About Us

Adam Wray became Tier 3 president and chief executive officer in 2010 after serving for a year as a board adviser. Wray brings more than fifteen years of sales, services, marketing and business development leadership experience across the content delivery, software-as-a-service, e-commerce and consulting sectors. In 2011 he led the company to secure $8.5M in growth capital. Previously vice president of global strategic alliances, channels and services for Limelight Networks, Wray also served as director of client services at Amazon delivering multi-channel outsource projects in e-commerce, fulfillment and customer service. Adam has held management roles within Cap Gemini, Akamai Technologies and SBC.

Jared Wray (no relation to Adam) is the architect of the company’s Enterprise Cloud Platform. Wray founded Tier 3 in 2006 to address the emerging need for enterprise on-demand services. Wray oversees the company’s development, support and operations teams and is responsible for the company’s intellectual property strategy and new product development. Leveraging the tenets of virtualization, automation, abstraction, Wray designed the enterprise cloud architecture with unique intellectual property at every layer of the stack. The result today is an agile, self-optimizing, enterprise grade cloud platform for customers’ mission-critical, production applications. Wray relies on his extensive experience directly managing and scaling large Web infrastructures and consulting for a number of financial, consulting, and technology companies such as Corbis Corporation, Ascentium, and Microsoft. A serial entrepreneur, Wray previously founded Dual, an interactive development firm with clients such as Microsoft and Nintendo.

Chris Brandon possesses over 20 years of financial, strategy, and operations management experience. He has raised capital for high and low technology ventures, directed numerous successful M & A transactions, set up distribution operations, and managed international based subsidiaries. For the past fifteen years, Chris has worked with telecom and technology companies serving in roles including COO, CFO, VP Ops, Director of Strategic Planning as well as an independent consultant and strategic advisor.

Previously, Chris was the fulltime or consultative COO and/or CFO for companies such as ExtraHop Networks, Optify, Medio Systems, 4thPass, Wildseed and Avogadro.

Education: MBA in finance with honors from Emory University, Atlanta and a BBA from University of Washington in Seattle.

As vice president of services, Bryan Thompson oversees the teams responsible for pre and post-sales technical support and professional services. Thompson brings over 15 years of experience architecting and operating enterprise technology solutions. Prior to joining the Tier 3 team, Thompson held a number of senior leadership roles requiring deep expertise in technical and operational functions including Amazon.com, Standard & Poor's and Limelight Networks.

Darren Simmonds joined Tier 3 in 2009 as the platform architect responsible for creating the core software infrastructure of the Tier 3 Enterprise Cloud Platform. Darren oversees the full software development life cycle from requirements gathering, architectural design, implementation, testing, and release management. Darren has over 20 years of software development experience with companies such as Safeco Insurance, Lante Corporation, SBI-Razorfish, and Ascentium Corporation.

As Tier 3’s vice president of marketing and corporate communications, Wendy oversees the inbound and outbound marketing, product positioning and branding and public relations. A veteran of technology leaders Intel, Microsoft and Motorola, she brings more than 20 years of experience leading hi-tech marketing organizations in the areas of enterprise solutions and applied technology. Wendy is a proud military veteran.

Adams, who joined Equinix in 2008, is a seasoned strategy and business development executive with more than 20 years of experience across various sectors of the high-tech industry. Previously Adams founded three start-ups and a venture capital fund for direct investment in Indonesia. He has been an active investor in digital music, VoIP, WiFi, Wireless Data Qos and data management and communications. Adams was the senior vice president of corporate development and strategy for Electronics for Imaging, Inc. (EFI), where he led a series of acquisitions and equity investments that helped reposition the company for new growth initiatives. Prior to EFI, Adams held senior leadership positions in corporate strategy, business development, and M&A transactions at several companies, including General Electric Capital and Adaptec.

Since 2005 John Connors has been a partner with Ignition Partners, where invests principally in business software and services. Prior to joining Ignition, John spent sixteen years at Microsoft Corporation in several strategic roles. From January 2000 to April 2005 he was senior vice president of Finance and Administration and Chief Financial Officer. John also held a variety of positions including vice president of the Worldwide Enterprise Group, and vice president and Chief Information Officer (CIO). Before serving as CIO, he held a number of positions within and outside finance, including Corporate Controller, General Manager of worldwide financial operations, Director of business operations of Microsoft’s European headquarters in Paris, and Director of business operations of the Worldwide Sales and Support Strategy Group.

Matt McIlwain is managing director at Madrona Venture Group where he focuses on a broad range of software-driven companies. Before joining Madrona in 2000, Matt was vice president of business process for the Genuine Parts Company (NYSE:GPC), a Fortune 250 company. He also was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company, concentrating on strategy and marketing in technology and financial service industries, and worked in investment banking at CSFB. Matt co-teaches a course on venture capital in the University of Washington Technology MBA Program. He is a board member of the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) and Villa Academy and serves on Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna’s Technology Advisory Board and is an advisory board member for Families Northwest.