INDUSTRY

United Devices announced that distributed computing veteran John Hime has joined the company's Board of Directors and high-performance computing (HPC) leader Mark Grefer has been named UD's senior vice president of sales. Hime brings more than 25 years of experience at leading-edge computer systems and software companies. As the first director of marketing at Sun Microsystems, he coined the phrase "The Network is the Computer" and created the company's Open Systems product strategy. As vice president of marketing at Tivoli Systems, he introduced the industry's first Distributed Systems Management products. "With his experience in distributed computing and enterprise systems management (ESM), John understands the political and cultural challenges faced by organizations committed to implementing Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)," said Ben Rouse, UD president and chief executive officer. "His experience packaging software infrastructure capabilities into generic solutions that map to real business cases will be valuable for UD and for the entire industry." Hime began his professional career in 1971, when he left graduate school in Computer Sciences at the University of Texas to join Texas Instruments in Austin. There, he developed operating system components for the ASC vector processing machine, one of the first multi-processor computers. After moving to Data General Corporation in 1974, he spent nine years in the rapidly emerging minicomputer market, where he made the transition from technical to marketing and management roles. This was followed by nine years in marketing and general management positions at Silicon Valley start-ups, including Pyramid Technology, Sun Microsystems, Frame Technology and MIPS Computer Systems. After returning to Austin and successfully launching Tivoli, Hime retired in 1994 and began supporting innovative technology companies as a mentor and angel investor. He has invested in over 25 start-ups and currently serves on the board of directors of one public company, SigmaTel. Mark Grefer brings 15 years of international sales and deep HPC domain expertise to UD, with extensive experience building global sales teams. His career includes sales leadership positions at Convex Computer Corporation and at Gould Computer Systems, an established market leader in high-performance real-time computing. "Mark has been an active participant in the evolution of the HPC landscape, from supercomputers to proprietary and commodity clusters, and he understands the business drivers behind each new transition. It's a positive event for UD and the industry at large when veterans like Mark sign on -- he's uniquely qualified to accelerate the next wave of evolution as companies embrace grid and HPC infrastructure management solutions," said Rouse. "Furthermore, his experience building HPC sales teams across Europe and Asia will be instrumental in advancing UD's growth trajectory." Grefer joins UD from MINDFLOW Technologies, a supply-chain planning and sourcing optimization software company where he was executive vice president. Prior to that he served as vice president/general manager at Applied Science Fiction from 1998 until the company was acquired by Kodak. He has also served as senior vice president of sales at USData Corporation where he was part of the executive team that led its successful IPO.