Eric Davies

Eric founded the Davies Murphy Group (originally known as SparkSource, Inc.) in 1998 to build a more client-centric, more integrated PR and marketing agency than he could find as a client. Eric is one of the Davies Murphy Group’s two principals, and spends more than 90% of his time doing hands-on work for clients.

Under the direction of Eric and his business partner, Andy Murphy, the Davies Murphy Group has established the highest client retention rate of any agency in the industry, and has experienced double-digit growth every year since its founding.

Immediately prior to starting the Davies Murphy Group, Eric served as the founding Director of Product Management at eRoom Technology (since acquired by Documentum / EMC for $120 million). There, he oversaw all aspects of product definition and marketing for versions 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 of the company's Web-based collaboration product, and played a critical role in building the company's customer base from zero to more than 300.

Before joining eRoom, Eric was a key member of the early technical marketing team at e-commerce pioneer Open Market, where he helped the company win critical initial deals with organizations such as AT&T, Time Warner, and MCI. The company enjoyed one of the first billion-dollar Internet IPOs, and was ultimately acquired by Divine, Inc.

Earlier in his career Eric worked for BBN Hark, a spin-out from Bolt Beranek Newman, the Cambridge-based consultancy that invented the modem, the parallel supercomputer, e-mail, and ARPAnet – the precursor to the Internet. There, he worked initially as a software engineer, building commercial speech recognition applications, and quickly rose to a position in which he was responsible for securing and managing several multi-million dollar projects. BBN Hark was ultimately acquired by GTE as part of a $700 million acquisition of its parent company.

Prior to BBN, Eric oversaw IT operations for the Philadelphia office of Fortune 500 company FMC Corporation, where he was responsible for migrating the company from centralized mainframes to a distributed network of intelligent desktops and servers.

Eric is a guest lecturer on the subject of entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and holds a BA in political science from Haverford College and an MS in computer science from Tufts University.

Andy Murphy

As a principal of the Davies Murphy Group, Andy brings a unique “360 degree” perspective to the agency, having experienced the PR process as a journalist, as a client, and as an agency manager and executive. He credits this breadth of experience with his perfect record of client retention – during his career, no account under his direct management has ever left for another agency. This record is also indicative of a deep belief that serving and retaining clients should be the most important goal for an agency professional – a belief which today permeates the Davies Murphy Group.

Prior to joining Eric Davies in December 1999, Andy ran corporate communications and investor relations for eXcelon Corp. during a period that saw the company's market capitalization grow nearly 600%. There, he successfully positioned the company out of the $100 million object database market and into the multibillion-dollar business-to-business application integration space. The company was ultimately acquired by Progress Software Corp.

Before this experience on the client side, Andy was at Schwartz Communications where he ran many of the agency's highest profile accounts, including Progress Software, Silknet Software, iMarket and eRoom Technology. Each of his accounts enjoyed tremendous success: Progress Software is one of the largest and most profitable software companies on the east coast; Silknet Software had a successful IPO and was subsequently acquired by Kana Communications for $4.2 billion; iMarket was acquired by Dun & Bradstreet; and eRoom Technology was acquired by Documentum. It was through his work with eRoom that Andy met Eric Davies, his future partner at Davies Murphy Group.

Prior to his work at Schwartz, Andy was a key staffer at Peters & Feldman, a marketing communications firm based in Norwalk, Connecticut. There, he served as the agency's lead writer while managing accounts ranging from startups like Voxware and DataTrak, to divisions of large corporations such as HP's Telecommunications Test Division and Xerox's Global Accounts Marketing organization.

Earlier is his career, Andy worked as a newspaper journalist at the Stamford Advocate , a daily metropolitan newspaper in the Times-Mirror chain. While at the Advocate, Andy won the Associated Press New England Newspaper Executives Association award for best feature story.

Andy has a BA in history from Colgate University.