Mr. Atorino has been a media analyst for over 30 years, following publishing, broadcasting, advertising, business services, and related areas at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Oppenheimer & Co., Dillon Read, Salomon Brothers, and Smith Barney. He has been awarded several stock-picking awards over the course of his career, and has been ranked by Institutional Investor Magazine 20 times. Mr. Atorino was ranked as the No. 1 Publishing Analyst in The Wall Street Journal's 2003 "Best on the Street Survey." He has an M.B.A. from New York University. Mr. Atorino holds the Series 7 and 63 licenses and is a member of the New York Society of Security Analysts, AIMR, and the Media and Entertainment Analysts of New York (M.E.A.N.Y.).
Mark Gilman has been an oil analyst for more than 25 years. Coverage has focused primarily on the major integrated oils but also includes selective work within the exploration and production and independent refiner sectors. He joined Benchmark in February, 2004 after having spent the last two and a half years at First Albany. Other prior Wall Street affiliations include ING/Barings, UBS, NatWest Securities, Eberstadt Fleming, EF Hutton, Lehman Brothers and Salomon Brothers. He has been recognized for his work, on several occasions, by the Reuters and Wall Street Journal analyst surveys and has appeared frequently on CNBC as well as Bloomberg TV. In addition to his research responsibilities, he has consulted for several of the major oils on business strategy issues.
Mark Gilman received his S.M. degree from MIT's Sloan School of Management and S.B. degree in Electrical Engineering , also from MIT, in 1973. He was awarded his CFA certification in 1979.
Mark Schappel is an equity research analyst with the Benchmark Company covering the enterprise software sector, with a focus on small and mid-cap names. Prior to Benchmark, Schappel spent over seven years with Hapoalim Securities and KeyBanc Capital Markets, a division of McDonald Investments Inc., where he was a Vice President and Equity Research Analyst. His research focused on the software industry, covering leading companies in the content management, specialized applications, and technical design & engineering software categories.
Schappel's research work builds on his extensive experience delivering IT solutions to meet user requirements. Prior to Wall Street, he spent several years leading large enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) implementations in the chemical industry for a Big Five consulting firm. As a former engineer and plant manager in the chemical industry, Schappel was involved with computer aided design (CAD) and engineering software, as well as customer relationship management (CRM), ERP, and SCM applications.
Schappel earned a MBA from the University of Pittsburgh (1991) and a BS in chemical engineering from Geneva College (1987).
Before joining Benchmark in March 2007, Brent C. Williams spent eight months as Managing Director of Research at Hapoalim Securities USA, a startup division of the largest bank in Israel. His ten years of experience in Wall Street research covering software companies also included six and a half years at KeyBanc Capital Markets and three years at Needham & Company. His coverage list has included database vendors such as Oracle and Sybase, middleware/connectivity vendors including BEA Systems and Tibco, operating system vendors including Microsoft, Citrix, Red Hat, Novell and Wind River, plus leading business intelligence software vendors. He also managed other senior analysts focusing on enterprise applications and other infrastructure software segments.
Brent has been involved with the software business since the late 1970s. He has built innovative, groundbreaking products ranging from manufacturing and financial applications to clinical medical software on a variety of platforms from PCs to mainframes. For several years, he was an engineer at Ingres Corporation, which was then the second largest developer of relational database software. After several years of marketing experience at Ingres and startups, Williams became an industry analyst at IDC, leading the PC software research team when Microsoft was introducing Windows NT, its initial enterprise operating system. After IDC, Brent moved to Gartner Group, where he was a senior analyst in the software development technologies group, covering software development tools and technologies.
Williams earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California at Berkeley.
Derek Taller, Ph.D. is a Senior Biotechnology and Specialty Pharma analyst for Benchmark Compay, LLC. He was previously employed as a Senior analyst at Tradition-Asiel Securities and Cathay Finanical. He also has experience on the buy-side at Stratix Asset Management and Xmark Funds. Derek has done extensive research for 10 years in oncology, neuroscience, bone biology, infectious disease, and diabetes.
Derek has a bachelor's degree in Molecular Biology for the University of California at Berkeley (1994) and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology, Immunology and Molecular Therapeutics from the Cancer Institute of New Jersey-RWJ Medical School.
