LANSA Taps Former SoftLanding CEO to Be New President

October 2, 2007 Alex Woodie

LANSA yesterday announced that Steve Gapp, the former president and CEO at change management software vendor SoftLanding, will take over the president’s chair when its current president, John Siniscal, retires at the end of the year.

You could call it a “soft landing” of sorts for Gapp, the English native who was presiding over New Hampshire-based SoftLanding when it was acquired by Unicom Systems almost a year ago. A number of SoftLanding employees were either fired or quit following the acquisition by Unicom, which has been criticized for its handling of the deal. Gapp’s tenure as SoftLanding’s leader also ended, as Unicom’s president and CEO, Corry Hong, assumed control. Gapp has been working as a consultant since the takeover.

LANSA smartly prefers to highlight the happier times, and notes that Gapp was instrumental in stepping up SoftLanding’s international presence when he took the company’s reigns in 2002, following SoftLanding’s acquisition of his company, Oasis 400 Software, which was SoftLanding’s European distributor. The ensuing years were the heyday for change management vendors, as public companies scrambled to put more stringent source code controls in place following the passage of the Sarbanes Oxley Act. LANSA also notes that Gapp traces his midrange roots back to the System/32 days, when he worked at Compass Ltd., a consultancy firm based in the U.K. that was the forerunner of LANSA’s first business partner in Europe.

In a press release statement, Gapp says he’s excited to join LANSA, which is based near Chicago. “With an experienced and highly capable staff already in place, we’re primed to take LANSA’s strong tradition of innovation to the next level to make it even easier for our customers to create truly progressive software solutions quickly and to easily integrate these LANSA-based solutions with others built with .NET and J2EE technologies,” he said.

Siniscal who has presided over LANSA since 1998 and oversaw the spin out of the LANSA business from its parent company, Aspect Computing of Australia, reflected on his tenure:

“The IT market continues to evolve at a rapid pace but LANSA has kept ahead of the curve, enabling our customers to deploy leading edge solutions without getting caught in the technology jungle. It has been my pleasure to work with the talented and committed staff at LANSA that have made this possible. I’m confident that Steve has the skills and experience to lead the company to even greater success in the years ahead,” Siniscal says.

LANSA is owned by its two co-founders, Peter Draney, who holds the title of LANSA Group CEO, and Lyndsey Catermole, who isn’t directly involved in running the company.

SoftLanding Systems Acquired By CICS Specialist Unicom Systems

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