New CEO at Kastle, first in 35 years

WASHINGTON--After 35 years heading integration firm Kastle Systems International, chief executive officer Gene Samburg is handing over the reins to Piyush Sodha, a long-time associate of investor Mark Ein, who purchased Kastle roughly one year ago. Sodha was most recently chairman and chief executive officer of Cibernet, a provider of solutions for the wireless industry, and was previously head of Matrics, an RFID manufacturer where Ein was a major investor and board member. He will now take over as chief executive officer and co-chairman at Kastle, with Ein and Samburg also serving as co-chairmen. "As excited as I was a year ago," said an enthused Ein, "I'm even more excited today, both in terms of the industry's prospects and Kastle's prospects within the industry ... We think we can create substantial growth and the most important decision we could make was to find the right leader for the long-term future of the company." Part of what makes Sodha right for the job, said Ein, is his technology background. Citing trends such as convergence and inter-manufacturer partnerships, Ein noted Sodha "has led companies that have created industry-leading technologies and so I think his breadth of technology leadership is particularly well suited to those trends." "There's almost a sense of deja vu" coming to the security industry with an RFID background, Sodha said. "People had closed solutions and they were looking for a uniform playing field where many people could play, and Matrics was a pioneer in bringing that vision to reality." He said he was excited to see that Kastle has recently adopted an IP-based platform for its customers, which are primarily commercial office buildings. "The IP network is fundamental," he said. "It's a platform for working with partners. No company can build the best everything. We're about putting these solutions together, and the current architecture allows us to bring many partners under the umbrella." Ein said to look for Kastle to grow mostly through expanding its geographic reach in the commercial real estate vertical, and to branch out into similar verticals, such as the government office building market.