Alexus Computer Consulting provides computer forensic capture of data and investigative services, as well as computer
software expert witness opinions.
Forensic Computer Services
Alexus offers computer forensic capture of data from hard drive and other computer storage devices. Our specializations
are desktop computer software, computer networking, computer server technology, forensic capture of computer hard
drives, forensic analysis of computer files, and security systems.
Rapid service can be provided for any location in the greater Los Angeles area. Service is also available for Orange County
and San Diego. Typically a computer forensic specialist can be onsite in the Los Angeles or San Diego areas within 2
hours. For Orange County, 1 hour service is available.
The forensic capture tools provide digitally signed tamper-proof images of the captured computer hard drive files. Laptop,
server harddrive and RAID arrays, and handheld devices such as Palm pilots may also be captured ond forensically
preserved.
Expert Witness Services
Alexus can provide computer software expert witness services for a wide range of computer systems. Computer
software component and application design. Web integration of authentication services, streaming media services and
content feeds.
Implementation of real-time and media streaming systems. Architecture and design of complex ERP business systems
involving database back ends. Oracle and SQL Server database technology. Computer security systems, including
encryption, public key encryption (PKI), wireless security. Wireless handheld devices and 802.11 network implementations,
including authentication, encryption and wireless e-mail. Streaming multimedia video and audio for web sites. Patent
litigation, theft of computer-related intellectual property, and software contract disputes.
Principal Consultant
PETER ALEXANDER, Ph.D.
Phone (949) 689 8692
email: peteralexus@aol.com
Awards:
Fulbright Scholar, 1965
National Science Foundation – Small Business Innovation Research, 1988
Dept. of Energy – Small Business Innovation Research, 1988
Education:
Ph. D., Electrical Engineering – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1971
M. S., Electrical Engineering – University of Illinois, 1967
Technical Expertise - Computer software design, development & deployment
- Forensic data acquisition and analysis
- Microsoft Visual Studio component and application design
- Web integration of authentication services, streaming media services, ad displays, content feeds
- Implementation of real-time and media streaming systems
- Architecture and design of complex business systems involving database back ends
- Oracle 8i, 9i and SQL Server 2000 database technology.
- Java, C, C++, Visual Basic, assembly language programming
- Embedded microprocessor designs
- Network equipment design and manufacture (LAN cards, routers, bridges)
- Security, authentication, networking, firewalls, hacking countermeasures, backups, archives, and service level
agreements for customer-outsourced data.
Domain Expertise - Client-server and web-based software applications
- ERP systems – financial, distribution, manufacturing, SF automation applications (Platinum)
- eCommerce - Secure web transactions, authentication (InfrastructureWorld, Syntricity)
- Semiconductor manufacturing – yield analysis, semiconductor defect analysis (Syntricity)
Current Litigation Experience
- Patent Litigation. Contributions made to four different patent infringement cases. Two of these required participation in
claim construction for Markman hearings; one involved the writing of an invalidity expert report and a non-infringement
expert report; and another required the creation of a tutorial for use by attorneys during Markman hearings. Testified in
deposition as an expert in claim construction.
- Software contract disputes. Analysis of desktop, Internet, and client-server software projects to determine adherence to
industry-standard software development processes, and to evaluate architectural design decisions. Contributions made to
nine cases, including court testimony in one, and deposition testimony in two others. Wrote two expert opinions and two
expert declarations.
Specific case experience involving testimony:
Case: Network Appliance v. BlueArc Corp.
Matter: Patent Infringement
Technical Issues: Interpretation of multiprocessor hardware/software architecture and implementation for a Network
File System data storage patent. The technology involved microprocessor operating systems, microprocessor hardware,
Internet protocols, and inter-processor messaging.
Responsibilities: Assisted lawyers with interpretation of patent specification, contributed to claim construction for
“means plus function” structure definition, testified in claim construction deposition as an expert witness.
Law Firm: Keker & Van Nest, San Francisco, CA for defendant.
Case: Neoris de Mexico v. Ariba, Inc.
Matter: Breach of warranty and contract
Technical Issues: B2B marketplaces and exchange design and development
Responsibilities: Wrote expert opinion and testified at deposition on behalf of defendant.
Law Firm: Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk & Rabkin, San Francisco, CA for defendant.
Case: Business-To-Business Markets Inc. v. Kshema Tech. Ltd.
Matter: Breach of contract.
Technical Issues The software development contract involved a complex, Java-based exchange web site. Apache web
server, Weblogic application server, Tomcat application web server, Oracle 8.1 database server, Java JSP pages, Java EJB
deployment, Linux operating system.
Responsibilities: Wrote expert declaration and testified at deposition on behalf of defendant.
Disposition: Motion for summary judgment in favor of defendant. Jan. 2004
Law Firm: Law Offices of Timothy Cronin, San Francisco, CA for defendant.
Case: CyberNET Engineering v. Con-Way Transportation
Matter: Contract dispute
Technical issues: Local area network design and implementation for 300 service centers.
Responsibilities: Researched relevant networking issues and testified at jury trial on behalf of plaintiff.
Disposition: Jury verdict in favor of plaintiff. 2003
Law Firm: Martin Bischoff Templeton Langslet, Portland, OR, for plaintiff
Case: Carma Consulting v. FileNet Corp and Farmers Insurance
Matter: Theft of trade secret case involving the alleged unauthorized release of source code
Technical issues: Two Windows Active-X server components, written in Visual Basic were supplied to Farmers
Insurance as a run time OCX and a DLL respectively. Evaluated the reproduction cost and the potential economic damages
for disclosure of source code.
Responsibilities: Wrote expert opinion and testified at deposition on behalf of defendant.
Disposition: Motion for summary judgment in favor of defendant. 2003
Law Firm: Cummins & White, Newport Beach, CA for defendant.
Has served as a disclosed consultant in:
Case: Datamize Inc. v. Charles Schwab & Co., CyberTrader, Inc.
Matter: Patent Infringement
Technical Issues: Interpretation of software design and implementation for applications involving graphical user
interfaces (GUI) allowing various degrees of built-in flexibility.
Responsibilities: Assisted lawyers with interpretation of patent specification, and contributed to claim construction
terms as a computer expert.
Law Firm: Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, New York, NY for defendant.
Case: E-Centives v. Coupons, Inc.
Matter: Web software patent infringement
Technical Issues: Microsoft ASP web servers, user tracking and consumer web services.
Responsibilities: Conducted technical research on software implementation, wrote expert opinion regarding invalidity,
wrote rebuttal opinion re non-infringement.
Law Firm: Rader, Fishman & Grauer, Washington, DC for defendant
Case: Undisclosed
Matter: Patent infringement for streaming multimedia systems.
Technical Issues: Implementation of web-based multimedia encoding.
Responsibilities: Conducted research, created technology tutorial for Markman hearings, and advised on technical
issues.
Law Firm: Hennigan Bennett & Dorman, Los Angeles, CA for plaintiff.
Case: Teleflora LLC v. Florists’ Transworld Delivery (FTD)
Matter: Trade secret misappropriation, copyright infringement, fraud and unfair competition
Technical Issues: Examine source code for florists’ shop floor management software to determine basis for alleged
claims of copyright. .
Responsibilities: Conducted research wrote expert declaration for the court, created a tutorial for use in hearings by
lawyers.
Law Firm: Silicon Valley Law Group and Techmark, San Jose, CA, for defendant.
Case: Donjin Semichem v. EmailFund
Matter: Software development contract dispute
Technical Issues: Ellyptic Curve Cryptography for wireless handheld devices. Encompasses Wireless Public Key
Infrastructure, ECC algorithms, RSA algorithms, equivalence of Public Key and Symmetric Key encryption strengths, and
WTLS.
Responsibilities: Wrote expert report. Conducting research on technical issues for plaintiff.
Attorney: Lee, Kim & Song Professional Law Corporation, Los Angeles, CA for plaintiff.
Case: Western Parcel Express v Excell Data Corp., Novell Inc.
Matter: Software development contract dispute
Technical Issues: Breach of Contract for deployment of an order entry, billing & shipping software system based on
Microsoft ASP and COM technologies.
Responsibilities: Conducted research and advised client on technical issues
Attorney: Parsons Behle & Latimer, Salt Lake City, UT for defendant.
Case: Sequent Technologies v. Insight Video Networks
Matter: Theft of trade secrets
Technical Issues: Video encoding, storage and retrieval software for an 802.11 wireless network application
Responsibilities: Conducted research and advised client on technical issues
Attorney: Fulbright and Jaworski, Los Angeles, CA for plaintiff
Case: United Devices, Inc. v. David Anderson
Matter: Theft of trade secrets
Technical Issues: Distributed multi-processor architectures developed in C++.
Responsibilities: Performed forensic capture of files from a software developer’s hard drive and analyzed the source
code for a network distributed multiprocessor scientific application.
Attorney: Fulbright and Jaworski, Los Angeles, CA for plaintiff
Detailed Professional Experience:
Syntricity, Inc. – San Diego, CA - Vice President Technical Operations, April 2001 – Jan. 2003
Syntricity is a supplier of application software to the semiconductor industry. Its customers include Intel, Sun Microsystems,
Broadcom, Qualcomm, and Conexant. Products are installed on Unix and NT 4.0 web servers at the customer site as
Intranet solutions (Enterprise), or on Unix servers at the Syntricity datacenter, which offers an ASP style subscription
services.
Developed a large capacity warehouse architecture and deployable warehouse solution to support defect, FBM, lot history,
non-lot equipment, and other data storage requirements to support analysis of yield and production forecasts from test data
acquired in the semiconductor manufacturing environment. This system was built on Oracle 8i and 9i commercial RDBMS
products. Implemented a comprehensive set of statistical analysis tools including multivariate regression and confidence
level testing to facilitate yield trend and production scheduling for semiconductor manufacturers.
Responsible for a team of 40 people across four groups that included Software Engineering, Database Design, Quality
Assurance, and Technical Operations. Java 2 was the implementation platform language, and Oracle 8.1.6 was used for
the warehouse database. All products were designed as web server solutions, with access via a standard browser.
Responsible for creating and managing design teams as well as quality assurance, configuration management, technical
hosting operations, and technical documentation groups. Detailed understanding of source code control, defect tracking,
configuration management and build tracking.
Customers using the hosting subscription center run under contractual Service Level Agreements (SLA). The ASP hosted
service is currently implemented on an E4800 Sun application server running Solaris 8, connected to an Oracle database
server (Oracle 8.1.6). Storage totaling approximately 1 Terabyte is provided through a combination of the EMC Clarion
System 1 storage arrays (Raid-5) accessed via fiber channel, and network attached storage using the Network Appliances
NetApp devices. Veritas SANPoint Foundation Suite HA for Solaris is used as the storage management tool.
InfrastructureWorld – South San Francisco, CA.
Chief Technology Officer. Oct. 2000 – March, 2001
Infrastructureworld, a spin off from Bechtel Enterprises, offered services through a collaborative web site for large-scale
construction projects. I managed development staff of 10, and operational staff of 3 to create, enhance and maintain the live
web site. Responsible for a new web server implementation based on NT4.0 and Windows 2000 technologies, to support
authentication through certificates, user access control via authenticated account login, SSL extranet connections and
document encryption. Investigated Public Key/Private Key encryption authentication mechanisms before selecting Windows
NT integrated challenge/response authentication as the preferred authentication technique.
Each business client was hosted as a separate virtual web site with secure access to content that described the client’s
projects offered for bid. Functionality included insurance and financing RFP’s, document management, and project
collaboration. In addition, each web site offered integration of multimedia content for promotion of client projects, including
steaming video and audio content. Implemented a secure data access system using native NT operating system
authentication services. All documents and files were transmitted via 128-BIT SS using server side certificates for server
authentication to the client browser. Automatic virus scanning and cleaning was implemented for all documents and files
uploaded to the users to the web server. The operational web server site was implemented with a two-tier server
configuration using Raid (redundant) storage
CareerPath.com – Los Angeles, CA.
Senior Vice President, Technology. Sept. 1999 – Oct. 2000
Management of Operations and Development teams. Lead the company’s Web site re-architecture project, providing higher
levels of Web server and Oracle database performance. Implementation of methodologies for project management, code
review, quality assurance, and defect tracking. Managed the operations group (40) supporting the production Web site,
encompassing Wide Area Networking, Unix Administration, Oracle DBA support, HTML Authoring, and Quality Assurance
teams. Managed the software development staff (25) which created new technology infrastructure and dynamic page
content using Java middle tier servelets, Java Beans, JSP presentation components, and Oracle technology. Object
oriented programming techniques were applied through use case analysis.
Created a feed management system, written using server-side Java parsing technology, to processes Web job postings
harvested from Web spider technology. Later enhancements included development of a Content Management system
(using XML page representation), vertical affiliate co-branding system, transparent registration and login across a
federation of partnership Web sites, and a comprehensive on-line reports server.
Charles Schwab Online Trading – Phoenix, AZ
Independent Consultant July/Aug. 1999
This project involved disaster recovery cold site planning for the Charles Schwab Online Web Trading facility in Phoenix, AZ.
The web capability was capable of handling 200,000+ concurrent users, and was implemented with 300 load-sharing IBM
gateway servers working behind eight Cisco Catalyst 7500 routers. The traffic was distributed across the front line servers
and routed to an ensemble of 200 middle tier servers, which manage the business objects and execute the trades. In the
third tier, customer financial and demographic data was maintained on a group of 7 IBM mainframes running DB2. A
design was formulated that gives the Schwab organization a contingency backup system in the event of catastrophic failure
of the main site.
Platinum Software Corp. – Irvine, CA (Re-named as Epicor Software Corp)
Vice President, Development. May 1997 – Feb. 1999.
Reported to the President until 7/1/98, then reporting to the Executive VP of Product/Marketing.
Member of the Executive Committee (top 8 executives in Platinum).
Managed a team of about 100 contributors working on Windows NT-based Client-Server systems. The Department was
organized into five functional groups each headed by a Director-level manager, and includes ERP Application Development,
Technology/Tools Development, Windows/DOS legacy systems, QA and Documentation teams.
This scope of the development effort encompassed the Platinum ERP Client-Server product suites, which include financial
and distribution applications. These applications, based on Microsoft SQL Server technology, are implemented within a two-
tier tool set, and involved 500 tables.
