After 25 years at IBM, I decided I needed a change. IBM is a fine company, but it takes enormous energy and persistence at any large company to make a difference, and in the end it wore me down. I chose Apigee in part because I liked the people, some of whom I already knew, in part because they are still relatively small, and in part because a majority of their business is hosted directly on the cloud. The API management space also seemed an interesting one. So far, Apigee is turning out to be what I had hoped.

This job is something of a return to my roots as a technologist, writing code and leading a new product team that is designing and building prototypes for the developer experience of IBM's cloud. In 2012, as CTO of the Rational brand, it became clear to me that cloud computing is changing the landscape for developers much more quickly and profoundly than we can accommodate with the evolution of existing developer products. I redefined my role to focus on re-imagining the developer experience for building applications on the IBM cloud. Our approach is to prototype cloud-native applications and the cloud capabilities they use, learning from the application architecture, processes and technology choices of born-on-the cloud companies. We have developed applications on multiple IaaSes (AWS, SoftLayer, OpenStack) and PaaSes (Heroku, OpenShift, CloudFoundry) using a range of application languages and technologies (e.g. Python, JavaScript, Docker, Nginx, HAProxy) and we have explored and reproduced the application architectures of a number of leading cloud application companies (e.g. Netflix, AirBnB). We have begun introducing new capabilities to the IBM cloud based on what we have learned. Another output from our work is an open-source project we created for the framework we wrote for developing scalable web-sites (http://ld4apps.github.io/).

As CTO I was responsible for the technical direction of the entire portfolio of Rational products and for the vitality of its technical community. IBM does not disclose detailed information on the size of the Rational business or its workforce, but you can see from the information that is publicly-available that they are large. During my tenure as CTO, we undertook a complete re-engineering and reinvention of the Rational portfolio in the project called Jazz - these products are now the mainstay of the Rational portfolio. I defined and managed the processes and organizational constructs we used to manage the architecture and design of these products and led the definition of the overall architecture. As CTO I was also responsible for the technical aspects of our business strategy especially regarding partnerships and acquisitions, and I also spent a significant portion of my time with marketing, sales and customers explaining the Rational products and strategic direction. I represented Rational and IBM in keynote presentations at many conferences, both IBM-sponsored and external - you can find some of them by Googling my name. I extracted some of the core architectural principles we used to integrate the Jazz portfolio in the form of an IBM submission to W3C - that submission led directly to the W3C Linked Data Platform recommendation (http://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/)

Responsible for setting the technical direction for the entire Rational portfolio and its technical teams. During this period, I was responsible for unifying the technical architecture and technical teams from the Rational acquisition with the large corpus of tools and teams that existed already within IBM.

In 1999, I was one of a team of three people who outlined a design and plan for a new software tools development platform to standardize and integrate the many software development tools in the IBM portfolio. This platform became a huge industry success when it was open-sourced under the name Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org). Development of the Eclipse platform happened in parallel with development of a flagship IBM product built on top of it - WebSphere Studio (now Rational Application Developer) - a full-stack JEE development environment. I was the lead architect and development manager for WebSphere Studio, working closely with the architects and developers of the base Eclipse platform of which we were the first clients. WebSphere Studio and Eclipse led to a whole new generation of software development tools inside IBM and reshaped a major part of the software tools industry.

Created the IBM VisualAge family of products, beginning with VisualAge Smalltalk, a development environment built on top of a core Smalltalk language environment. This was followed by VisualAge/Java, which was eventually replaced by Eclipse and Websphere Studio.

Hired into the team that was working on DBase 5 - a product that never emerged

Field Systems Engineer working on mainframe Operating Systems, Transaction Processing software and network communications sytems