WSI has a strong Executive Management team in place and operates out of Huntsville and Anniston in Alabama. The executive management team is as follows:

Thomas P. (“Pat”) Hardeman, Ph.D.
Chief Executive Officer and Vice Chairman of the Board

Dr. Pat Hardeman is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of WSI. He currently serves as Vice Chairman on the Board of Directors of WSI. He provides strategic direction to WSI, setting objectives and policies. Prior to WSI, he was a Manager of Boomhower Realty (now Prudential) and a Partner in Phelps Hardeman Realtors, owner of Sarasota Realty Exchange, Inc. Prior to that, he was Chief Executive Officer of Community Service Foundation in Pinellas County, Florida, an organization successfully carrying out many government programs during the 1960’s in the area of literacy, self-help housing, performing the first Vista training program in the United States, and co-authoring early guidelines for the National Head Start Program.

He holds a Masters and Ph.D. degree in Philosophy from the University of Illinois and is a graduate of Murray State University, Kentucky.

Patrick J. Gannon
President & Chief Operating Officer

Patrick Gannon is the President and COO of WSI and serves on the WSI Board of Directors. He is responsible for setting goals and budgets as well as managing the sales, marketing and operations of the corporation. He previously served as president and CEO of OASIS Open from 2001 to 2008, and was also an OASIS Board Director from 2000 to 2008. Mr. Gannon was appointed in 2006 as a high-level Advisor to the United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN GAID). He also served from 2000 to 2005 with the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), as Chairman of the Team of Specialists for Internet Enterprise Development, which advised governments in transitional economies on best practices for electronic business. Previously, Mr. Gannon worked for BEA Systems, as Senior Vice President in the eCommerce Integration Division, and at Netfish Technologies, as Vice President of Marketing and Industry Programs. He also served as Vice President of Strategic Programs for the CommerceNet Consortium, directing research and development efforts in new Internet commerce standards such as XML.

Mr. Gannon is co-author of the book: Building Database-Driven Web Catalogs, and is an international speaker on electronic business and Web services standards. Mr. Gannon was educated at Georgia Institute of Technology in Engineering Science & Mechanics from 1965-1970.

Elysa Jones
Chief Technology Officer

Elysa Jones currently serves as the CTO of WSI. Prior to this, she was WSI's Engineering Program Manager for eight years, where she managed the design, development and deployment of over 100,000 Tone Alert Receivers and numerous software controlled activation systems. She has served as a board member for the Partnership for Public Warning, works closely with the Emergency Interoperability Consortium and chairs the OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee. This committee developed the first international emergency data standard for communicating warnings, the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) as well as the Emergency Data Exchange Language Distribution Element (EDXL-DE) for defining routing assertions for any emergency data. In February 2006, she was awarded the first annual Leadership in Emergency Interoperability Award granted by the Emergency Interoperability Consortium.
She has over twenty years prior experience providing contractor support to the Army DoD missile defense program. In that capacity, her work ranged from data reduction and analysis of phased array sensor data to managing software support for a large scale computer simulation facility. She was involved in the early IEEE work that led to the TCP/IP standards.

Elysa has a Masters degree in Computer Science specializing in Engineering Management from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, Alabama and a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics also from the University of Alabama

Victor L. Cestaro, Ph.D.
Chief Engineer

Dr. Vic Cestaro serves as WSI's Chief Engineer, where he is responsible for new product design and development and provides ongoing technical assistance in WSI's Huntsville and Anniston, Alabama facilities. He was also involved in the setup and deployment of more than 30,000 Tone Alert Radios in the Alabama CSEPP operation before joining WSI full-time. Dr. Cestaro came to WSI with more than 25 years of engineering experience in the aerospace, broadcast, and digital systems industries. Prior to joining WSI he was a research scientist for the Department of Defense at Fort McClellan, Alabama where he examined the use of non-intrusive methods, such as thermal imaging and speech analysis, to assess human physiological responses to stress. He also provided expert witness testimony in this area. During his tenure at DoD he received two awards for research excellence. He holds three patents and has published in several journals. Dr. Cestaro holds a Bachelor of Science, Master of Arts, and Ph.D. degrees from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Mr. Wade Griffin
Operations Manager

Wade Griffin is the Operations Manager of the Anniston Office and joined WSI in 2003. He manages the CSEPP ToneAlert Radio installation program. He is responsible for providing technical guidance for county emergency management agencies in troubleshooting transmitter equipment, oversight for the programming of TARS prior to installation, and inventory management for all equipment in the Company’s warehouse, preparing management reports to the State of Alabama, county agencies and WSI’s management and Quality Assurance.

Prior to joining WSI, he was Food Safety Coordinator of Tyson Foods, Inc. from 1997 to 2000 and prior to that, he was Employment Interviewer and Employment and Security Representative for Department of Labor, State of Florida from 1993 to 1997. He holds a Master of Arts degree in General Studies from Jacksonville State University, Jacksonville, Alabama. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Jacksonville State University, Jacksonville, Alabama.

Mr. Johnny Maplesden
Accounting Manager

Johnny Maplesden joined WSI in August of 2003 as an Accountant in the Huntsville Office of WSI.

Prior to joining WSI, Johnny was employed by Intergraph Corporation in Huntsville, Alabama, as an Accountant. Prior to that, he worked for Kroger Company in Madison, Alabama as Assistant Customer Service Manager. He obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting in 1990 from Athens State College, Athens, Alabama.