Management Team

Ravi Ika

Executive Chairman and Founder

A consummate entrepreneur and business process improvement expert, Ravi Ika founded ikaSystems in 1999 to address what he recognized as a pressing problem in the health insurance industry: extensive use of paper-based processes; fragmented, inflexible, expensive systems from legacy vendors; and limited ability to make effective decisions based on sound, enterprise-wide business and medical intelligence. The result was ikaEnterprise, a technology platform utilizing cloud computing that works across all health plan departments and business lines to optimize the allocation of healthcare premiums between administrative costs, medical costs and health plan profits. Market momentum attracted the world’s sixth largest private equity firm in 2009, Providence Equity Partners, which invested over $120 million in the company’s continued growth and success.

Today Mr. Ika continues in his role as lead innovator, focusing on overall corporate growth and product strategy and working closely with client organizations to ensure they receive optimal value from the company’s solutions. Essential components of Mr. Ika’s leadership are his vision for what technology can accomplish, his hands-on approach to clients’ success and his ability to build world-class development and implementation teams that possess the synergistic competencies of technical and business process reengineering expertise.

Prior to ikaSystems, Mr. Ika was founder of The ikaGroup Companies, providers of global consulting services. He also worked as a research scientist at Harvard University. He has a master’s degree in environmental engineering from Old Dominion University.

Joseph V. Marabito

President and Chief Executive Officer

Joe Marabito oversees all functional areas of ikaSystems and presides over the company’s day-to-day operations. He joined ikaSystems from Medco Health Solutions, Inc., the country’s top pharmacy benefits management company. Responsible for Medco’s consumer directed healthcare product line, he guided its rapid growth to 2.9 million members and led a doubling of margin realization.

Prior to his role at Medco, Mr. Marabito was executive vice president, chief customer officer and chief operating officer at NaviMedix, Inc., now NaviNet, Inc., a company that connects healthcare providers and payers using Web and electronic data interchange technologies. There, among other achievements, he oversaw nationwide expansion to all 50 states while restructuring operations and account management areas, driving higher customer satisfaction scores, increasing revenue and doubling margins from existing customers.

Mr. Marabito was also a partner at Accenture and senior manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and he spent four years as senior vice president for strategy and corporate development at RightCHOICE Managed Care, Inc., a 1.8 million member, publicly traded regional managed care company. He began his career with Texas Instruments as a mechanical engineer.

Mr. Marabito holds a BS degree in mechanical engineering (highest distinction) from Pennsylvania State University and an MBA degree from Harvard Business School.

Edward E. Saraiva

Chief Financial Officer

Ed Saraiva oversees ikaSystems’ financial operations and brings a diverse background of financial and managerial experience to the company.

Prior to joining ikaSystems, Mr. Saraiva was the chief financial officer of Beacon Hospice, Inc., a nationally recognized leader in providing Hospice and Palliative Care services. He was responsible for all of Beacon’s financial functions including Medicare, Medicaid and Third Party Insurance reimbursement. Mr. Saraiva led Beacon through two acquisitions, internal site expansions, and several financings. He also led the Beacon team in the sale of Beacon to Amedisys, Inc. (AMED).

Prior to his role at Beacon Mr. Saraiva was the CFO and business partner to several venture capital backed technology and service companies including Veridiem, Inc., TekCel, Inc., SourceGate Systems, FEN.com, Avidynen, Inc., and
TravCorps, Inc.

Mr. Saraiva started his financial career as a Certified Public Accountant with the international public accounting firm of Deloitte & Touche. At Deloitte, he focused on servicing several international public companies.

Mr. Saraiva holds a BSBA degree from Stonehill College and is an Emeritus Board Member to the Big Brother and Big Sister of Mass Bay.

Kate Criniti

General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer

Ms. Criniti , who serves as ikaSystems’ General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer, has over 14 years of legal experience, with particular focus on venture capital backed technology companies.

Before joining ikaSystems she was the General Counsel
– Americas for Day Software (DAYN), which was acquired by Adobe Systems in October 2010. Prior to Day Software, she founded ClearCourse Advisors LLC, which provided outsourced general counsel services to emerging growth companies, was the General Counsel of ThingMagic, Inc., and held senior legal positions at VeriSign (VRSN), Guardent, Inc. (acquired by VeriSign in February 2004), and IONA Technologies (IONA). She began her legal career at Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault in Boston, where her practice focused on mergers and acquisitions, securities law, venture capital financings and general corporate representation of technology companies.

Ms. Criniti graduate cum laude from Boston College Law School and Bates College. She currently serves on the Boston Advisory Board of Self Help Africa, a non-profit that seeks to enable rural Africans to attain economic independence.

Alok Gupta, PhD

Executive Vice President, Operations and Technology

Alok Gupta, PhD, has an exceptional track record of innovation, general management experience, product and business development success, global research and development (R&D) leadership, high-performance team-building and business execution. As chief technology officer, he works closely with other senior ikaSystems leaders to set and guide the strategic direction of development, infrastructure, and research and development (R&D) organizations.

Dr. Gupta was previously senior vice president and chief information officer at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, the largest private health insurer serving Maryland, Washington DC and northern Virginia. There, he co-led the organization’s multi-year, $600 million technology-driven business transformation initiative designed to decrease administrative costs, improve the efficiency and quality of care through better provider/patient engagement, and respond to the changing requirements of healthcare reform.

Before CareFirst, Dr. Gupta held multiple senior leadership positions over seventeen years at Siemens. For Siemens Healthcare, he spent six years as vice president and global business head, where he led strategy, operations, profit and loss, and global business for computer-aided diagnosis and knowledge solutions, an entrepreneurial start-up charted with developing clinical decision support products. For the Imaging and Visualization Division of Siemens Corporate Research, he served in roles including general manager, in which he spearheaded image processing, computer vision and 3D visualization and had worldwide responsibility for conducting innovative and applied R&D for Siemens’ healthcare, automation, power generation and automotive businesses.

Dr. Gupta has been awarded twelve patents, with six patent applications pending, and has published numerous journal and refereed conference papers. He earned a BTech degree in computer science and engineering with honors from Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur; an MSE degree in computer and information science as well as a PhD degree in computer and information science, specializing in artificial intelligence and computer vision, from the University of Pennsylvania; and an MBA degree from the Wharton School.

Barbara Linder

Senior Vice President, Product Development

Barbara Linder has over 20 years of experience in healthcare strategic planning, operational, finance and information technology. A noted expert in procedural and organizational optimization of healthcare operations, she spearheads ikaSystems product development efforts, deploying industry-standard tools and techniques to ensure clients achieve value from ikaSystems technology rapidly and efficiently.

Before joining ikaSystems, Ms. Linder was chief executive officer for Delta Medical Care of Clearwater, Florida, a third-party administrator specializing in Medicare Advantage claim administration. She also held a range of leadership positions, including chief operating officer, at the Florida Hospital Healthcare System in Orlando, covering operations, procedures, reporting and staffing; over a period of seven years, she helped the at-risk physician hospital organization transition from an operating loss to a multi-million-dollar profitable company. Ms. Linder also has also lent her extensive management skills to Options Behavioral Health of Norfolk, Virginia; Florida 1st Health Plans of Winter Haven, Florida; Administrative Services of Tampa; Quality Network Plus of Clearwater (an ancillary PPO covering the state of Florida that she also co-founded); ABI Administrative Services, Health Plan Administrators and Coordinated Benefit Plans, all located in Tampa; and Power Group Designs of Overland Park, Kansas.

Ms. Linder has served in executive roles for the Florida Association of Health Underwriters and the West Coast Association of Health Underwriters, as well as several charitable organizations. She has a BS/BA from the University of Nebraska, Omaha.

Raghu Ramaya, PhD

Senior Vice President, Strategic Business Development

Raghu Ramaya brings to ikaSystems a proven record of success in rapidly growing sales and formulating and implementing new strategic business initiatives in competitive environments and compressed timeframes. His experience spans a number of industries, including insurance, information technology and investment banking.

At one of the world’s leading specialty insurance companies, Mr. Ramaya helped start and rapidly grow a consulting business that assisted clients with proactively managing business losses that resulted from major capital equipment breakdown. In Wall Street, as a trader and market maker for an investment bank, he started and built a large emerging market currency options book in the Mexican peso. He has also worked for a number of information technology companies, where he helped build and grow various industry practices in record time. His entrepreneurial experience includes starting a management consulting practice with leading industry experts to provide process efficiency improvement solutions to healthcare organizations and improved risk selection procedures to insurance companies.

Mr. Ramaya completed his undergraduate degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, and MBA and PhD degrees at Syracuse University, where he was awarded the School of Management’s distinguished alumni award for exemplary academic achievement. He also taught undergraduate chemistry as an assistant professor in the State University of New York system.

Aruna Wickremeratne, CPA

Senior Vice President, Operations

One of ikaSystems’ first employees, Aruna Wickremeratne has served ikaSystems in numerous capacities over his tenure with the company, playing key roles in financial, operational, sales and client service areas. In his current role, he works closely with ikaSystems’ chief executives to set corporate strategy and ensure the smooth function of financial, accounting and client service programs. Prior to joining ikaSystems, he served on the management team of a regional public accounting firm, where he led audits for several software firms.

Mr. Wickremeratne earned a BA degree in economics magna cum laude and a master’s degree in accounting from Clark University, where he was a member of the Beta Gamma Sigma honor society and received the Wall Street Journal Student Achievement Award for academic excellence in economics. He is currently a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and the Massachusetts Society of Certified Public Accountants (MSCPA).

Solomon J. Zak, MD

Senior Vice President, Business and Medical Intelligence

For the past 15 years, Dr. Solomon J. Zak has guided medical intelligence product development. An invaluable contributor to the ikaSystems team, he brings to ikaSystems a degree of healthcare industry knowledge and foresight possessed by few in the field.

Before joining ikaSystems, Dr. Zak founded several healthcare companies. In the process, he identified actuarially defined, case-mix adjusted and provider risk tiers for 40 health plans and insurance entities throughout the United States. His most recent endeavor, DataMedica, created a primary care provider quality assessment system, the Zak Quality Index (ZQI), consisting of 59 measures. The ZQI demonstrates that economic profiling of primary care physicians is an excellent proxy for quality of practice. DataMedica was also one of the first companies to offer solutions for HEDIS reporting.

In previous positions, Dr. Zak served as medical director of SHARE Health Plan of Minnesota and co-corporate medical director of Share Development Corporation until it merged with UnitedHealthcare. He was also a consultant to Humana Hospital Corporation in its acquisition of IMC and initiated the licensing of UCARE, a successful University of Minnesota HMO.

Dr. Zak graduated from the University of Minnesota School of Medicine, and he has taught hematology, conducted research and has been published in many peer-review journals.

John Jacobsen

Vice President, Finance and Controller

John Jacobsen is responsible for managing the company’s financial operations and has more than twenty years of experience with fifteen years specifically in the technology industry. He joined ikaSystems from Streamserve, Inc., a $70 million software company, where he was the vice president of finance. There he oversaw financial operations, human resources, IT, Technical support, legal, facilities and office administrative operations.

Prior to his tenure at Streamserve, Inc., Mr. Jacobsen held finance and accounting roles at Cybex International, Inc., Hybridon, Inc., Arthur Andersen, Kenan Systems, and Gold Hill Computers. He graduated cum laude from Northeastern University with a degree in accounting and finance and is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA).

Brian Kim

Vice President, Account Management

Brian Kim leads the company’s account management team and is responsible for developing and implementing ikaSystems’ account leadership approach to better serve our clients. Mr. Kim brings to the organization over 20 years of healthcare experience, with expertise in client management, strategy and translating strategy into operational results.

Prior to joining ikaSystems, Mr. Kim led the data licensing business and aspects of business development at Medco Health Solutions, Inc. There he specialized in identifying new partnership and acquisition opportunities to support the core business, including the $730 million acquisition of United Biosource.

Before Medco, Mr. Kim held account management and business development roles at software and healthcare organizations. At NaviNet, Inc., he was vice president of partner management and director of business development, ensuring and raising high levels of client service, customer satisfaction and profitability to the company.

Mr. Kim graduated cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in Biomedical Engineering.

Bijendra P. Malik

Vice President, Technology

Bijendra P. Malik, who drives ikaSystems’ technical direction, has 20 years of experience in industries such as insurance, finance, manufacturing and telecommunications. His versatile background, strong management and leadership skills, and experience in creating strategies for disaster recovery and processes to improve and maintain high security and service levels provide ikaSystems with the solid foundation necessary for architecturally designing various hardware and software applications. His technical leadership has also been invaluable in guiding health plans interested in migrating from legacy to next-generation systems.

Mr. Malik has held strategic positions with companies such as GE Silicones and LG Electronics, a Fortune 500 company. His extensive experience includes providing over 99.9% uptime and operations and security leadership for multiple datacenters, designing and implementing disaster recovery plans using highly integrated blade servers, creating WANs using “Delta changes” technology, and SAN strategies. He has hands-on experience with redundant Cisco switching, Cisco PIX firewalls, data protection using replication, performance and availability monitoring, Safeword Secure Tokens Cisco-based VPNs for remote and mobile users, Oracle 10G and SQL Server databases.

Mr. Malik has a BS degree in electrical engineering and numerous certifications that include Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), IBM’s Certified Lotus Professional (CLP), Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), Checkpoint Certified Security Administrator (CCSA), Certified Novell Engineer (CNE) and Citrix Certified Administrator (CCA).

Cheryl Valera

Vice President, Human Resources

Cheryl Valera has more than fourteen years of experience in human resources, including over eight years in leadership roles at Sycamore Networks and Ipswitch. To ikaSystems, she provides a balance of strategic insight, tactical solutions and compassion that positively impacts business results.

Ms. Valera has a significant track record of streamlining operations, developing and implementing organizational solutions, and applying broad-based HR expertise in diverse, demanding and rapid-growth environments. Specific expertise areas include strategic and tactical HR leadership, development, and implementation of HR programs and systems, benefits and wellness planning and design, mergers and acquisitions, employee and leadership development, change management, compensation and reward and recognition strategies, employee relations, coaching and communications, workforce planning and talent acquisition strategies.

Ms. Valera is a member of the Northeast Human Resources Association, the Society of Human Resource Management, the Senior Human Resources Network and the Boston Recruiters Group. She holds certifications in Professional Human Resources and other management areas, and she is a Global Professional in Human Resources.