Glick replaces Durocher as Webraska CEO

PARIS -- Webraska, a global provider of location-based services (LBS), has announced that co-founder and CEO Jean-Michel Durocher is being replaced as CEO by Barry Glick. Durocher will remain a member of the company's board of directors. Glick has served as chairman of Webraska for the past six months.

Glick previously was the CEO and chairman of MapQuest, where he built the company to its industry-leading position, which led to a highly successful IPO, and eventual sale to AOL for $1.1 billion. 

"I am tremendously proud of everything Webraska has achieved since its creation in 1998", Durocher said. "The company is widely recognized as the powerhouse of the location-based services sector, with more services and middleware deployed with more carriers in more countries and more continents than our four nearest competitors combined."

As an example of Webraska's success, Durocher cited the recent multi-million dollar agreement signed with Orange World that he said signals a major evolution from single country agreements to high-value international multi-year contracts, as the industry matures

Revenue growth

"Webraska has indeed built an enviable and unique market position," Glick said. "During the months and years ahead, the Webraska management team will focus on helping our wireless carrier customers to generate significant profitable revenue growth from compelling location-aware mobile information and communications services."

Glick said that within the telematics services sector he looks forward to collaboration with companies such as IBM and SAIC-Telcordia, whose worldwide sales networks, business relationships, systems integration capabilities and vertical industry expertise provide a valuable complement to Webraska's core technologies.

Along with the leadership change, Webraska also announced that Michael Nappi, formerly VP and General Manager, MapQuest Business Solutions at AOL Time Warner, has accepted the position as senior vice-president of sales, marketing, and business development.

MapQuest founder

Nappi was a founding member of the team that created MapQuest. He was responsible for managing the sales and marketing of MapQuest's business and enterprise products to a worldwide set of over 2,000 corporate clients. In this position, he managed a staff of over 160 including marketing, product management, business development, worldwide sales, software development and operations. His group was focused on the distribution of packaged technology and content solutions to clients worldwide via ASP and client side services. Prior to this, Nappi held senior sales, product management and marketing roles with RR Donnelly and Unisys. 

Webraska provides the advanced software solutions required to develop, integrate and deploy location-based services. Webraska's carrier-grade offering includes the SmartZone Geospatial Platform, the SmartZone LBS Application Platform, the patented and award-winning car navigation solution, IbDN Lite, and over 30 other ready-to-deploy market-proven applications such as maps and directions, traffic alerts, yellow pages, BuddyFinder and m-Vite.

Silicon Valley and France

Webraska has headquarters in the Silicon Valley and in France, and offices around the world. The company currently powers the LBS offering of service providers in four continents, including Shell Mobile, E-Plus, Sensis (Australia), Orange, Telecom Italia Mobile, and 02, and has partnerships with leading technology providers including Ericsson, IBM, Nortel and Openwave.

Last month, Webraska announced that O2 Ireland, a wholly owned subsidiary of mmO2 plc and a leading network operator, had chosen Webraska's portfolio of LBS applications and SmartZone middleware platforms for the deployment of Locator for WAP, Web and two-way SMS. 

"We are very pleased to announce our collaboration with Webraska, which gives us the ability to deliver innovative new location-based services to our customers," said Campbell Scott, Product Director, O2 Ireland. "The Irish market is one of early adopters, eager to embrace new and innovative technologies such as Location-Based Services. We have selected Webraska because we believe their LBS solutions deliver value and meet the needs of our customers."