Evergreen Assurance, IncorporatedCo-Founder, President & Chief Technology Officer
Feb. 2002 - Dec. 2004Annapolis, MDOn 9/11, the Port Authority of New York lost its World Trade Center data center, severing access to critical email servers hosted by USinternetworking (USi), where John was VP of Managed Hosting. To swiftly restore communications, USi stood up a BlackBerry server and overnighted 50 Blackberries to the Port Authority, enabling mobile communications for its disaster response team. This event highlighted vulnerabilities in traditional disaster recovery methods and inspired John to coneive a real-time disaster recovery cloud service for corporate email and BlackBerry devices, aiming to reduce the recovery time objective (RTO) from 24 hours to just 15 minutes with a single click on a web console. He named it Evergreen. In 9/11's aftermath, John co-founded Evergreen Assurance in Annapolis, Maryland, securing $4 million in funding. He invented and patented the Evergreen disaster recovery management system which delivered semi-automatic, 15-minute disaster recovery for corporate email and BlackBerry communications through a user-friendly Command and Control web console. This groundbreaking solution allowed organizations to maintain near-seamless communication during outages and disasters. During the Northeast Blackout of 2003, Evergreen failed over Forbes' Microsoft Exchange, BlackBerry, and Active Directory servers from Manhattan to Evergreen's Cincinnati data center in just 15 minutes, with no data loss, with three mouse clicks from John's Strategic Assurance Command Center (SACC) in Annapolis. This rapid response ensured that Forbes's global operations remained uninterrupted during the crisis. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), BlueCross/BlueShield of Pennsylvania, and McGraw Hill would subscribed to the Evergreen Cloud. With the IMF and Forbes, Evergreen's impact went global. Evergreen went on to win SC Magazine's Global 2004 Judges' Award for "Best Disaster Recovery Service," in the world, establishing John's global impact in real-time disaster recovery.