MIKE GRANBY

Mike Granby is currently President of Red Lion Controls.

He was born in the United Kingdom, and started his career as a freelance developer of computer games for the BBC Micro back in 1984 at the age of 16. His only claim to fame in this field is the publication of an old-fashioned shoot 'em up game called Acid Drops, the name of which was changed from Acid Bath by the publishers lest their shareholders think that they were dealing in horror titles. From the games world, he moved into industrial software development via a path that is too complex to explain. He worked on some of the very first Human-Machine Interface products as far back as 1986, and can thus honestly claim to be one of the few people in the world with nearly 30 years' experience in this field.

Mike's path took him through a series of start-ups in the late eighties and early nineties, to the founding of a company called Paradigm Controls in 1993, where he was responsible for the development of the software and firmware for a range of operator interface terminals. Paradigm caught the eye of Red Lion, and was acquired by Red Lion's parent company as a bolt-on in 1996. Mike continued to run the company in the UK until moving to the United States in July 1999 to join Red Lion in Pennsylvania as Vice President of Engineering. Five months later, Mike was promoted to President at the age of 31.

Under Mike's leadership, Red Lion has quadrupled in size, first doubling its sale organically, and then doubling them again via the acquisition of N-Tron and Sixnet. Red Lion has moved far beyond its roots as a panel meter company from a small Pennsylvania town. It now employs 400 people worldwide, all working together to drive the company's mission to be recognized as the global leaders in communication, monitoring and control for industrial automation.

Before his executive duties expanded with the acquisitions, Mike was also Red Lion's Chief Software Architect, in which capacity he designed the majority of the company's Crimson 3.0 programming and runtime environment. He has no formal qualifications beyond High School and is self-taught in software and electronic engineering. He is one of the few non-graduates to have attended the Advanced Management Program at INSEAD near Paris, where his meager French was given a work-out during the month-long stay in Fontainebleau. He lives in York, Pennsylvania with his two sons, Adam and Ben.

Mike's resume is available here.