Full biography
Dr. Nicholas (Nick) Bowen is the Vice President of Technology, reporting to Linda Sanford, Senior Vice President, Enterprise On Demand Transformation & Information Technology. Dr. Bowen is responsible for driving the Technology Team topics, assessments and studies that shape the technology strategy and business opportunities for IBM. These are linked to the Corporate Technical Milestones, which set and track IBM's technology commitments and progress. He has leadership roles in the Technical Leadership Team, and Technical Review Team. At the same time, he has responsibility for managing the corporate nomination, selection and evaluation processes for employees to be named IBM Fellow or Distinguished Engineer, in addition to determining what technical contributions warrant a Corporate Award. Another key responsibility Dr. Bowen has is overseeing of the annual Corporate Technical Recognition Event.
Prior to his current position, in January 2007, he was appointed Vice President of Technical Strategy and Worldwide operations for IBM’s Research Division which include driving the creation of the Global Technology Outlook, leading the worldwide operations and I/S teams, and driving the research strategy, plan and measurement processes.
Prior to that role current position, Nick held several executive positions within the IBM Systems & Technology Group (STG) including: vice president, software development, with responsibility for all server operating systems (zOS, AIX, i5OS, zVM, VSE, Linux), firmware development for IBM Systems z, i, p, and x, management software (IBM Systems Director) and hardware management systems (HMC, FSP); chief technology officer and vice president of software architecture for the same group of products; vice president of UNIX and IBM xSeries software for the server division with responsibility for driving eServers into growth markets for UNIX, Linux, Windows, GRID, and High Performance Computing where he was responsible for delivering leadership management solutions for key emerging technologies such as BladeCenter and Linux Clusters; and vice president of xSeries software and performance, responsible for all software development, performance, and hardware service processor development for xSeries, including responsibility for the IBM Center for Microsoft Technologies in Kirkland, Washington.
Prior to his positions with STG, he was with IBM Research. Nick was director of computing utilities, where he spearheaded the definition of the "intelligent infrastructure" research program, and he was director of servers with worldwide responsibility for the Research programs in servers. This group had many exploratory system projects in addition to making contributions to AIX, OS/390, AS/400, and xSeries servers as well as many products within the IBM Software Group. He made technical contributions to the S/390 Parallel Sysplex effort and led several of the OS/390 initiatives to embrace Internet and object technologies.
He joined IBM at East Fishkill, New York where he worked in a datacenter and learned the trials and tribulations of maintaining a 24x7 datacenter. He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM. His research interests are operating systems and fault-tolerant computing.
Nick’s career with IBM spans over 25 years and he has expertise in high availability, memory management, and parallel processing. He received the B.S. degree in computer science from the University of Vermont, a M.S. degree in computer engineering from Syracuse University, and the Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a member of Association of Computer Machinery. He served on the Computer Science Advisory Boards of Florida International University and North Carolina State University and helped found the Computer Science Advisory Board at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. His research interests are operating systems and fault-tolerant computing.
November 2008