Richmond Leadership

Mark Wensell, Ph.D.
Vice President and General Manager

Mark Wensell, PhD. brings 10 years of large-scale web-hosting and management experience and more than 6 years of entrepreneurial experience to Peak 10 Richmond. Dr. Wensell is responsible for overseeing the facilities, financial and sales management operations of Peak 10 Richmond, as well as creating streamlined programs to manage Peak 10's growth in the market.

Prior to Peak 10, Dr. Wensell was the co-founder, original CEO and Vice President of Engineering for bayMountain, Inc., a managed hosting company in Richmond, Virginia specializing in comprehensive IT hosting, management and support.

Dr. Wensell has nearly a decade of graduate and postdoctoral experience in computational physics using supercomputing and cluster- computing platforms. He helped develop and maintain a large-scale web- hosting environment for an ISP that included both software and hardware solutions. Dr. Wensell received a bachelor's degree in math with a computer science concentration from St. Mary's College of Maryland and a Ph.D. in physics from North Carolina State University.

Randy Franklin
Director of Operations and Engineering

Randy Franklin brings more than six years of information technology experience to Peak 10 Richmond. He leads a team of highly skilled engineers that support a diverse customer base. In addition to overseeing daily operations he works closely with both the sales team and the individual customers to design and implement solutions that meet or exceed customer requirements.

Prior to holding his current position as Director of Operations and Engineering, Mr. Franklin held the position of Supervising Senior Engineer, guiding customers with skillfully architected solutions as they grew from single-server installations to multi-tiered clustered configurations. His extensive experience in storage, security, networking and systems design allow him to help customers utilize the full potential of Peak 10 data centers and its support staff.

Mr. Franklin holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Mechanical Engineering from North Carolina State University. As part of his graduate thesis, Mr. Franklin co-developed Computational Fluid Dynamics software to simulate a new method for applying Teflon to surfaces using the RESS technique. Due to the computational requirements of the models, the software was designed to make use of Cray, IBM and Silicon Graphics super-computers located at the North Carolina Super-Computing Center in Research Triangle Park. Having authored and co-authored a number of papers describing the research in addition to extending the accuracy and capabilities of the numerical models, Mr. Franklin brings well-developed problem solving skills to Peak 10.