The ICN Team
Richard Thibedeau
Chief Operating Officer
The first half of Rich’s 30-year career in technology and operations was spent in retail, working for D&L Stores and Edwards Super Food Stores, where he managed a data center, and installed and supported POS systems and applications. With consolidation of the industry, Rich embarked on what has become the second half of his career in the marketing services industry, focusing on retail, consumer package goods, and couponing. Rich joined Relationship Marketing Group (RMG) as the VP of Information Technology. RMG was the first company to target and deliver digital coupons to consumers based on their actual shopping behavior. RMG was purchased by Valassis Communications Inc., where Rich continued to work for another eight years as the Manager of Client Services for their Software division and Manager of One-to-One Operations for their Retail division. In 2008 Rich left Valassis to become a Co-Founder of ICN.
Jon Robertson
EVP Marketing
Prior to joining ICN, Jon founded a relationship marketing company serving the retail and consumer products goods (CPG) industries and served as President for 4 years. The company, Relationship Marketing Group (RMG), provided customer-specific promotions based on household purchase data. Leveraging one-to-one marketing techniques, advanced database technology, and strong retailer-manufacturer relationships, RMG quickly became the leader in its market niche and was ultimately acquired by Valassis Corporation. In 2008, Jon joined Gary, Rich and Brian to start ICN, where he is responsible for marketing.
Brian Schulte
VP of IT
Brian has 15 years of customer facing technology experience in the grocery retail industry. Brian started his career with VRMS, a Valassis company, working on the Integration Team where he was responsible for deploying, integrating, and patching the VRMS software at various retail clients internationally. This required extensive knowledge of multiple database platforms, OS’s, and programming languages. Brian moved up from managing the Integration Team to holding the position of Product Manager, responsible for the direction of the MarketEXPERT and TargetEXPERT products and directly helping with sales efforts. In 2008 Brian left Valassis to co-found ICN as VP of IT, contributing to ICN’s patents and all aspects of design, development, quality assurance, deployment, integration, and system administration.
Ron Schulte
Sr Software Developer
Ron brings more than 18 years of software engineering experience to ICN, including a strong background in object-oriented programming languages and relational database design. Prior to joining ICN, Ron worked at VRMS for 9 years as a member of the software development team, where he implemented many of MarketEXPERT’s targeting and reporting capabilities and TargetEXPERT’s batch processing functions. Ron also worked at Logic Technology, Inc. for 5 years as a Principal Consultant, working on multiple assignments for GE’s Global Research and Corporate divisions. His diverse software engineering background spans many industries and functions, including customer relationship marketing, energy, newspaper publishing, automotive, batch scheduling, simulation, and research. Ron joined ICN in 2015 as a Senior Software Engineer and is heavily involved in the design, implementation, maintenance, and support of ICN’s entire software solution.
Vlad Brusilovski
Software Developer
Vlad has 24 years of wide-ranging experience in design and development of business and internet applications. At the beginning of his career Vlad was working within the Microsoft technology stack starting with Visual Basic and SQL Server and over the years transitioned to Web Development. Vlad joined ICN in 2011 as a Software Engineer and led the conversion of the UI interfaces to more modern technologies incorporating Telerik and the latest Microsoft tools.
Jim Capodiferro
Integration & QA Specialist
Jim brings more than 20 years of software support and integration experience on several Point-of-Sale and Loyalty platforms. Previous employers include IBM, Giant Eagle, Excentus, and Ingles-Markets before joining ICN in 2017. Jim’s years of experience with multiple platforms allows him to lead and complete successful integration projects to the ICN solution. With his extensive QA experience it allows him to understand a customer’s platform and create valuable testing scenarios and scripts to assist in customer certification.
Charisse Reddy
Sales and Marketing Director
Charisse has over 20 years of Sales and Marketing experience working with some of the largest retailers and CPG’s in the industry. In 1998 she started her career with Valassis as a Data Analyst and Subject Matter Expert for Valassis Relationship Marketing Systems, the CRM software division of Valassis. In 2011 she was promoted to handle the In-Store Marketing business for one of the largest grocery retailers in the country and due to her success in driving the In-Store Marketing business year over year she was promoted to Sales Executive for one of largest CPG’s in the country. Charisse joined ICN in 2020 and will be leading strategic sales initiatives.