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Technologist of the year
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM's Vice President, Technology and Strategy

By Ed Scannell

CONSISTENTLY HOPPING BACK and forth over the fence that separates deep technical research and the commercial marketplace for the past 30 years has made IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger the sort of practical visionary who can visualize and shape raw technology into purposeful products.

During just the past five years, Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technology and strategy at IBM's Server Group, has been one of the top two or three prime intellectual and spiritual movers behind IBM's initial collection of e-business technologies, its surprisingly bold Linux initiative, the Project eLiza autonomic computing strategy, and, most recently, its long-term strategic commitment to grid computing. And he's reluctant to stand in the limelight alone.

"I am good at synthesizing technologies and figuring out what is going on in research and the marketplace. ... If you are going to take on very complex projects, you can't do it all yourself, and I have been very lucky to have worked with some brilliant people," says Wladawsky-Berger, who considers himself lucky but also industrious and insatiably curious.

Wladawsky-Berger traces this curiosity for all things technical back to his familiy. His parents, Jewish immigrants who left eastern Europe in the 1940s for Havana, where they owned a small department store, would often bring him home toys. Although he enjoyed those toys as would any typical child, he always became intrigued about how they worked and would take them apart and put them back together again.

"Ever since I can remember I have been interested in how things work and in things like math and the sciences. I think my parents encouraged that which only made me more curious," Wladawsky-Berger says.

As Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba, Wladawsky-Berger's family lost their business and again was forced to move in 1960, this time to Chicago. There, Irving attended University High School, which had an association with the University of Chicago, and from there went on to attend The University of Chicago receiving an M.S. and a Ph.D. in physics.

While studying physics Wladawsky-Berger came in contact with Clemens Roothan, one of the world's leading computational physicists and chemists who pioneered the use of computers in physics. Under Roothan's tutelage, Wladawsky-Berger decided he was more fascinated by computers than physics and, through contacts Roothan had at IBM, went to work for IBM Research at its labs in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.

Throughout the 1970s, Wladawsky-Berger worked on a number of key projects in research, including IBM's first multiprocessing operating system for mainframes and projects involving early work on artificial intelligence.

By the early 1980s there was a movement under way at IBM to tie technologies being developed in research with the product groups. After a sabbatical he took from research when he spent time "slumming" with one of IBM's major marketing divisions, Wladawsky-Berger decided he liked his first taste of the real world and eventually moved over to become vice president in charge of systems development for the company's Large Systems Division.

In this capacity Wladawsky-Berger served as one of the first bridges between IBM's research and development world. He helped guide the company's re-emergence in the world of supercomputers, drove the switch over from bipolar to CMOS-based mainframe chip technology, which essentially gave rise to client/server computing, and lead the first development efforts on parallel computing.

While talking in the late 1990s to researchers both inside and outside IBM who were working on supercomputing technologies, it became clear to Wladawsky-Berger that some interesting things were being done with Linux-based clustering.

After his recent experience in establishing IBM's Internet Division, he took his ideas to Sam Palmisano, who was then in charge of IBM's server divisions. Wladawsky-Berger got the green light to begin dove-tailing Linux and other open-source technologies with the Internet.

"By 1999 it was clear the success of technologies like Apache meant that open-source software was critical for the success of the Internet. In order to connect and integrate this expanding infrastructure, you needed many aspects of it to be rendered as open-source software. I was also clear that, because of the Internet, more advanced technologies were going to be developed by whole communities," Wladawsky-Berger says.

This notion -- one of communal development and integration of technologies and resources that often starts within research and academic circles and then gradually extends to the commercial markets -- has fed smoothly into Wladawsky-Berger's current focus: autonomic and grid computing.

So far most large IT shops fail to see why they should be interested in these technical initiatives; many believe they will not have any sort of meaningful impact on their businesses for years to come. But with a background in research and commercial markets, Wladawsky-Berger has seen this movie before.

"Once again, researchers like me are saying, 'This is the next big thing,' and many commercial people, for good reasons, are wondering what we are smoking. Well, that is the job here, to figure out how to best explain all this to IT and to get them as excited as you are about how these things will change their life," Wladawsky-Berger says.

Ed Scannell is an editor at large at InfoWorld.