Lester Hightower Email & Phone Number

Jacksonville, Fl, Us

Fishplate Holdings is an investment company with a focus on technology and innovation investments within surface transportation.

436 Software provides technology tools to freight transportation providers that enrich their customer relationships and market credibility, that propel internal and external efficiencies, and that add tangible value. 436 Software received its early funding Fishplate Holdings.

Dallas, Texas, Us

Railspire retrofits customer locomotives for autonomous driving, with an initial focus on yard, near-yard, and industrial environments. Railspire's on-board artificial intelligence and machine learning software obeys human operators, who provide task-based instructions and oversight. Railspire received its early funding from Fishplate Holdings.

Jacksonville, Florida, Us

Jacksonville, Florida, Us

Florida East Coast Railway is a storied and strategic Class II railway with a heavy focus on intermodal. It provides domestic door-to-door and ramp-to-door transportation with origin and destination drayage provided by FEC Highway Services, truck/rail moves done in conjunction with FECR trucking subsidiary Raven Transport, and international intermodal done in conjunction with the seaports of South Florida. I served as CIO for FECR and all of its subsidiaries.Some noteworthy accomplishments:• 2012-2013 – separated FECR IT from RailAmerica and G&W; added DR• 2012-2013 – new business intelligence environment with executive dashboards• 2013-2014 – introduced CRM and Customer Service ticketing systems• 2013-2014 – new highly automated ICTF at Port Everglades• 2014-2015 – aided in RFQ and installation of Wabtec TMDS for RR dispatch• 2014-2015 – FECR Connect (http://www.fecrconnect.com)• 2014-2015 – Electronic logs for FECHS owner-operators• 2015-2016 – FECHS owner/operator kiosks to solve paperwork challenges• 2015-2016 – added Statements & Invoices to FECR Connect• 2016-2017 – added EZ Buy and load-board integrations to FECR Connect • FECR's conduit for selling door-to-door transportation in the spot market • Exceeded its multi-million dollar revenue goals within the first 18 months• 2016-2017 – integrated train locations data from signal system to FECR Connect• 2016-2017 – Pricing Dept. price optimization (Deal Desk), with Revenue Analytics• 2017-2017 – FECR Connect train string charts: scheduled, what-ifs, and actuals• 2017-2017 – integrated semi-truck locations from Omnitracs to FECR Connect• 2018-2018 – FECHS Owner/Operator Mobile App (FECHS O/OMA) for smartphones• 2018-2018 – Raven Connect (http://connect.raventrans.com)Fortress Investment Group acquired FECR in July of 2007 for $850 million and sold it to Grupo México Transportes in July of 2017 for $2.1 billion. I then worked for almost two years moving FECR G&A functions to Ferromex.

Munich, De

A newly created role to consolidate various SaaS and back office software systems into a P&L apart from the products business and to pursue opportunities to apply technologies from sister companies (Invensys Controls and Invensys Operations Management) into the North American freight and transit railroad markets. Reported to the President and CEO of Invensys Rail North America.

10East Corp. was a software as a service (SaaS) provider to the North American railroad industry providing services under the RailDOCS brand name. Five of the seven North American Class I railroads are RailDOCS customers, plus many regional and short-line railroads. 10East Corp. was formed in January of 2002 by the private equity firm Three Cities Research and senior management. In April of 2009, 10East Corp. was sold to The Carlyle Group portfolio company RMI (Railcar Management, Inc.) of Atlanta, Georgia. In November of 2011, RMI was sold to GE Transportation. In 2019, GE Transportation merged with Wabtec.

My role at ABC-NACO (NASDAQ:ABCR) was two-pronged: 1) I served as the Chief Information Officer for ABC-NACO's Rail Systems Division (~350 employees in 11 locations) and 2) I also managed a startup, for-profit subsidiary of ABC-NACO called The AIMS Group, Inc. and served as its Chief Technology Officer until the assets of ABC-NACO were sold to a private equity firm through a bankruptcy court auction, after which 10East Corp. was formed from the assets and human resources of The AIMS Group, Inc.

United Railway Signal Group was an independent signal design contractor to the North American railroad industry. I joined URSG's team in 1995 as the Manager of Information and Communication Systems and ultimately became a Vice President. During this time, the software as a service business that became known as RailDOCS was born. URSG was sold to ABC-NACO (NASDAQ:ABCR) in October of 1997.

CIT provided small and mid-sized companies with (mostly) Internet-related consulting and software development services. Most engagements involved doing substantially all of the "inside the wall" work of connecting companies to the Internet for the first time. In this time-frame, that often meant moving LANs from Banyan VINES, LANtastic, Netware IPX, etc. to TCP/IP, or overlaying TCP/IP. CIT routinely installed routers, firewalls, SMTP and POP/IMAP email servers, web and FTP servers, etc. Additionally, we did a lot of custom software development work, some web-site related, but much of it more business centric (Intra/Extranet).Two notable and non-Internet-based projects were an emergency 911 call response software system and a jail management system, both done for the Sheriff Department of Gadsden County, Florida, on subcontract to Delphi Enterprises, and both designed to integrate with Delphi's public safety software named Code3.In addition to myself, CIT had two part-time employees. CIT was wound down after I accepted employment with United Railway Signal Group.

Tallahassee, Fl, Us

The Supercomputer Computations Research Institute (SCRI) was a federally funded supercomputer research center that was started during the Ronald Reagan presidency and housed on the campus of the Florida State University. Federal funds were lost during the Bill Clinton presidency and that ultimately led to SCRI's demise, with FSU taking over the facility and turning it into FSU's Department of Scientific Computing. I held several positions at SCRI and worked for many different research scientists. The last position held was as the Lead Developer of the Wide Area Network Environment project where the fledgling and open-sourced Linux operating system was enhanced to support very large numbers of simultaneous users on commodity x86 servers.