computer related positions at MCI and Blackboard, Inc.
Don Kennedy – Senior Vice President of International Sales
As Senior Vice-President of International Sales, Don Kennedy is based in Singapore and responsible for EMS’s international sales and marketing efforts in Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, all of which are seeing significant growth in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Data Center sectors.
Prior to joining EMS, Kennedy served as Vice-President, Global Channels, for Seagate Technology where he led a distribution sales team with annual revenue responsibility in excess of $4 Billion and exceeded 100% of the company's sales revenue target. During his tenure with Seagate, he held various senior-level sales and marketing positions based in Singapore, Paris, San Jose and London and consistently surpassed sales revenue targets throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia-Pacific and the United States.
Kennedy also spent 14 years holding executive roles at Western Digital, including 6 years based in Singapore as V.P. of Asia Pacific Sales. Prior to joining Seagate, Kennedy founded Westan International, where he was Western Digital's master distributor for South East Asia and a key distributor and manufacturer's representative for IntelliSync, Labtec and Chromatic Research.
Kennedy holds a B.A. in Business Management from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, N.C.
William Woodbury II – Co-Founder, Chief Design Engineer
William Woodbury II is the co-inventor of EMS’ products. When presented with the idea to have a mobile data center platform in 2005, Woodbury took that idea and helped develop it into a full product line of mobile, high-density, cost-effective and energy-efficient data centers.
His talents in engineering have allowed EMS to develop equipment for a variety of military, governmental, industrial and commercial applications.
Today, Woodbury oversees the engineering of EMS’ full product line from concept, to research and development, to design and implementation.
Simon Rohrich – Co-Founder and Chief Technology Evangelist
As Co-Founder and Chief Technology Evangelist of Elliptical Mobile Solutions,
Rohrich is dedicated to driving data center trends toward optimal efficiency, while reducing their harmful greenhouse gas emissions.
His multi-disciplinary experience and passion for green technologies have shaped the philosophical underpinnings of the company’s overall product vision.
Rohrich has taken an active part leveraging contact with businesses, governmental and technology leaders to establish ongoing relationships with the Uptime Institute, the Data Center Alliance and Lifebot, to name a few.
At EMS, he serves in many senior level capacities primarily in engineering, finance, project management, and marketing.
Rohrich’s background in various technical fields, including telecom, IT, and wireless communication has been a valuable asset in the development and implementation of EMS’ product line.
Mike Chaput- Co-Founder and Director of Technical Sales
With more than 25 years in the IT industry, Mike Chaput brings to Elliptical Mobile Solutions a vast knowledge of the data center industry that has led to much of the EMS product line as it exists today.
Chaput conceived the idea for a mobile computing/communications platform while serving in the U.S. Air Force where he designed squadron level data centers and computing environments and managed a team of peers responsible for the implementation, cut-over, and testing of environments. He believed a mobile data center platform would be priceless in terms of cost-effectiveness, energy efficiency and space savings.
Today, Chaput serves as Director of Technical Sales at EMS. In this capacity, he provides all technical sales support and engineering for VAR’s, partners’ and customers across North and South America.
Prior to joining EMS, Chaput served as Senior Sales/ System Engineer for Sanity Solutions, a privately held VAR offering storage, backup, deduplication, WAN optimization, and DR/HA solutions for SMB to large enterprise accounts.
Before that, he was Principal Sales/System Engineer for Xiotech Corp., a manufacturer of enterprise class data storage solutions. While there, he was responsible for regional Systems Engineering and support of SAN products for the SW region; and built a customer base of more than 50 accounts covering the So Cal region. His sales team increased the footprint of storage solutions by 35 – 50% year after year.
Chaput also worked as a Technical Solutions Manager and Consultant for Paranet, an IT consulting/contracting company that was later acquired by Sprint, and Phoenix Home Life Insurance Company in Hartford, Conn., where he was responsible for IT related matters for 126 field offices nationwide.