Management Team
- Bryan Menell - Co-Founder, CEO
- Judy Kenney - Vice President of Sales
- Joel Hobbs - President
- Ed Garner - Vice President of Consulting Services
- Laura James - Vice President of Innovation
Bryan Menell
Co-Founder, CEO
"A lot of so called learning service companies are really just trying to shoehorn their product into a fit with their customers. We take a different approach."
After spending the last 15 years consulting with Fortune 500 companies on the use and integration of advanced technologies, Bryan Menell founded Fusion Learning Systems to harness those technologies and focus solely on creating meaningful learning solutions.
Before founding Fusion, Bryan was founder, president, and on the board of directors of Perficient (NASDAQ: PRFT), a publicly traded technology consulting firm. While at Perficient, Bryan's teams provided web-based solutions to some of the most recognizable companies and institutions in the world, including Lands End, Xerox, Gateway, Novell, Sterling Software, Lotus, and Deutschebank. Prior to Perficient, Bryan founded Exact Systems, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) consulting firm. Exact was acquired by BSG Corporation, where Bryan continued to operate the CRM business unit.
Bryan earned his B.S. from California State University, Chico in Business/MIS. He is a frequent guest lecturer at the University of Texas and has been featured in USA Today and Family Money Magazine. He also serves on several technology panels and non-profit boards and was a finalist for Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year, and recipient of an Austin Under 40 Award.
Judy Kenney
Vice President of Sales
"We have a great process, but it's the individual desire of each Fusion team member to do the right thing for our clients that gives us an edge."
Judy Kenney has extensive experience advising customers on interactive technology solutions and serves as client advocate to ensure results.
Prior to founding Fusion Learning Systems with Bryan Menell, Judy served as the director of Sales and Marketing for Thought Interactive, a multimedia web development company that designed and delivered educational CD-ROMs, product demos, streaming video, and interactive design. While at Thought Interactive, Judy led sales and marketing, which contributed to the profitable acquisition by Meritage Technologies. After the acquisition, Judy served as a major accounts rep for enterprise sales for large-scale system integration for Global 2000 companies and was the top-performing sales representative.
Prior to her involvement with e-learning, Judy spent seven years in the advertising and publishing industry. She worked with clients ranging from Seagrams Brands to Budweiser, Volkswagen, and Rollerblade to create branding campaigns that reached targeted demographics in regional publications like the Houston Press, Austin Chronicle, and LA New Times. Judy is the co-founder and past president of the Austin Symphony BATS and served on the 2002 board of directors for the Austin Symphony Orchestra. She has been a nominee in the Austin Business Journal's Profiles in Power Award in 2002 and 2003 and was nominated in the Austin Business Journal's Rising Stars.
Joel Hobbs
President
"It's inspiring to be fielding the perfect team to create great learning environments, whether it's rich-media custom courseware or complex technical infrastructure."
Joel Hobbs leads Fusion's delivery of strategic, content, and technical services to deliver world-class educational experiences. He brings twelve years of information technology, creative development, and instructional design experience to Fusion Learning Systems.
Joel is a seasoned leader and excels at building dynamic teams and developing successful large-scale projects. Over the past decade, Joel has held leadership roles within the e-learning practices at Sapient, Human Code, and Top Drawer Productions. Prior to Fusion, Joel led delivery for Sapient's Learning Services practice and managed a production staff of 60.
These award-winning project teams have developed and implemented custom learning applications for clients within educational and corporate markets, including Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Disney Interactive, Addison Wesley, Chase Bank, and Dell Computer Corporation. At Texas Learning Technology Group in the early 1990s, Joel was part of the team that innovated the first technology-based high-school curriculum to be adopted as a textbook alternative.
Ed Garner
Vice President of Consulting Services
Ed Garner serves as director of technology for Fusion Learning Systems, managing Engineering, Quality Assurance, and IT team leads. Since beginning his career in the US Army as an M-1A1 tank platoon leader, Ed has devoted the last 6 years to educational technologies. He is experienced with Java, .NET, and Win32 development, as well as with C++ and embedded C. Equally at home in PC or Macintosh OS X environments, Ed also has experience with Shockwave and Flash browser-delivered interactivity.
Ed has developed products for a diverse set of clients, including Disney; Holt, Rinehart and Winston; Worth Publishers; VTEL; Hasbro; Scholastic Publishing; The Hartford; and Zowie Intertainment. He was a lead programmer on Zowie's smart toy, "Redbeard's Pirate Quest," which was named Newsweek Magazine's "it" toy for Christmas 1999. Ed also led the Fusion engineering team which built out a full content management database and automated website build system for fall 2002 rollout.
Ed's engineering staff provides development expertise on products as diverse as content integrations, desktop applications, and database-driven Java or .NET infrastructure.
Ed received his B.A. from The University of Texas at Austin.
Laura James
Vice President of Innovation
Laura has been involved in conceptualizing, designing, and producing interactive learning environments since 1995 - and loves it. No other media has allowed her to express ideas and the relationships between them as fully.
Laura was lead instructional designer enhancing five college mathematics textbooks with animations and activities.
She was lead designer-producer for a product providing bilingual real-world science articles, activities, and experiments to accompany six elementary-school science textbooks, and designed interactive modules for an award-winning biology project. When it came time to put twelve of a publisher's core junior high and high school textbooks on line, she was in charge of the design of the 3000 animations to explain concepts in physics, chemistry, biology, and health.
Whether explaining science or giving context to social studies, Laura brings a passion for teaching to everything she does. Her Boston Symphony Orchestra website activities won awards. Credit issues became clear and relevant with the interactive bilingual course on credit and money management she designed. Need to know where you stand? A dynamic assessment tool she designed allows instructors to create variable-driven questions and rule-based tests to determine student areas of strength and weakness and make recommendations. She works with organizations to help define training needs and create the strategies, work plans, processes, and templates to efficiently and effectively deliver training to a wide range of geographically distributed audiences.
Laura's background includes a BA in biochemistry and French, MA in French with work toward a doctorate, and coursework in instructional design, pedagogy, technical writing, and creative writing. Prior to becoming involved in interactive design, she taught French at the University of Texas at Austin for 6 years and software-related courses for 1½ years.