Recognizing John Hamre’s Role in Intelligence

For years I’ve enjoyed volunteering on national-security-focused “public/private partnership” projects with colleagues at AFCEA, where I serve on the executive committee of the Board of Directors. But as the Chair of the AFCEA Intelligence Committee, I also have the privilege of overseeing that Committee’s selection of the recipient of a most prestigious annual honor: The Charlie Allen Award for Distinguished Intelligence Service.

Candidates for this award must demonstrate a truly “long and distinguished record of significant accomplishments and senior leadership in support of the Intelligence Community at the national and/or international level,” befitting an award named to honor a legend himself. Charlie served as a senior government executive for over 25 years – during a career of nearly 60 years of total service – with extensive experience in managing the most sensitive programs, heading intelligence collection at CIA, and overseeing large national-system and compartmented acquisition. Since retiring from active government service, Charlie continues to serve the nation in a variety of ways, including as an active member of our AFCEA Intelligence Committee.

The Allen Awardees stretching back to 2009 (and before it was named for Charlie Allen back to 1990 listed here) represent a true pantheon of modern American intelligence. I enjoyed handing the Award last year to a longtime friend and colleague, the then just-retiring-from CIA Dawn Meyerriecks, who capped a stellar career in industrial R&D and DoD by serving as CIA’s “DD/S&T” or Deputy Director of CIA for Science and Technology, long considered “the most powerful development and engineering organization in the IC.”

Later this month I’ll be handing the 2024 Allen Award to John Hamre, President and CEO of the preeminent U.S. national-security think-tank CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His official bio is here, but our Committee based its vote on his intelligence contributions specifically, which for two decades at bipartisan CSIS have been extraordinarily rich (read more about the center’s related work here). He’s also spent decades on the boards of IC partners Leidos, SAIC, MITRE, and before that as Deputy Secretary of Defense itself – and as anyone who can read the federal budget knows, the bulk of US intelligence resides within DoD. Several of his most significant decisions in that role remain classified, but a number of our members spoke of them highly in support.

Click the image to read more about CSIS’s related current work

Since leaving the government Dr. Hamre has repeatedly answered a call for continuing service. In 2007, Secretary of Defense Gates appointed him to serve as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, and he served in that capacity for four secretaries of defense. Presiding over a board with Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, Brent Scowcroft, Graham Allison and a raft of senior defense and intelligence leaders, Hamre advocated a wide range of innovative management initiatives and clearance reform. In 2008 – 2009, he served on the Secretary of Defense Task Force on DoD Nuclear Weapons Management (“The Schlesinger Panel”), producing a comprehensive report on nuclear deterrence and effectiveness, spending, organization, procedures, mishaps and accidents, and recommendations. Hamre was also principal co-author of the landmark “Science and Security in the 21^st Century,” the report of a Secretary of Energy Commission tasked to assess counterintelligence and cyber threats to premier scientific institutions; its lessons continue to echo.

Dr. Hamre received his PhD with distinction in 1978 from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, after a 1972 BA with high distinction from Augustana College in Sioux Falls, SD, in political science and economics. He also spent a year as a Rockefeller Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School. And, finally, he is a longtime friend to AFCEA; I believe one of his earliest AFCEA interactions was an ahead-of-its-time talk at the 1991 AFCEA WEST Conference, on “New Directions for C4I.” I eagerly anticipate him extending that career arc this month at our classified AFCEA Spring Intelligence Symposium, where as the Allen Awardee he will be delivering substantive remarks on a particular topic. Congratulations John Hamre!

Visit here for more information and the full agenda of the 2024 AFCEA Spring Intelligence Symposium (Classified TS/SI/TK, registration closes March 10!).

New List, New Job, New Year

MIT’s world-famous economist Robert Solow died this month at 99, nearly seven decades after his earliest remarkable scholarship which won him the Nobel Prize in Economics. We owe him for much of our understanding of the underlying dynamics of our modern digital economy. Solow’s initial scholarship in the 1950s was radical and complex, but he summarized it neatly: “I discovered to my great surprise that the main source of growth was not capital investment but technological change.” As the Nobel Committee observed, “he developed a mathematical model illustrating how various factors can contribute to sustained national economic growth. From the 1960s on, Solow’s studies helped persuade governments to channel funds into technological research and development to spur economic growth.”

As 2023 closes we are still accelerating into the multi-decade technological propulsion of the U.S. economy, resulting in a seismic shift you may not have noticed. There’s a dramatic new look to the list of 10 Largest American Companies. They’re all tech companies! Sort of… and I’ve joined the newest member of the list.

If you didn’t notice, slipping in under the radar late this year was the completion of the largest IT corporate acquisition in history: Broadcom has finalized its acquisition of software giant VMware for $69 Billion. As an executive at VMware I have accepted an offer to join in the new combined company, to help lead “VMware by Broadcom” operations as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Public Sector, meaning our efforts for government, education, national security etc. That’s a substantial area of work in a large company, and to see just how large let’s take a look at how Broadcom has shaken up that Top-Ten U.S. companies list, which fluctuates daily based on market-cap (this data is from the last trading-day before Christmas):

Top Ten U.S. public companies by market capitalization as of 12/22/2023, source companiesmarketcap.com

Keep in mind that’s not a “Silicon Valley leaders” list, that’s the largest companies in the United States overall. From the three-trillion-dollar behemoth Apple on down to the half-trillion-dollar Broadcom, you see the dominance of tech firms. Eight of the ten are now straight-up hardware-software companies, including Tesla, an auto manufacturer of course but definitionally one marked by its unique technologies in energy, robotics, and digital engineering. Lilly is a pharmaceutical giant founded by Eli Lilly over a century ago which today invests billions in technological research advancement, as recently seen in its COVID-19 diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.

And what about Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, the seeming outlier? The “value-investing” conglomerate is broadly based, relying on Buffett’s mantra that “Diversification is a protection against ignorance,” but there’s no escaping that its full portfolio is indeed 53% in technology.

When Broadcom joined this Top Ten list by virtue of the VMware addition, it nudged down the finance giant Visa, which is remaking itself with a “fintech” focus and says it has been using machine-learning for thirty years as “the first AI-powered payments network.” More tech firms are sprinkled further down in the Top 50 Companies of course (Oracle, Cisco, Salesforce, Netflix, SAP, AMD). Other fast-growing tech companies will certainly rise, and many established giants continue to morph along Solow’s prescription toward tech-enabled growth.

Back to the Future

The technological shape of the future has been clear, even before Marc Andreesen wrote in 2011 in the Wall Street Journal that “Software is eating the world.” I have written and spoken often about the transformational history of Silicon Valley, stretching back to the first half of the twentieth century. That history is exemplified in VMware’s origin story, in a computer science classroom in 1998 on the campus of Stanford University, and now even more so in combination with Broadcom’s even deeper, more fascinating combinatorial technology roots. Not a flashy company, not a marketing megaphone, just a foundational inventor/manufacturer of tech infrastructure and mission-critical software underlying the digital era.

Broadcom’s roots stretch back through mergers and acquisitions to combine the legendary transistor or silicon or optical or networking or software divisions of AT&T’s famous Bell Labs, Hewlett-Packard‘s semiconductor business, digital engineering trailblazers LSI Logic, all added over the years to the pioneers of video streaming at “Classic” Broadcom, mainframe software at CA, cybersecurity software at Symantec, and now virtualization at VMware… all now joined in the same powerhouse Broadcom. It’s a striking lineage of technological audacity and strategic foresight.

Barreling into 2024 using Robert Solow’s growth equation, with VMware’s previous $3 Billion per year in R&D investment supplementing Broadcom’s existing $5 Billion a year in R&D – and with CEO Hock Tan’s plan to increase our R&D substantially – we intend to enable new advances in foundational infrastructure across the technological landscape (for example see my new colleague Clayton Donley‘s recent piece “Generative AI and the Reinvigoration of AIOps“).

Don’t expect hype. Broadcom’s formula focuses quietly on sustained strategic growth. As we were finalizing the merging of our two organizations I learned quite a bit reading a deeply-researched piece by a semiconductor-industry analyst: “the fact is that in 2023, no one besides NVIDIA will generate even $1B revenue from chips that run large language models. Scratch that, there is one other player. Often overlooked is that Broadcom is the second largest AI chip company in the world in terms of revenue behind NVIDIA, with multiple billions of dollars of accelerator sales… Broadcom, the Silent Giant in the AI Chip Revolution.”

As a CTO in this new software/hardware dynamo I couldn’t be more excited about the future fun. Maybe we can climb that Top Ten list even higher by this time next year – stay tuned.

#newjob #TopTen #SiliconValley #technology #AI #research #government #future

What’s Next in Nat-Sec Tech

For nearly a decade, AFCEA and INSA have jointly hosted a large conference in the nation’s capitaI, and the 2022 Intelligence & National Security Summit takes place on September 15/16 at DC’s Gaylord National Conference Center. I’m involved in both of these fine organizations and we’re very pleased with the line-up of speakers and participants, and with the post-pandemic full return to in-person activity for the Summit. With a little over two weeks to go before the event, we have over 1,100 attendees registered and 70+ exhibitors. Full agenda is here.

From the main keynote by Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. Kathleen Hicks, through thoughtfully composed panels on a wide variety of topics, there are great opportunities to learn from experts and discuss with peers and colleagues across the spectrum of defense, homeland security, intelligence, and technology disciplines. I’m delighted to be moderating the panel on “Technology Futures for National Security,” with a dream-team of top leaders from DoD, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector.

It’s rare to have the Directors of both DARPA and IARPA on the same stage, the esteemed Stefanie Tompkins and Catherine Marsh, but we have them. Rounding out the panel is a private-sector leader who has earlier held one of those jobs and overseen the other; today Lisa Porter is co-founder of leading management, scientific, and technical consulting firm LogiQ Inc., and former president of Teledyne Scientific & Imaging, but she was earlier the founding director of IARPA, and more recently was Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering overseeing DARPA and the rest of DoD’s $70+billion R&D efforts.

Should be an outstanding discussion. Feel free to suggest questions to me beforehand whether you’re attending or not; if you’re attending I might even ask them 😉 We have a lot to talk about; here’s the summary blurb:

Technology Futures: Who’s investing how much in what, and when might it pay off? These panelists define the answers to those questions. It has now become a truism that the IC and DoD confront a world where the U.S. no longer monopolizes science and technology advances – yet the government still has the obligation to fund and create breakthrough technologies for advantage in national security. Commercial R&D drives tech advance broadly, but new mission-advantageous breakthroughs will come largely from the nation’s two leading national-security innovation lighthouses, DARPA and IARPA. This session will hear from those who have been charged with leading the government’s efforts to provide innovative future technologies necessary for our security – and with incisive observations from the private-sector. We’ll look at current work on revolutionary opportunities for advantage, but beyond just a buzzword glance across the litany of investment areas (“AI,” “quantum,” “cybersecurity,” “metaverse”) there’ll be a focus on the system-of-systems challenges in bringing radical new capabilities to real operational life across the siloed halls of DoD and the IC.

Our morning-of-Day-Two panel is just one of the many great sessions, which include:

• Chinese Threats to U.S. Supply Chains
• Leading Change: A Look at the CIO, CDO, CTO, and CDAO Roles
• Public Data and IC Analysis: Improving Integration of Public-Private Capabilities
• Commercial Space-Based Intelligence for National Security
• Intelligence Priorities of the U.S. Military Services
• Russia/Ukraine Conflict: Implications for U.S. National Security
• Midterms 2022: Election Security
• Strategic Intelligence Challenges / IC Leaders Panel

We’ve lined up many leading government, industry, academic and media figures for the 2022 Summit, and I hope you are able to participate as well! More information at intelsummit.org.

New Faces at the Intelligence Committee

It turns out that this blog can be an effective recruitment device. At least two newly-elected members of the prestigious AFCEA Intelligence Committee tell me that they applied for the biannual selection process after first reading about it here earlier. This week LTG Bob Noonan (retired head of U.S. Army Intelligence and the committee’s chair) announced the new members, and the list is indeed impressive. As the vice chair, I am surrounded by members with stellar careers and I always quietly keep in mind the great line from Groucho Marx, “I refuse to belong to any organization that would have me for a member.”

Congratulations to our new superstar members, listed here in either alphabetical order or by height, I can’t remember which:

• Robert Ames, Sr. Director, Emerging Technologies, VMware and former SVP, In-Q-Tel
• Jason Bacheler, Principal, Corporate Information Security, Lockheed Martin
• Melissa Cutter, Director, AT&T
• David Lee, President, ASRC Federal – Exatech
• Katharina McFarland, President, Blue Oryx, Inc. and former Asst. Secretary of Defense
• Dr. Lisa Porter, Co-President, LogiQ, Inc., former Director of IARPA and former Deputy Under-Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering
• Teresa Smetzer, VP, National Security Programs, Salesforce and former Director, Digital Futures, CIA
• LtGen Vincent Stewart, USMC (Ret), CEO, Stewart Global Solutions and former Deputy Commander, US Cyber Command and former Director, DIA

Congratulations to them all. We’re going to put them all to work now, starting with the upcoming annual AFCEA/INSA Intelligence & National Security Summit – which is virtual this year, meaning that naturally there are still tickets available 🙂 and you can register here.

How to Apply for the AFCEA Intelligence Committee

If you’re engaged in the business of intelligence, you’re likely aware of (and already registered for) an annual highlight in that world, the AFCEA/INSA Intelligence and National Security Summit, this year a virtual event on September 16/17. Stellar lineup as always, but typically invisible is the behind-the-scenes work in preparation, done by staff and volunteer members of INSA and the AFCEA Intelligence Committee. Monday August 10, 2020 (update – extended from Friday August 7) is the deadline for annual new applications to join that prestigious AFCEA International Intelligence Committee, a premier outside body of experts and insiders, government officials and business/academic leaders, who oversee the intelligence-related activities of the 32,000+ member Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association.

Private-sector applicants for four-year terms can apply at this link. (Hurry! You have only till midnight August 10.)  You can easily fill out the simple online application in less than an hour, not burdensome – no college transcripts required 🙂

Where else in DC can you engage with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and hackathons on national security? My own tenure on the Committee has been fantastically fun and enlightening – and I hope helpful to AFCEA and the government agencies we advise and support. When I joined, our Committee’s Chair was the IC legend Maureen “Mo” Baginski, career NSA and FBI senior leader; and I’ve been honored to serve as vice-chair to her two successors in that seat, former DIA Director VADM Jake Jacoby, and current chair former head of Army Intelligence LTG Bob Noonan. Leaders from the world’s biggest defense/intelligence contractors are members, as well as successful startup leaders in the nat-sec space. We benefit from active emeritus members who continue to participate like CIA’s legendary Charlie Allen and the world’s preeminent scholar of intelligence Mark “Jeopardy Champion” Lowenthal.

You must have an active TS/SCI clearance, as many of our activities and conferences are classified – we’re even planning fully virtual classified events this winter. And the application weighs heavily on your career track record, so we encourage recently retired senior civilian leaders and military members as well to apply.. We especially encourage applicants diverse in origin, gender, race, background, skills, and outlook —to reflect the nation as a whole and the diversity of the intelligence mission itself, and to break chains of old thinking and get crackling new ideas on tomorrow’s most significant topics.  

In considering applicants during the selection process, these are the primary precepts we keep in mind when we consider applicants:
(1) Would the candidate further Committee efforts to build bridges between industry and the government/military? And have the contacts to do so?
(2) Would the candidate enhance AFCEA’s reputation with the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense?
(3) Would the candidate likely be someone willing to actively engage with the Committee and help advance its goals?
(4) Would the candidate further thought leadership and innovation within AFCEA, to include involvement with other AFCEA Committee efforts?

When I was elected not long after leaving government service and going back to the tech industry, I wrote here about the Committee’s history and prominence, and that I was “honored to be elected” to this “prestigious collection of some of the smartest minds in that field.” I was tempted to respond then with William F. Buckley’s great line from his quixotic and unsuccessful Mayoral campaign in New York City in 1965, when he was asked what his first act would be if elected: “Demand a recount!”

Once again, here’s that link to the application site. Good luck!

How I Use Tech and Media during the Pandemic

My friend and longtime colleague (back to ancient days in a leading intelligence agency) Bob Gourley now leads CTOvision and a consulting firm OODA LLC, and is widely known as a leading global voice on tech trends. He recently launched a video/podcast series “OODAcast” to fill our days and nights with commentary on “Hot Topics in Enterprise IT and Business Risk,” and I was flattered to be asked to participate.

Here’s the video of Part I of our conversation (there’s a second half forthcoming). But if you don’t want to suffer through a half-hour of me bloviating, below I have provided a few excerpts and annotations on topics I mention, so you can skim below instead 🙂

 

4:20 – We begin with the role of technology in government and public policy, including today’s COVID-19 crisis and back in the early atomic era (referencing Einstein and Oppenheimer)

From 6:20 – Discussion of how to deal with information overload amid the COVID-19. I discuss maximizing “the positive side” of easy access to enormous data via the Internet: “there continue to be what fully existed before the Internet era, and that is a wealth of trusted, branded, curated sources of edited news. I have a lot of respect for the role of editor… the smartest person on campus was the editor of that paper, and he corrected a lot of mistakes that I made.” That editor of The Cavalier Daily at the University of Virginia whom I refer to was Woody Holton, who predictably went on to become a highly regarded historian and writer.

At 9:00 – I mention being the sole home-delivery subscriber to the print-edition New York Times in my rural Essex County, Virginia, along with contrasts of online news sources and social media sources. (I should mention here that working from home for me has always been easy, in part because my company VMware has been enabling virtual remote-work long before the pandemic.)

10:45 – I discuss the comparison of two versions, online and print, of a NY Times information visualization of the origins and spread of the novel coronavirus in 2019-2020. The online version is here, while below are some clips of the print version, on the front page and across two interior double-page-spreads:

13:40 – I refer to the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and its “COVID-19 and AI, A Virtual Conference,” which is described and video-archived here.  I’ll also recommend from ACM, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, its new comprehensive guide “to conference organizers suddenly facing the need to move their conference online in light of the social distancing recommendations and global restrictions on travel.”

15:40 – I describe my use of curated Twitter Lists. At Bob’s urging, I have opened up several of my curated “private” lists (see below for links to follow them, but I’ve kept my best and most exotic Lists locked for now):

• AI People (142 accounts)
• US Politics/Government (245 accounts)
• UK Politics/Government (75 accounts)
• Top R&D Orgs (23 accounts)
• SCOTUS, US Supreme Court news (41 accounts)
• China Topics (87 accounts)
• Russia Topics (52 accounts)

18:35 – Discussion of using LinkedIn for “authentication and validation of who’s posting what you’re looking at… you wind up becoming as nimble as an HR professional at assessing the credibility of people based on their track record, background and online resume… Especially in this period where everybody’s working remotely I notice that the volume of posting on LinkedIn has really grown.”

Your comments on the discussion are welcome below, and stay tuned for Part II….

 

 

 

My Telework Tool Tally

Today’s Tuesday, April 7, and I’ve been working from home almost entirely for some three-plus weeks now. (VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger began our company-wide work-from-home on March 14; and my advisory office inside a DoD agency went “strongly-encouraged remote work” not long after.) So far this week alone, on just Monday and Tuesday, I’ve had the following virtual meetings:

5 Zoom (Enterprise)
1 Zoom Government (CAC-enabled, FEDRAMP-cloud hosted)
1 Google Hangout
1 MS Teams
2 VMware Horizon virtualizing Skype for Business
1 Ubiety
1 GoToWebinar
1 WebEx
2 Phone conference calls (one coordinated/scheduled via Calendly)

I can live with any of them, though of course quality varies, including within the meeting. Users hunt for mute/unmute buttons and other controls, with no consistency across the platforms – it reminds me of the ancient days learning different bold and underline commands in WordStar and WordPerfect 🙂

Admittedly like most people my favorite feature is the Zoom virtual background; and while I haven’t gone to as much trouble as some of my friends in Palo Alto and elsewhere who have deployed home-office green-screens and photoshopped fancy memes, I’ve been having bipartisan fun switching between these two this week:

 

 

It’s worth noting, perhaps, that while several of my Zoom “enterprise” meetings and both of the conference calls were internal corporate ones, all the rest included government colleagues, i.e. officials at one or another U.S. government agency – typically with the Defense Department or Intelligence Community. In a few cases they were participating from inside their regular offices, but the majority of them were working from home.

And we got a lot done! But there will be social reverberations. To quote Shakespeare via Aldous Huxley, “O brave new world…”

 

About the Other Intelligence Leadership Opening

Yes, the news is abuzz with leadership turnover in the Intelligence Community. Wait – not that news about outgoing DNI Dan Coats, the important news: it’s time for applications to the prestigious AFCEA International Intelligence Committee, the premier outside body of experts and insiders, government officials and business/academic leaders, who oversee the intelligence-related activities of the 32,000+ member organization.

Private-sector applicants for four-year terms can apply at this link. (Hurry! You have only a week till the deadline, midnight August 5, 2019.)  You can do the application in under an hour, not burdensome – no college transcripts 🙂

Where else in DC can you engage with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, hackathons on national security, and the leaders of the national-security community? My own tenure on the Committee has been fantastically fun and enlightening – and I hope helpful to AFCEA and the government agencies we advise and support. When I joined, our Committee’s Chair was the IC legend Maureen “Mo” Baginski, career NSA and FBI senior leader; and I’ve been honored to serve as vice-chair to her two successors in that seat, former DIA Director VADM Jake Jacoby, and current chair former head of Army Intelligence LTG Bob Noonan. Leaders from the world’s biggest defense/intelligence contractors are members, as well as successful startup leaders in the nat-sec space. We benefit from active emeritus members who continue to participate like CIA’s legendary Charlie Allen and the world’s preeminent scholar of intelligence Mark “Jeopardy Champion” Lowenthal.

You must have an active TS/SCI clearance, as many of our activities and conferences are classified. And the application weighs heavily on your career track record. We especially encourage applicants diverse in origin, gender, race, background, skills, and outlook —to reflect the nation as a whole and the diversity of the intelligence mission itself, and to break chains of old thinking and get crackling new ideas on tomorrow’s most significant topics.  

In considering applicants during the selection process, these are the primary precepts we keep in mind when we consider applicants:
(1) Would the candidate further Committee efforts to build bridges between industry and the government/military? And have the contacts to do so?
(2) Would the candidate enhance AFCEA’s reputation with the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense?
(3) Would the candidate likely be someone willing to actively engage with the Committee and help advance its goals?
(4) Would the candidate further thought leadership and innovation within AFCEA, to include involvement with other AFCEA Committee efforts?

A key element in the Committee’s success is close ties with the Intelligence Community’s and the military services’ intelligence and cybersecurity organizations, the ability to reach into those organizations with current contacts and the relationships permitting direct interface with leadership.  These are key to high-content industry days, quiet advisory engagement at the government’s request, speakers for meetings and the regular engagements that keep AFCEA Intelligence in the fore in their planning.  We have Committee members who have been in the forefront of these efforts who are rotating off the Committee or have rotated off in recent years, and we encourage recently retired senior civilian leaders and military members as well to apply.

When I was elected not long after leaving government service and going back to the tech industry, I wrote here about the Committee’s history and prominence, and that I was “honored to be elected” to this “prestigious collection of some of the smartest minds in that field.” I was tempted to respond then with William F. Buckley’s great line from his quixotic and unsuccessful Mayoral campaign in New York City in 1965, when he was asked what his first act would be if elected: “Demand a recount!”

Once again, here’s that link to the application site. Good luck!

 

 

 

 

Deep Dive on AI and National Security

Although the day is very nearly sold-out, I’m told there’s a ticket or two still available for tomorrow’s Intelligence & National Security Summit “Classified Day,” the follow-on to last week’s multi-day unclassified sessions in DC. (For a good summary of last week see “Four Key Takeaways from the 2018 Intelligence and National Security Summit.”)

If you are able to make Wednesday’s session, at NGA Headquarters, you’ll see me interview Sue Gordon, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, one-on-one to kick off the TS/SCI day, followed by several in-depth threat briefs from the leadership of the National Intelligence Council.

But – my favorite – you’ll get to hear a high-intelligence-wattage panel I’m moderating on “Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning and Machine Augmentation.” When we began planning that panel, I hoped to achieve representation from Academia’s research world, the Intelligence Community, DoD’s increasingly energetic AI sector, and from leading Industry – not a simple task given the classification level. Shockingly, we scored on all four corners of the national security landscape. Here’s that panel:

• Matthew Gaston, Director, Emerging Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI)
• Dean Souleles, Chief Technology Advisor, ODNI
• Richard Linderman, Deputy Director of Research and Engineering for Information & Cyber Systems, DoD
• Thomas Reed, Senior Director, Solution Architect, NVIDIA

Full agenda is here, and you can read here more about the Classified Day overall, including last-minute directions if you can make it and we still let you in!

Building the Next Great Virtual Machine

I have a great new job, allowing me to spend several weeks recently in the center of the universe, and I’m loving it. I’m going to spend even more time there from now on.

By that I mean Palo Alto, Silicon Valley’s capital and VMware HQ, where I am now Senior Director, National Technology Strategy, working primarily with the R&D team. But I can’t help putting that “Valley capital” term in a bit of historical context. Back in ancient times (late ’80s-early ’90s) when I worked for the Mayor of San Jose, S. J. City Hall was dealing with a bit of civic insecurity. Although San Jose’s population was already larger than San Francisco and now the tenth largest city in the country, our mayor (my boss Tom McEnery, the first government leader ever elected to the Silicon Valley Business Hall of Fame) believed that we needed to brand the city explicitly as “The Capital of Silicon Valley.” So that became a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign, and we punched the message home every chance we got.

Yet as the mayor’s policy adviser and speechwriter, I laughed each time I used the phrase. I had just moved to San Jose from Palo Alto, where I got a graduate degree at Stanford. Just twenty miles up Highway 101, Palo Alto had much better claim to being the center of the geographically hazy electronics domain. I knew the arguments we used in San Jose (see here for example). But I also had already met Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in person in Palo Alto, and had walked many times on the sidewalk by the legendary garage at 367 Addison where HP was born in the late 1930s; and I had also seen a different historic marker four blocks from the garage, at the corner of Channing and Emerson, commemorating Palo Alto’s very first electronics startup – Federal Telegraph Company, founded in 1909.

Palo Alto itself has spawned thousands of startups for many many decades, and it never stopped. Fast forward to the turn of the millenium just 20 years ago, when Microsoft and Amazon were trying to shift attention to Seattle/Redmond, Palo Alto struck back and fostered yet another legendary Valley startup: VMware – now my new home. Here’s the origin context for VMware, from an official history of Stanford Research Park:

It can be said that one of the cornerstones of Silicon Valley was laid when Varian Associates broke ground as Stanford Research Park’s first company in 1951. The Stanford Industrial Park, as it was first called, was the brainchild of Stanford University’s Provost and Dean of Engineering, Frederick Terman, who saw the potential of a University-affiliated business park that focused on research and development and generated income for the University and community.

Dean Terman envisioned a new kind of collaboration, where Stanford University could join forces with industry and the City of Palo Alto to advance shared interests. He saw the Park’s potential to serve as a beacon for new, high-quality scientists and faculty, provide jobs for University graduates, and stimulate regional economic development.

In the 1950s, leaders within the City of Palo Alto and Stanford University forged a seminal partnership by creating Stanford Research Park, agreeing to annex SRP lands into the City of Palo Alto to generate significant tax revenues for the County, City, and Palo Alto Unified School District.

Throughout our history, an incredible number of breakthroughs have occurred in Stanford Research Park. Here, Varian developed the microwave tube, forming the basis for satellite technology and particle accelerators. Its spin-off, Varian Medical, developed radiation oncology treatments, medical devices and software for medical diagnostics. Steve Jobs founded NeXT Computer, breaking ground for the next generation of graphics and audio capabilities in personal computing. Hewlett-Packard developed electronic measuring instruments, leading to medical electronic equipment, instrumentation for chemical analysis, the mainframe computer, laser printers and hand-held calculators. At Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), innovations such as personal work stations, Ethernet cabling and the personal computer mouse were invented. Lockheed’s space and missile division developed critical components for the International Space Station. Mark Zuckerberg grew Facebook’s social networking platform from 20 million to 750 million people worldwide while its headquarters were in the Park.

Today, Tesla’s electric vehicle and battery prototypes are developed and assembled here in its headquarters. Our largest tenant, VMware, continues to create the virtualization hardware and software solutions they pioneered, leading the world in cloud computing. With over 150 companies in 10 million square feet and 140 buildings, Stanford Research Park maintains a world-class reputation.

source: Stanford Research Park, “About Us”

In the summer of 2017, I got an email from a former Microsoft research colleague and one of the most eminent leaders in American technology R&D, David Tennenhouse. David has held key leadership roles in dream positions over the past quarter-century – everyone has wanted him on their team. He was Chief Scientist at DARPA; a research professor at MIT; President of Amazon’s R&D arm A9; VP & Director of Research at Intel; a senior leader in Microsoft’s Advanced Strategy and Research division. Smart companies have wooed him in serial fashion. Now David is VMware Chief Research Officer building and leading a stellar team, and over several months into 2018 we had some great conversations about where VMware had been and was going, and what I could bring to that journey. I had a chance to speak with several of the dozens of Ph.D.s he has been hiring to flesh out a comprehensive R&D agenda. I excitedly joined recently and we’ve been off to the races.

For a 20-year-old startup, the company’s growing like gangbusters (the stock market obviously still loves it), and it ranks high every year on lists of Best Employers. But what really attracted me was the stress on R&D and innovation culture, driving an unbelievably ambitious vision. I had always been impressed by VMware’s early virtualization technology; at DIA we were pioneering federal customers fifteen years ago, and wound up using it as a foundation of what would become our private cloud infrastructure. But VMware scientists and research engineers took virtualization much further, with abstraction becoming almost addictively popular. After the server and the OS were virtualized, so was storage, and then networks, and then the data center itself. Now our research agenda is energetically broad, across the following areas:

In fact, any large complex orchestration of resources, hardware, and processes may actually be just the next big virtual machine. We intend to build it, with disruptively great software. In 2011, web pioneer and Netscape cofounder Marc Andreesen wrote a famous manifesto in the Wall Street Journal, “Why Software is Eating the World”:

“More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.”

That’s why I smiled last month, just after joining VMware, when our CEO Pat Gelsinger rebuffed talk of him moving to Intel as that company’s new CTO. He began his career at Intel, was its first-ever CTO and the father of the fabled -486 processor. But today he’s virtualizing the world’s computational resources, and Pat tweeted his response to a CNBC anchor’s comments about the Intel CEO job: “I love being CEO of VMware and not going anywhere else. The future is software!”

I still intend to live in Virginia and work closely with DC government friends and colleagues on research, reflecting the Valley’s traditionally close working  partnership with the federal government. In fact, if you’re in a government position and are wondering “What’s going on inside VMware Research labs?” – drop me a line 🙂