Our executive is made up of:

Ben White, Chief Executive Officer

Ben White is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Star and Chief Strategy Officer of MessageLabs.  Ben has also served as Chief Executive Officer and Director of MessageLabs Group and was appointed Vice Chairman of the Board in February 2006.

Prior to co-founding MessageLabs Group, Ben co-founded and was a director of RBR Networks, a Cisco distributorship that was sold to Datatec in October 1998. Ben was recently recognised by the European Technology Forum's UK Technology Innovation & Growth Awards as 'Technology Entrepreneur of the Year' for 2005 and in December 2005 was ranked in the top ten of Management Today's list of the UK's top one hundred entrepreneurs.

Paul Watson, Vice President, Product Management & Marketing

Paul is responsible for solution development, product management and solution marketing at Star. He has been a member of the executive team since August 2004 having joined Star through the acquisition of 4th Contact in 2003.

As a founder and Managing Director of 4th Contact, he was pivotal in taking the business from concept through to venture capital funding and finally delivering services to organisations such as: The London Stock Exchange, Hitachi, Warner Brothers, Volkswagen and Fujitsu. Paul also achieved UK market leading status for 4th Contact.

Previously Paul was a founding Director of professional services firm Caversham Buchanan where he began his relationship with Star as a customer in 1995.

John Leese - Chief Financial Officer 

John ensures that the finance team provides a first rate service, using consistent technologies and policies wherever possible.  He is also responsible for human resources.

John started with Content Technologies in 2000 and managed its operational finance team through a period of significant change, including its £600m acquisition by Baltimore and subsequent sale to Clearswift in 2002. John joined Star from Clearswift in 2005 where he was Group Financial Controller. While there, John led the implementation of numerous new systems and processes to improve financial discipline and overall efficiency of the business.

John began his career at Deloitte & Touche, where he qualified as a Chartered Accountant. He then moved to Ernst & Young, spending over three years on the West Coast of the US in its Software Industry Group.

John Adey, Chief Operating Officer

As COO, John leads all of our internal systems development and operations activities and is responsible for service delivery.

John has been tasked with ensuring Star has an efficient, centralised and consolidated infrastructure, which will drive responsive business systems to directly support Star and our customers' business.

John has over 18 years of IT related experience working for; GEC, Compaq and Cambridge Technology Partners.  In October 2004, before joining Star, John had been working for Novell as their Regional CIO for Europe, the Middle East and Asia. This included responsibility for the EMEA business development function.