Management Team

Ceryx is a team of highly skilled professionals who are committed to helping enterprise clients harness the power of cloud-based solutions. Select members of the Executive Team include the following:

• Gus Harsfai, Founder, President and CEO
• David Penny, CIO
• Roger Smith, Vice President, Operations

Gus Harsfai

As the founder, President and CEO of Ceryx, Gus Harsfai drives a culture of product innovation and service excellence. His commitment to clients stems from counseling executives of Fortune 500 companies across North America for over 20 years.

Gus is a powerful and charismatic speaker who speaks and writes regularly on topics that resonate with the C-suite, such as how to leverage cloud-based technologies for lowering costs. He is an active member of several industry associations including the Telecom Executives Business Network, Software and Service Group and the Young Presidents' Organization. Gus is a graduate and fellow of Quantum Shift -- an invitation-only leadership program for 40 of Canada's most innovative entrepreneurs founded by the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario and KPMG Enterprise. Gus also sits on several Microsoft Advisory Committees.

Prior to founding Ceryx, Gus leveraged a strong foundation in IT consulting to launch NRG Consultants Inc. where he oversaw deployments and migrations of messaging systems for large enterprises, including: the Government of Canada, Unilever, Pharma Plus, Magna Entertainment, Yellow Pages and other enterprises throughout Canada, the United States and South America.

David Penny

As CIO, Dr. David Penny leads the technology team responsible for building and running Ceryx's industry-leading Cloud-based products. Dave has over 25 years’ experience leading technology teams. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto working in the field of languages, operating systems, and software engineering. He served as VP Software Development and CTO at Algorithmics where he led the team that developed the industry-leading RiskWatch™ middle-office enterprise risk management software. He was VP of R&D at Electronics Workbench leading to their successful acquisition by National Instruments. He has been a sought-after software industry consultant while a Professor at the University of Toronto, where he continues to teach an advanced course in software engineering. At Ceryx, Dave grew the technology team and lead the creation of Cloud Control™ - the extensible software-as-a-service platform that enables enterprise clients to harness the benefits of cloud-based messaging and collaboration.

Roger Smith

As Vice President, IT Operations, Roger Smith is responsible for ensuring that Ceryx's technology infrastructure successfully meets or exceeds all of our client service level commitments. As such, he oversees operations management, service implementation and customer support. Roger brings over 17 years of experience in IT operations management -- including holding senior consulting positions at Rand, EDS and KPMG. In these positions, he led enterprise application integration projects in the telecommunications industry and for the U.S. Government. Roger has earned the CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) certification of which there are only 3000 in Canada.