Steve Akers is the founder of Digital Reef. A highly successful entrepreneur, Steve has spent his career designing cutting-edge technology solutions that solve complicated and very large scale business problems.

As chief technology officer in the Lucent Technologies Inc. "Wireline" business unit, Steve worked closely with Bell Laboratories to deliver large-scale technologies for integrating data, optical, and wireless networking across a common set of IP technologies. Steve came to Lucent from Spring Tide Networks, a company he co-founded in 1998. During Steve's tenure, Spring Tide became the premier provider of "IP Service Intelligent" switches for enhanced data services over IP networks. Steve and his team architected and designed the wireless, wire line, and broadband platform that inspired the purchase of Spring Tide by Lucent in 2000. As chief technology officer and key architect at Shiva Corporation, a maker of remote access and virtual private networking equipment, Steve partnered with Nortel networks to deliver remote access server and carrier-based VPN technologies. Steve's networking, storage, distributed file systems, and security experience also includes key positions at Stratus Computer, Hewlett-Packard, and Apollo Computer.