Name: Irving Wladawsky-Berger
Company: IBM
Job Title: Vice President of Technical Strategy and Innovation
Bio: As Vice President of Technical Strategy and Innovation, I am responsible for identifying emerging technologies and marketplace developments that are critical to the future of the IT industry, and then organizing activities in and outside IBM in order to capitalize on them. That involves leading several key innovation-oriented activities and formulating technology strategy and public policy positions in support of them. I am also responsible for our university relations office and for the IBM Academy of Technology where I serve as Chairman of the Board of Governors. In 1996, I led the effort to formulate IBM’s Internet strategy and to develop and bring to market leading-edge Internet technologies that could be integrated into IBM’s mainstream business. Since then, I have led a number of companywide initiatives like Linux, Grid Computing and, in October 2002, our On Demand Business initiative.
I joined IBM in 1970 at our Thomas J. Watson Research Center. I worked in a number of areas, but in particular I helped start technology transfer programs to move the innovations of computer science from IBM’s research labs into its product divisions. I later became head our computer sciences department. In 1985, I joined the product development end of the business where I continued to move advanced technologies to the marketplace, leading IBM’s initiatives in supercomputing and parallel computing, and helping in the transformation of IBM’s large commercial systems to microprocessors and parallel architectures. I have also managed a number of IBM’s businesses, including the large systems software and the UNIX systems divisions.
In February of 2006 I was appointed Visiting Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT’s interdisciplinary Engineering Systems Division. I am a member of the University of Chicago Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratories and of the Technology Advisory Council for BP International. It was my honor to serve on and later act as co-chair of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee from 1997 to 2001, and to be a founding member of the Computer Sciences and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council in 1986. A few years ago, I was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Having been born in Cuba and come to the US at the age of 15, one of the things of which I am proudest is having been named 2001 Hispanic Engineer of the Year. I have an M.S. and Ph. D. in physics from the University of Chicago.