Manal Mehta is benefitalign^®’s President & Chief Executive Officer and is responsible for the overall strategy, operational excellence, and growth of the company. Part of the benefitalign^® family of services, benefitalign^® is a rapidly growing organization with its finger on the pulse of the health care, eCommerce and technology industry.

Manal has over 25 years of operational and P&L leadership experience in the pharmaceutical, healthcare and IT industries, and brings a passion for innovation and value-creation for the customers. Manal was most recently with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), a leading global pharmaceutical and consumer products company, where he served as the Strategy and Operating Officer for the global Oncology business. Manal previously served in the Office of the CEO and Corporate Strategy at GSK where he spearheaded the delivery of strategic planning, growth and productivity initiatives. He has extensive experience in business development and M&A and has led global product development and operations teams. Prior to GSK, Manal held leadership roles at Covance Inc. and Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC).

Manal holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Pune University, a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Lehigh University, and an MBA in Finance from the Wharton School of Business.

Steve Castano is benefitalign^®’s Vice President of Architecture and DevOps, and is responsible for the overall design and operation of global data-centers, makes key technology decisions for the cloud SaaS infrastructure and leads the priority platform architecture initiatives. Mr. Castano has over 20 years of design and operations experience in the technology, security and cloud computing industries, and brings his immense passion and dedication to provide performance, stability and innovation without compromising the security and safety of customer-data. Mr. Castano’ s vast expertise has been the direct result of his association with industry leading companies like SAP, SucessFactors, and Freddie Mac as well as being a government contractor for multiple public sector departments. He has designed, built and operated enterprise level cloud solutions in over 10 countries and 4 continents and has helped guide the companies he has worked with through the rapidly changing world of cloud computing and the Software as a Service (SaaS) landscape.

Mr. Castano has studied computer science, information science and aerospace engineering at The University at Albany and Polytechnic University and continued his education with multiple professional certifications for Data Center Virtualization from VMware and Network Design from Cisco.

Ashwini Deshpande is the Senior Director for Product Management at benefitalign^®. She is responsible for the product planning and execution throughout the Product Lifecycle, including: gathering and prioritizing product and customer requirements, defining the product vision, and working closely with engineering, sales, marketing and support to ensure the Company’s revenue and customer satisfaction goals are met. She also ensures that the products support benefitalign^®s overall strategy and goals.

With a background in Computer Engineering, Ashwini has held key Engineering, Enterprise Architecture and Leadership positions in leading Fortune 500 companies like AT&T, BellSouth, SBC and Cingular Wireless. Over the course of her career spanning 25 years, she has architected, developed and managed diverse IT solutions ranging from Wireless provisioning, Mobile Applications, Enterprise ERP, CRM, Telecom Rates and Billing and various Business Process Models.

Most recently, Ashwini caught the Entrepreneurship bug and channeled her passion for innovation into co-founding startups in the Education and Logistics Domains with special emphasis on Mobile, GPS, Web and Cloud based products.

Scott brings a wealth of experience to benefitalign^®’s industry practices from various horizontals and verticals. He is a strategist and thought-leader who evolves innovative mechanisms to improve benefitalign^®’s forecasting (both revenue as well as a pipeline), staff scheduling, staff development, recruiting, project quality assurance, engagement management, invoicing/receivables with other Profit and Loss responsibilities, and partner relationship management. He also handles the analysis of existing systems and processes, and futuristic enhancement strategies.

As our practice leader, Scott is responsible for business development activities including lead qualification, proposal development, client engagement and expansion of existing customer relationships.

In 2003, Girish Panicker transformed his passion for bringing clients the world’s best custom software applications into a business. With more than 15 years of hands-on experience, including work with IBM, CGI, and Worldcom, he designs, develops and manages complex application software systems.

His areas of expertise include eBusiness Applications using Oracle, Siebel and Java-based technologies, namely NetDynamics, EJB and J2EE. Having built solutions for some of the world’s most respected financial services, telecom, and health care institutions, Mr. Panicker has become a renowned CRM Architect.

Mr. Panicker received his degree in Computer Science from Pune University in India and earned a Master of Science in Computer Science from Drexel University in Philadelphia.