John D. Beneventi – CIE Chairman / Co-founder 5x Solutions

John D. Beneventi is a social entrepreneur with a focus on technology as the change agent. For the past ten years, John has lead the design, creation, and deployment of market leading technologies for the real estate and housing counseling industries. Prior to that, he worked for 15 years in the audit accounting and financial field as CFO for many for profit and non-profit corporations.

John has worked with major corporations such as Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, HUD, Quepasa.com, and national non-profit corporations such as NeighborWorks America, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), and the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP).

John enjoyed a diverse educational background founded in the arts at; Interlochen Arts Academy, and Berklee College of Music; and supplemented with business studies at Palomar College.

Ron de Frates –Board Member CIE/Co-founder 5x Solutions 

Ron de Frates has been developing software for over twenty years. His experience encompasses the entire software life cycle including requirements analysis, architecture, framework design, maintenance and support. He began his career programming mainframes in the mid 1980’s, crafting desktop applications in the ‘90s, and developing web-based applications and web services from the late 90’s on.

Ron witnessed first-hand the ‘democratization’ of technology as the CPU moved from mainframes to PCs on desktops and hand-held devices. User expectations of software and even their role in the development of systems have created significant challenges and opportunities as access to technology has evolved. Specifically, Ron recognizes the value of:

• collaborative design with business sponsors, domain experts, and end users

• measurable and verifiable project success metrics

• short development cycles with continuous improvement

• application frameworks

• loosely coupled component design

• multi-layered architecture

The breadth of these experiences formed his views on development methodologies that take into account time-to-market, communication, modeling, and code construction.

Projects include procurement management systems for Sempra Energy, various market research models, Phase I & Phase II clinical research studies for new drug applications, development of Counselor Max, and various housing/finance related software projects.