Interop Keynoters Are Industry Standard Bearers

The four keynote presenters at Interop New York are all business computing veterans who believe adherence to industry standards is at the heart of building an efficient -- and interoperable -- enterprise architecture. They also represent key vendors who will play an increasingly important role in the build-out of data centers that use key, forward-looking technologies such as virtualization, software-as-a-service, service-oriented architectures, and Web-based computing.

As head of products for Google Enterprise, Matthew Glotzbach is responsible for the development, management, and marketing of the Google Enterprise product lines. He brings 10 years of enterprise product management, marketing, and sales experience to Google, specializing in the business and technology needs of enterprise customers. Prior to joining Google, Glotzbach was a senior member of the management team for the Computer Industry Business Unit at Trilogy, an enterprise software company. He was involved with the creation of Trilogy's product direction and acted as the lead product manager on a number of Trilogy's industry solutions. Glotzbach holds a bachelor's degree from Cornell University.

Glotzbach recently told InformationWeek that he sees Google's role in the enterprise as a facilitator of collaboration, and that it doesn't need to replace Microsoft. "The right way to view (Google business products such as) Writely and Google Spreadsheets, especially in the context of a larger business, isn't necessarily as a replacement for Word or Excel," said Glotzbach. "They're the collaboration component of that."

Glotzbach will talk more about Google's enterprise strategy during his Interop keynote.

Simon Crosby, CTO and founder of XenSource, was a principal engineer at Intel, where he led strategic research in distributed autonomic computing, platform security, and trust. Before Intel, Crosby founded CPlane, a network optimization software vendor, and held a variety of executive roles while there, including president, CEO, chairman, and CTO. Prior to CPlane, Crosby was a tenured faculty member at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, where he led research on network performance and control and multimedia operating systems. He is the author of more than 35 research papers and patents on a number of data center and networking topics, including security, network and server virtualization, resource optimization, and performance. Crosby also is a frequent speaker on the topic of enterprise-grade virtualization with open source technologies.

Crosby last month told InformationWeek that virtualization needs to be embedded into the fabric of the data center if IT managers are going to get the most from the technology. As a key executive at XenSource, he's got a vested interest in promoting that concept, but his arguments make sense nonetheless. Virtualization "should be part of the box. As the server is turned on, the first thing the system administrator sees is [the option for] virtual machines, and he's off to the races in doing virtualization," Crosby said. You can learn more about the role virtualization can play in the standards-based data center when Crosby speaks at Interop.

Both Glotzbach and Crosby are slated to deliver their Interop keynotes on Wednesday starting at 9 a.m.

Meanwhile, Tom Robertson, Microsoft's general manager for interoperability and standards, works with product teams, customers, other vendors, and international standards bodies on the standardization activities in which Microsoft is involved and the issues of interoperability and innovation. Previously, Robertson was Microsoft's associate general counsel for North Asia, based in Tokyo and Hong Kong, and also has served as the associate general counsel at the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

Robertson led Microsoft's push to have its new Office Open XML format endorsed as an international standard. The International Organization for Standardization recently rejected fast-track approval for OOXML, but the issue will come before the body again next year. In the meantime, OOXML already has been endorsed by another international standards body, ECMA.

"A lot of hype -- and smoke and mirrors obfuscation -- surrounds interoperability these days," said Robertson. "The best way to cut through it is to focus on what is really happening, what steps are actually being taken, rather than the rhetoric. A good example is the debate surrounding document file formats," Robertson said on a Microsoft blog post earlier this year.

Expect to learn more about the role that Microsoft thinks OOXML can play alongside other formats, such as the open source Open Document Format, during his keynote.

Finally, Barry Rudolph, a VP for portfolio management in IBM's system storage unit, is responsible for driving all decisions on portfolio investments for the storage business. Prior to his current assignment, Rudolph served as VP for IBM's Disk, SAN, and NAS Storage Systems unit. In that role, he was responsible for all aspects of the disk, SAN, and NAS storage business within IBM, including profit and loss, product portfolio investments, go to market strategy, and execution and customer support.

Rudolph joined IBM in 1978 as an associate test engineer in San Jose, Calif., and has held various positions, including manufacturing engineering, product development, test and assurance, program management, field support, direct manufacturing, and VP, tape storage systems, and VP, storage systems/software, for IBM's Storage Subsystem Division. Rudolph holds several degrees, including a bachelor's degree in engineering and a master's of science in electrical engineering from San Diego State University, and a master's of business administration from Santa Clara University.

Rudolph recently said that a key focus of his group is ensuring that IBM targets midmarket customers with disk storage technologies that can easily interoperate with their existing systems and applications. "Increasingly, midmarket clients are requesting stronger integration," Rudolph told the Storage News Channel.

Robertson and Rudolph will deliver their keynotes starting Thursday at 9 a.m.

Interop runs Oct. 22 to 26 at the Javits Center, on the west side of Manhattan in New York City.