The Blade.org Member Committees

Blade.org has a number of member committees comprised of volunteers from member companies. These committees perform the work of the organization and are organized by function. To join one of these committees or to inquire about a particular activity or propose a new committee or activity, please contact the Chairperson of the applicable committee. Key committees include:
 

The Technology Committee
Chairperson Tom Bradicich, Ph.D., IBM, technology@blade.org	Tom directs the System x and BladeCenter Server Architecture and Technology organization, in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, where he is Vice President for Systems Technology, responsible for the architecture and technology of IBM's x86-based server line. He and his team have developed internal and external alliances to create technologies such as PCI-X, Software Rejuvenation, BladeCenter architecture, Virtualization Availability Manager, and Hosted Client solutions. Tom is IBM's executive sponsor for the PCI SIG, the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG), the HyperTransport Consortium, Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC) and a cofounder of the Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH), the RDMA Consortium, Blade.org, the InfiniBand Trade Association, and TheGreenGrid.org. In 2001, Tom was named an IBM Distinguished Engineer, an exclusive position given to technical executives who set the product and technology direction for the IBM company. In 2004, Tom was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology, an honor given for exemplary technical leadership and accomplishment. In 2006, Tom was appointed an IBM Fellow, IBM's highest technical honor. Tom blogs on blade servers and various random topics at www.bladenation.typepad.com. Tom has served on the faculty at several universities, and is an adjunct professor in the college Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University. He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and has served on the Computer Science Accreditation Board, the National Science Foundation Center for Technology Commercialization Executive Board. Tom meets frequently with industry analysts and speaks regularly at industry conferences, customer locations, and universities on IT, computer architecture, and high technology trends and directions. At IBM his assignments included product and technology development in IBM's Personal Computer Division, Server Group, and Industry Solutions Unit where he led the worldwide business development for mobile solutions for healthcare information systems. The Blade.org technology initiative serves Blade.org members and the industry by casting a vision for the industry on the future of blade technologies, establishing a common, industry accepted, systematics and taxonomy for blade systems platforms, and creating a formal forum for the exchange of technology trends and directions.
The Marketing Committee
marketing@blade.org	Lisa Galish has been responsible for driving the implementation of Blade.org activities since before Blade.org was officially formed. Ms. Galish manages the day to day operations of Blade.org, initiating and managing outbound marketing programs such as the www.Blade.org website and publicity program, developing consensus among member companies, identifying strategic alliances for the organization, recruiting members to Blade.org, and providing direction to Blade.org's operational management team and outside vendors. She has served as Marketing Committee Chairperson of Blade.org since it's inception in February 2006. During this time, the marketing committee has achieved notable success in establishing Blade.org as a respected, well-known industry consortium of blade server industry movers and shakers. Within IBM, Ms. Galish has held positions of Program Director, Manager, and Brand Marketing Specialist, and has worked in areas from Microsoft to Linux and in roles focused on marketing, operations, and strategic alliances. Prior to IBM, Ms. Galish held the positions of Staff Director, Market Management and Staff Director Sales Planning and Promotion at NYNEX, which is now part of Verizon. Ms. Galish graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois in 1986 with a BA in economics, and later earned an MBA at Columbia University in New York in 1996. The Marketing Committee is comprised of volunteers from Blade.org member companies and is responsible for all aspects of Blade.org marketing and promotion activities including creating, developing and maintaining the Blade.org web site, promoting Blade.org and its member companies through press activities, news releases, trade show participation, white papers and technical articles and for communications with members through regular face-to-face meetings.
The Power and Cooling Committee
Chairperson Preston Miller, APCC, power@blade.org	Preston Miller serves as the world wide Technical Product Manager for the OEM relationship between IBM and APC. In this role, he works closely with IBM and APC personnel to address product launch, field quality, and customer satisfaction issues with the IBM System x branded UPS systems and APC's power and cooling solutions. Preston has been with APC for over seven years. He started with APC as a Platform Engineer in APC's East Providence, Rhode Island facility. He was then based in Tokyo, Japan, for three years as the Asia Pacific Regional Applications Engineer for APC's Business Network Group. After his international assignment, he returned to the USA in 2004, to his current role, which is based in North Carolina. The Power & Cooling Committee's mission is to focus on essential aspects of power and cooling in the blade environment. The committee's major goals are to: Identify critical power and cooling needs of the end customer that deploys blade servers. Map out elements that contribute to power & cooling efficiency and effectiveness from the processor to the power grid and in between. Establish best practices for power & cooling in blade installations. Explore management software applications and interaction of the blade server with Network Critical Physical Infrastructure (NCPI) Identify power & cooling challenges and trends and propose solutions to those challenges and support the trends.
The Strategic Planning Committee
Chairperson Daniel Cohen, Brocade, strategic@blade.org	Daniel has been with Brocade Communications for over 7 years and is responsible for Brocade's business development activities across the various lines of business within IBM. Since Brocade's entry into the BladeCenter ecosystem with the first generation SAN Switch Module, Daniel has been an integral part of the business and development teams within Brocade that have delivered best in class I/O module capabilities for BladeCenter customers. He continues to be involved in the day to day working relationship with IBM to deliver industry leading solutions to BladeCenter customers. In addition to his current role, Daniel has worked in Brocade's solutions marketing group which is tasked with communicating to customers the value of Brocade SAN solutions. Prior to moving to Brocade, Daniel's work experience included positions in organizations focusing on server solutions, storage solutions and IT services. He had responsibility for business development within Hitachi Data Systems OEM sales organization, was a founding partner at a systems integrator focusing on server and storage solutions and worked for SunGard focusing on open systems business continuity solutions. Daniel graduated from Boston University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration. The Strategic Planning Committee is chartered to establish and maintain Blade.org's vision statement, the organization's 5-year, Board-endorsed Strategic Plan, and annual Tactical Plans designed to support strategic goals. In addition, the Committee is tasked with creating a criteria against which all committee work can be measured to ensure cohesive support of program goals. Committee membership is exclusive to Sponsoring and Governing members of Blade.org.
The SMB Taskforce Committee
smb@blade.org	Mr. Venkat Venkataraman, IBM, Program Director, IBM POWER Systems, serves as Chairperson of the SMB Taskforce Committee for Blade.org. The mission of the SMB committee is to increase the adoption of blade based technologies and solutions amongst SMB clients by addressing their needs for simplicity and ease of deployment, use and maintenance through the collaborative effort of blade.org members focused on the total solution ecosystem. SMB firms lack IT skills such as systems, server, network, storage administrators but typically have 10-20 servers in their company for various tasks. SMBs would rather focus on running their business instead of maintaining IT systems and that poses some challenges in a world where technology is changing rapidly. Some of the key IT needs of these companies are around networking, IT security, business continuity, IT optimization / systems management, collaboration, CRM and green/energy solutions. SMBs prefer IT to be affordable and work "out-of-the-box" and rely on trusted solution providers.
The Compliance and Interoperability Committee
Chairperson Will Atherton IBM, comp@blade.org	Will Atherton works at IBM in the System X series servers on developing new testing methodologies and is the Tools Development lead. He has his BS degrees in Electrical Engineering, and Electrical and Electronic Technology from McNeese State University. He has a MS in Computer Network Engineering from North Carolina State University. Will is also an IEEE senior member. The Compliance and Interoperability Committee manages the product compliance program and drives awareness of compliance and interoperability activities within Blade.org. The group advises on activities such as technical demos and related events.
The Solutions Architecture Committee
Chairperson Chitra Balachandran, IBM, solutions@blade.org	Chitra Balachandran has been with IBM since 1997. Chitra has 17 years of industry experience in hardware and software development, test and management. Currently she is the Program Manager for Strategy in the Blade development organization. Prior to this she was the Program Director for Performance, responsible for performance development and benchmarking for all IBM System x products. Before joining IBM, Chitra worked at VTel and Siemens Stromberg-Carlson where she held various roles in test and development. She holds a BS and MSCE degree. The Solutions Architecture Committee is responsible for creating a library of blade server solutions that will be posted and promoted through Blade.org's public website. The committee targets both horizontal and vertical solutions and actively encourages the submissions and participation from all members.
The Virtualization Task Force Committee
Chairperson Adam Mendoza, NetApp, virtualization@blade.org	Mr. Mendoza has over 20 years experience in the Information Technology industry. He is currently a Senior Manager for the Virtualization and Grid Infrastructures (VGI) business unit within NetApp. One of his principal responsibilities is the development of the virtualization solution strategy and portfolio for the VGI organization that utilize blade server architectures and provide reference architectures that customers can leverage and adopt. He is also responsible for the development of strategic alliances with leading technology companies that jointly focus on the business, technology and operational considerations for next generation data center environments. The goal of the Virtualization Task Force is to create customer awareness of blade server architectures as the best platform for virtualized infrastructures; to create a collaborative environment that integrates customer requests, industry technology and joint experience to develop virtualization reference architectures; and to publish best practices, solution architectures and provide expertise to the industry to continue to expand blade servers and related software, network and storage hardware solutions.
The Hosted Client Task Force, subgroup of the Solutions Architecture Committee
Chairperson Joe Makoid, President, DevonIT, solutions@blade.org	Joe Makoid is a 20-year technology industry veteran. In 1987, he co-founded Bus-Tech, the industry's largest supplier of interconnect controllers and was instrumental in selling the company to Network Systems Corp. In addition, Joe founded Data Center Direct in 1999 and expanded the scope to include the Management Services Provider model. Data Center Direct was acquired by Safeguard in 2000 to provide the foundation for Safeguard Global Services. Prior to joining Devon IT, Joe was Executive Vice President, Business Development for Tarantella. The Hosted Client Working group is dedicated to the development of business for its members. The members of the working group will benefit from marketing, demand generation and public relations activities and will be invited to participate in all hosted client working group activities as well as the hostedclient.org web site. Membership is limited to companies already part of blade.org but, because hosted client is not limited to blade technologies, activities will reach beyond blades and blade systems to encompass all aspects of hosted client solutions. The initial members of the working group include IBM, Citrix, VMware, Devon IT, Virtual Iron, Ericom, and Teradici.
The European Initiative Task Force Committee
Chairperson Christophe Loye, Bull, euro@blade.org	Christophe Loye is the Marketing Director for the Enterprise Servers Business Unit of Bull. Christophe has a BA with Honors in Economics from the London Middlesex University. He joined Bull in 1995 in charge of developing Bull's Networking business with companies such as 3Com and Cisco. ÊChristophe then moved to UNIX Product Management, in charge of Bull's Escala Business Unit. Most recently, he was Marketing Director for Bull's Open Servers Business Unit, before being appointed Operational Marketing Director for the newly formed Enterprise Servers Business Unit in 2008, including Unix and x86 servers in rack, tower and blade form factors. Ê Bull designs and develops servers and software for an open environment, integrating the most advanced technologies, and proposes a wide range of services, from system integration consulting to outsourcing. Bull brings its customers its expertise and know-how to help them in the transformation of their information systems and optimise their IT infrastructure and their applications. Bull is particularly present in the public sector, banking, finance, telecommunication and manufacturing sectors. Capitalising on its wide experience, the Group has a thorough understanding of the business and specific processes of these sectors. Its distribution network spreads to over 100 countries world-wide. The European Initiative Task Force was formed in late 2007 in response to the needs of Blade.org's European members. European members wish to participate in the activities of Blade.org, such as committee work, members meetings and symposiums in real time, utilizing common languages and convenient time zones. It is the work of the European Initiative Task Force to provide convenient meeting times for committees, webinar's, local all-members meetings and symposiums for European members to attend locally. It is also the goal of the European Initiative Task Force to grow Blade.org membership to more companies based in Europe and to encourage participation of North American member companies with a presence in Europe to become engaged in the activities of Blade.org.
The Bylaws and Membership Committee
Chairperson Sharon Hobbs, IBM, bylaws@blade.org	Sharon Hobbs is a Program Director in the IBM Alliances Execution Team. The mission of this team is to drive the negotiation of business and alliance deals supporting all hardware and storage products within IBM's System and Technology Group. As chair of the Bylaws and Membership committee during Blade.org's formation, she personally drove the negotiation among all the founding members and their legal staffs to define and document the organization's charter and initial legal agreements. This committee has an on-going mission to assist and advise the Blade.org Board on implementation of any bylaws or membership agreement amendments. Sharon has an extensive and successful track record of leadership roles and over 30 years experience in the technical industry. Her IBM experience includes serving as the BladeCenter Alliance Program Director during the start-up of IBM's blade project. As IBM Alliance Plans and Operations manager, she was responsible for selecting, recruiting, and supporting a portfolio of top software vendors to enable revenue growth on RS/6000. As AIX Tools manager, she drove the planning, development, and conversion of IBM Austin, Kingston, San Jose and other sites from a mainframe based source tracking and change control system to a Unix™ based system. Her prior experience also includes managing IBM Austin Programming Operations, where she led a restructuring which reduced operations cost by $17M while expanding the worldwide base of customers from 2000 to 8000 users. She holds a Masters Certificate in Project Management from George Washington University, a MA in Mathematics with a minor in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA in Mathematics with a minor in Engineering from UT Austin.