It is 2014 and as my linkedin status and resume reflect: I am currently exploring new career opportunities.

Below I have provided three glimpses into my professional career:  management style, recent work history and early work history.

Management Style:
In addition to Computer Science, I studied Psychology at UC Berkeley. My area of focus was creativity, learning and problem solving. This has turned out to be a perfect foundation for my career in engineering management.

Valuing each person and understanding that each person has unique way of approaching and solving problems has let me create teams that are flexible, energized and effective. I build teams that operate with open communication, honesty and integrity. I create loyalty and passionate dedication within the team by translating the importance of the company mission into the importance of each person’s contribution.

Over the past 20 years, I have focused on understanding and evolving my management style. Having a clear style that can be communicated and understood by new teams, allows me to quickly become effective and minimize any spin up time. It also allows me to correct deficiencies in my management style and refine and adapt my management style to that of my manager / organization / company.

Recent Work History:
Let’s start this walk through my work history with my time spent at Silicon Graphics as Senior Director of Core Operating Systems. I had the honor of managing a team of over a 100 world class engineers that were split between Mt. View, California and Eagan, Minnesota (previously the Cray Research OS team). We were responsible for the platform independent portion of IRIX (SGI’s UNIX operating system) and for high end system configurations, systems with 32 to over 2000 processors.

When leaving Silicon Graphics, I set a new goal for myself. I wanted to try my hand at building a startup from the ground up. I found this opportunity as the VP of Engineering at PublishOne. Here we created a ground breaking Web publishing and distribution system for high value content. The PublishOne Web service allowed authors and publishers to price and distribute content under the copy and use protection of a Digital Rights Management (DRM) engine. PublishOne went live as a web service with a number of high profile customers, such as Yankee Group and Standards & Poors.

We sold the company to Intertrust, where I transitioned as Senior VP of Engineering responsible for the next generation DRM service. Sadly, Intertrust transformed itself to an intellectual property company, shut down all product development activities, and sued Microsoft.

I spent the quiet time of the dot com crash, getting into great shape (cycling, running, swimming and tennis) and consulting a bit. As the market firmed up, I wanted to find a job in a technical space that had growth potential and that I loved as much as operating systems. After a good amount of thinking, it was clear that the mobile technical space was the right choice. Mobile phone platforms will be a dynamic area of growth for the next decade and are the realization of the next generation ubiquitous computing platform.

My search for a mobile company lead me to SEVEN, which provides software that allows enterprise email and data to be securely delivered to cell phones. SEVEN sells a white label product that is rebranded and sold by over 90 Carriers around the globe including (Sprint, AT&T, and KDDI). I joined SEVEN as Senior Director of Engineering responsible for the management of all mobile phone development activities. When I joined SEVEN, they had a working Pocket PC client and a mostly working Palm client. After improving the quality of the Palm product, I hired and expanded the team. We then released the SEVEN client on an array of platforms: J2ME, Brew, Symbian, Palm, Pocket PC, and Smart Phone. We also developed and released an email SDK, which was used by Samsung to create their own custom email client. Another key contribution at SEVEN was the development of a mobile application framework that allowed a single application to run across multiple handsets.

Upon leaving SEVEN, I searched for another company in the Mobile Space. I joined the Traverse Networks as the Director of Web and Mobile Clients. Traverse Networks sold a mobile client and enterprise server solution that brought the functionality of one’s office phone to a mobile phone. Some of the interesting features were: single number identity (calls made from your cell phone appear to the caller as if they came from your office), single number reach, access to corporate phone data (voicemail and call logs), and access to corporate contact data. When I joined Traverse Networks, they had a production Web and J2ME client. We then rounded out the product suite by developing Palm and RIM clients.

Blessed by good fortune, a wonderful product and a great engineering team, we were able to sell Traverse Networks to Avaya. This team and product portfolio created the foundation for Avaya’s Unified Communication division. I continued on as Director of Engineering responsible for the client facing portion of the product. At Avaya I expanded the product portfolio to include: Web, WAP, iPhone, J2ME, Symbian, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry environments.

The experience at SEVEN, Traverse Networks and Avaya gave me a solid foundation in mobile application development. I had the opportunity to work with both Mobile Carrier development teams and phone manufacturer development teams. I was challenged to enable the product portfolio to work across a wide array of phone OS platforms and devices. This forced me to understand and address the issues that come from mobile platform diversity but more importantly it allowed me to learn how to design a user experience and user interface that worked well in the mobile context and was consistent across multiple mobile environments.

I left Avaya once the application had been localized into 15 languages and development activity was complete. I took the time to do important personal things like: a winter of skiing, a spring of bike riding and running. It was a wonderful rest and allowed me to play with a variety of technology components, such as: Perl, Python, MySQL, Linux and Ruby.  As summer neared, I was approached with a mid-sized company turnaround opportunity. My responsibility was to bring a Mobile Analytics product to market to be sold to wireless Carriers.

To learn more about my professional career, please refer to my resume or contact me directly.

Early Work History:
Taking an overview of my professional background, you can divide my career into two areas of major focus. The first part of my career was focused on software development and management responsibilities centered around operating system development, specifically UNIX related operating system technology, with some forays into networking and security. I also had the opportunity to manage a variety of enterprise and end-user applications and develop products using J2EE and .NET technologies.

At the beginning of my career I had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, which allowed me to develop, from dream to reality, two production UNIX-like operating systems. At Ford Aerospace I was part of the team that developed a multi-level Secure UNIX system for the Defense Department (KSOS). Later at Ridge Computer, we developed ROS, the fastest, best, and most reliable UNIX system of its day. It was a micro-kernel OS, that provided paged virtual memory and a reliable extent-based file system. Sadly, we did not win the race and Sun Microsystems left us in the cold.

I got lucky on my first startup. It was Valid Logic, one of the 3 original ECAD companies (electronic computer aided design). We did everything from scratch. We built our own system hardware, ported UNIX to that system and built our own ECAD software system. We had the good fortune of going public and later being acquired by Cadence Design. I was part of the two man OS team that brought the workstation to life.

My next few attempts to join and build a winning startup did not result in finding any gold at the end of the startup rainbow, so I decided to start my own company.

I ran Engineering Options for 10 years. It was a small company that provided consulting services such as: tactical project management, software technical services, accounting and financial services, human resource management and startup infrastructure management. I personally consulted for a variety of hardware companies providing management and operating system technical expertise such as: Fujitsu, MIPS, Ridge, Dana/Ardent/Stardent/Kubota, and Silicon Graphics. Sometimes, as in the case for Kubota and Silicon Graphics, I transitioned from a consultant to a full time employee.

I dissolved Engineering Options when presented with the opportunity to be the Senior Director of Core Operating Systems at Silicon Graphics (SGI) . My entire career to this point had been focused on operating systems. To be given the responsibility to run core technology team for one of the premier operating systems in the world, was a honor.  There are three contributions I made at SGI that stand out. First, I merged the underlying OS support strategies (CPU scheduling and virtual memory management) so that IRIX could both address the low end systems and the very large systems. Second, I implemented the first project management, project tracking and lifecycle process that had been rolled out to operating system directors and managers. Third, I improved the quality of the IRIX releases by pulling QA and benching marking into the development process. This reduced the integration time and assured us that we stayed on our quality and performance targets.

My last challenge at SGI was left half done. In the post Ed McCracken period, SGI began to de-evolve. Revenue was falling and we were faced with laying off over 40% to 50% of the engineering team across the company. I established relations with Sun, HP, IBM, and Microsoft trying to create some alignment in order to save operating system development costs. I provided management with an array of options to share technology and reduce costs. This downsizing activity was a big multi-year job and if I took the next steps, I would have to see it through to its conclusion. It was with much sadness that I left SGI.

This brings us to the recent portion of my career that is described in a section above. After leaving Silicon Graphics, I joined PublishOne as the VP of Engineering and from there I transitioned into the second phase of my career, focusing on mobile technology.

To learn more about my professional career, please refer to my resume or contact me directly.