Gennaro (Jerry) A. Cuomo

Co-founding father of IBM WebSphere Software, Cuomo has served as Chief Technology Officer of WebSphere, a business unit within IBM Software Group (SWG). He has been working for IBM since 1987 and was part of the WebSphere Application Server engineering team from its inception in 1997. He spent the first nine years of his career working on advanced technology software at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York.

As an engineer on the WebSphere project, Cuomo was involved in Web Server Performance, High Availability, Dynamic Caching, Edge Serving, Web Security, SOA, Web 2.0 and RESTful SOA via Project Zero, Appliances, Event Driven Architecture, Open Development, and Virtualization. At IBM, he led projects in the areas of mobile and cloud computing, web application servers, Java, TCP/IP, real-time collaboration software, and high-performance transactional systems. He has filed for over 45 US patents for IBM.

Cuomo began serving as WebSphere's Chief Technology Officer in 2006 and went on to serve as CTO and Vice President of Business Strategy at IBM in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. He provided technical direction to the WebSphere portfolio and led the technical executive leaders and development teams to "cultivate the future of WebSphere." He has also provided direction on IBM's strategy and product capabilities related to mobile and cloud computing.

Specifically, Cuomo was involved in defining the key attributes of cloud computing, defining IBM's Platform-as-a-Service strategy, approaches for measuring cloud performance, mobile computing and engaging enterprise strategy, mobile development with JavaScript-based technologies, and IBM's Internet of Things strategy. He has also been vocal about the positive impact the "mobile generation" would have on society. He was named an IBM Fellow in 2006, the highest honor a scientist, engineer, or programmer at IBM can achieve.