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As we close off this week, we welcome Bola Rotibi as the last of our external judges onto the Cisco Developer Contest judging panel again in an honorary capacity. Bola is a principal analyst with Macehiter Ward-Dutton Advisors, and is based in the United Kingdom. This makes her our first and only non-U.S judge on the panel.
Bola brings a lot of relevant expertise into these contests. She is a high-profile and very experienced analyst focusing currently on software development technologies, processes and market trends. Her expertise includes application lifecycle management strategies for a variety of platforms (mobile, server, desktop, web etc.); software modelling, testing and performance managmeent. Other areas of expertise include Web 2.0 and Rich Interactive/Internet Applications; IT sourcing for software development projects; enterprise architecture and IT governance processes.
We thank Bola for accepting our invitation quickly and with great enthusiasm. We look forward to Bola carrying her expertise, energy and enthusiasm into the judging panel, as we sift through the final entries.
Oh, BTW, did I mention that have now locked-in our external judging panel?
As we close on our external judging panel this week, we wanted to welcome on board Brian Proffitt – a key pillar of the Linux community manager of the Linux Developer Network at the Linux foundation. Brian has been following the contest and in fact wrote an article about it sometime back on how “Cisco Dev contest bridges network, development gap”.
Brian is a softspoken individual, but at the epicentre of the Linux foundation ecosystem, interacting with community members, individual developers and vendors. Earlier he was managing editor of Linux Today, a popular news and information site on Linux and open source technology. As you can see from his blogs, Brian has a passion for writing, and he’s also the author of several consumer guides about Linux, including “Introducing Ubuntu: Desktop Linux” and “The Joy of Linux”
As we step closer to our August 15th deadline, for Phase-2 of the Cisco Developer Contest to close, we’re excited to have one of our key customers (pun intended), from KeyCorp join the judging panel. Dominic M.Del Balso, Vice-President Enterprise Technology and Operations has graciously agreed to come on board and help us adjudge the entries from the top ten finalist teams. KeyCorp is one of United States largest bank-based financial services companies, where Dominic leads the voice and data engineering groups for an enterprise with more than 1500 locations worldwide, in addition to overseeing a large portfolio of project implementations that have significant impact to the organization.
Dominic has been a constant source of inputs for us over the years, as an active member of Cisco’s Enterprise Technical Advisory Board (E-TAB), a platform that aligns Cisco’s development strategy with that of its customers business needs. We sincerely appreciate his time investment in this current effort.
We welcome Dominic into this panel in an honorary capacity, as he joins our other judges Zeus Kerravala of the Yankee group and Robert Whiteley of the Forrester Research.
Our top ten finalist teams keep busy, as we edge past the mid-point of Phase-2 of the Developer contest. As part of the organizing team, we’re equally busy with a key task - ensuring our judging panel is locked down quickly. Sometime back, we announced Zeus Kerravala from Yankee coming on board as one of our external judges.
We’re now pleased to announce Robert Whiteley, Principal Analyst and Research Director at Forrester Research has accepted our invitation to join the judging panel. Rob Whitely brings a diverse and deep perspective of various industry trends and is very well respected for his business acumen and his technological insights and we’re very lucky to have him be a part of the panel.
Before we launched the contest back in October 2008, we sounded out Rob to see if the idea had merit, and his encouragement motivated us to roll it out. Now, when I reached out to him a little while ago to see if he was interested, Rob was unequivocal with a yes.
He also took some time out to share his thoughts on the contest. In his characteristic style, Rob weighs in on the relevance of the Developer contest and its timing as he muses on “the maturing of folks who are ready to take on the Network as a platform”.
It has been a little over a week since Michael Jackson passed away. A number of my friends are traveling to Los Angeles to go lay a flower on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, or make a trip to the Neverland Ranch to pay their respects. It is amazing how his death has suddenly made people realize what his life meant. I, like so many others, had forgotten how much his music had meant to me and the influence his videos had on me growing up. Last week brought back all of those in a flood as we looked up his various performances on DVD and some of the rarer ones on YouTube, reminiscing. Clearly, others felt the same, as when news of his death hit the various bulletins, the Internet slowed down and many sites crashed including Twitter, Wikipedia. Reportedly, Google searches were also impacted.
The debate about his death and his life will go on. Sensationalism will prevail, and I have no idea of what is true about his personal life. However, all this will put the spotlight back on what truly should be his legacy – his music and his constant innovations that put him in a different league altogether. Whether it be perfecting the “moonwalk”, or filing a patent for gravity-defining boots, incorporating jaw-dropping special effects, or even that little hiccup he managed to introduce in many of his songs giving them the edgy feel, he was always innovating to turn up every performance that extra notch. His ‘Thriller’ still manages to stop people from what they’re doing and glance at the screen, even after 25 years.
Posted by Shashi Kiran at 09:47AM PST
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