Bill McQuaide '82

Position: Chief Product Officer

Company: PointClickCare

Location: Mississauga, Ontario

Program: MBA

“I’ve been a tech guy throughout my career,” notes Bill McQuaide ’82 MBA, who is Chief Product Officer with PointClickCare in Mississauga, Ontario. The company’s cloud-based software platform targets the health care market for seniors, allowing seniors living chains, independent nursing facilities, and other institutions to manage health care solutions and resources on behalf of each individual resident and patient. In his current role, Bill oversees the company’s product strategy and its product management and engineering teams. He also plays a vital role in the development and long-term vision of the company’s products.

“You are in business to solve your customers’ problems,” Bill emphasizes. In technology firms, the uncertainty and synergy of mergers and acquisitions are an industry fact of life, he says. “If you’re considering a career at a technology firm, you’ll most likely experience them first-hand,” he tells Isenberg students.

Before joining PointClickCare in early 2014, Bill was Executive Vice president of Strategic Services and Customer Success at Black Duck, an open-source software developer and consultant. Black Duck, he explains, tracks 2 million open source projects. It maintains its extensive open source library, adding its own “secret developmental sauce” to common- source platforms. That allows the Burlington, Massachusetts firm to scale and customize software for its customers in electronics, media, manufacturing, financial services, and government.

Before his seven years with Black Duck, Bill had product launch and development positions at former Massachusetts high-tech firms Data General, Apollo Computer, and the company that bought it, Hewlett-Packard. In 1997, he joined the Bedford-based IT system turnkey firm, RSA Security, serving as its product management director and vice president. In 2003, industry storage leader EMC bought the company; McQuaide stayed on for five years as senior vice president of its enterprise solutions group.

“Throughout my career, I’ve valued the advice of Tom McAuley, a favorite professor at Isenberg [and retired Johnson & Johnson executive],” Bill recalls. “When you join a company, Tom advised, become part of the core activities involved in how that company makes money. That’s where your career path will rise.”