RICHARD S. (RICK) KEARNEY
President and CEO
Mainline Information Systems
1700 Summit Lake Drive
Tallahassee, Florida 32317
(850) 219-5000
rick.kearney@mainline.com

Renowned for his vision and pioneering instincts, Rick Kearney has been an entrepreneur since an early age. He started his first company while still in high school and, while he spent a few years in corporate America, he has preferred to engineer his own destiny. He is currently President and CEO of Mainline Information Systems, Inc., a company he founded in Tallahassee, Florida in 1989. Starting with a handful of people with computer programming skills, he nurtured the company into Florida’s number three High-Tech Company as rated by Florida Trend Magazine. Mainline is IBM’s largest worldwide solution provider and Premier Business Partner. In addition to its United States offices, Mainline Systems of Brazil, officially named Mainline Systems Do Brasil Comércio De Produtos De Informática LTDA, is an extension of Mainline in South America.

Mainline has been on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing privately held companies in the United States for five years in a row; three years the company ranked in the top 25, most recently as number 375. Rick was featured on the cover of the June 2000 Inc. Magazine and again in the Inc. 500 “Hall of Fame” in the October, 2000 Inc. 500 Special Edition.

For many years, Rick has served as a board member for ITFlorida (www.itflorida.com) and was chairperson in 2003-2005. Originally founded by the Florida legislature, ITFlorida is designed to provide its members with access to lawmakers, businesses, capital and domestic and foreign technology leaders. ITFlorida enables Florida's high-tech sectors to speak as one voice and, as both a national and local technology business leader, Rick remains an active board member.

For his active visionary leadership in his community, in 2000, Rick was recognized with the Tallahassee Distinguished Leader of the Year Award and the Jim Moran Enterprises “2000 Entrepreneur of the Year” award. In 2001, Rick received the inaugural “Ethics in Business” award by the Tallahassee Rotary Club.

In 2005, Rick was honored by the Jim Moran Institute at their Entrepreneurial Excellence Showcase and Awards Banquet where he was recipient of the Entrepreneur of the Decade Award.

The following year brought more recognition for Rick for both his entrepreneurial and philanthropic pioneering efforts. On June 22, 2006 Rick was honored with the prestigious Ernst & Young Florida Entrepreneur of the Year Award within the field of technology.

Rick was the driving force behind Tallahassee’s “Digital Canopy”, a public-private partnership operating in downtown Tallahassee and in Florida’s State Capitol building. A high-speed wide area wireless network, the Digital Canopy project (www.DigitalCanopy.com) gives Tallahassee one of the largest single wireless footprints in the country.

Mainline’s headquarters is located at Summit East, a high technology, high-amenity "SMART" campus supporting forward-thinking companies and their employees. Groundbreaking was held in February of 1999, and what was once a part of Rick’s dreams, is now a reality, providing a leading technology-enabled, employee-centric workplace that houses numerous local businesses in addition to Mainline.

Rick was one of the founders of Good News, a local social service outreach started in 1986. This outreach continues in Tallahassee with an award winning program providing quality housing for low-income moms with kids, a team of volunteers who provide daily food and other assistance to the poor and elderly, a program for reintegrating released prison inmates successfully into society, and a clinic for indigent mothers.