Most enterprise CTOs are very interested in the “cloud” and ways to tap into cloud-based resources.   An interesting aspect of this discussion has been how to access the cloud while on the move.   Today’s cellular networks support that access today, and future enhancements are making that support even better and much much faster.

How much faster? I’ll try to put that in context in this post.

Early 3G networks had a download speed of 384kbits per second and an upload speed of 192Kbits per second.  The wireless router you might have in your home, by contrast, might have a speed of 54Mbits per second.  So, about 140 times faster.

But the 3G networks in place today use new transmission algorithms that enable much faster throughput.  Here is a little more context from vendor pages:.

Verizon asserts their broadband access, based on CDMA2000 1x EVDO (Code Division Multiple Access Evolution-Data Only) provides download speeds of up to 1.4Mbits/s and uploads of up to 800kbits/s.

AT&T is leveraging its GPRS technology called EDGE to deliver higher speeds than Verizon’s.  AT&T’s EDGE delivers speeds of around 1.7Mbits/s and upload of around 1.2Mbits/s.  AT&T also claims that their new protocols (HSDPA/UMTS, for High Speed Downlink Packet Access/Universal Mobile Telephone System) makes it possible to make use of more services and credit this with their ability to let you talk and use the Internet at the same time.

Sprint asserts that its broadband cards delivery 350-500kbps but then say you might get a peak of 3.1Mbps.  I wonder if or how often that happens.  Sprint also claims that they “lead the way with 4G” and in many ways they seem to be the pioneers here, but they might be defining that term differently than others.  Clearly their offering of EVO is revolutionary, it is an incredible device (look for reviews elsewhere on our site).  Sprint’s system, which is fast at an advertised .5 to 1.5 Mbps uplink (and peak uplinks at up to 5 Mbps (another source said peak can be 12 Mbps)), is very fast but still no where near the speed I think of when I think 4G.

Really 4G refers to the fourth generation of cellular wireless standards.  I consider 4G to be IP-packet-switched networks operating at gigabit speed for access.  Most in the field consider WiMAX and LTE (Long term evolution cell) as pre-4G or sometimes 3.5G.

What’s coming next:

A key emerging protocol is HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access).  HSDPA is sometimes called 3.5G.  This protocol is in the HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) family and allows download of up to 14.4Mbits/s download and 5.8Mbits/s upload.   Now this is getting interesting.

HSPA+ allows speeds of up to 42Mbits/s.  This is almost what you would expect to see in your home wireless LAN.  The next step is a project called Long Term Evolution.  This LTE will start with providing 150Mbits/s to handheld devices and soon thereafter expect protocols and algorithms to increase that up to 1gig of bits per second to your mobile device.

When will these new protocols and speeds be available to consumers?  The answer is, the best roadmaps I have seen are all tightly held insider views, but if you look at what is being rolled out right now we should expect a continuing stream of announcements that brings the timing of these new protocols more into focus.   Public information show many vendors moving to the first version of LTE by 2011.  Sprint’s very fast WiMax and cell is available in many urban areas today and will hopefully spread fast.

So, brace yourself for the innovation that will drive in the devices that connect to the cloud through cellular.

For more on 4G I recommend wikipedia at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G

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I am so proud to be associated with Twiki.  Some of the personal reasons I enjoy working with them is an ability to interact with and learn from their CEO Jitendra Kavathekar (@JeetKavathekar) and their founder Peter Thoeny (@peterthoeny).  Both are enthusiastic teacher/leader/thinkers.  I also appreciate the opportunity to work with members of the advisory board they have established.  Rod Beckstrom (@RodBeckstrom), Dion Hinchcliffe (@dhinchcliffe) and Bob Flores (@bobflores) are good, enjoyable, mission-focused folks.

But Twiki is about far more than good technology and enjoyable technologists.  It is about a new ability to serve some very important missions in industry, academia and government and many important missions that span across all those domains.

Which is why I’m particularly excited about word of Twiki winning the Disaster Management Initiative (DMI) award for Gov2.0 solutions.  It is proof that there is something very important going on here.

Here is more about this award:

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I have a thesis I would like to try on you.

In the IT world, like in many other human endeavors, the things that get measured get improved. And the things that don’t get measured are easy to ignore.  So, when the world’s largest IT enterprise (the US federal government) starts measuring IT differently we need to take note.

Specifically the feds will be improving the measurement of energy efficiencies of IT.  This will be done to meet goals mandated by an executive order that President Obama signed on 5 October 2009 titled “FEDERAL LEADERSHIP IN ENVIRONMENTAL, ENERGY, AND ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE”.

See: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/President-Obama-signs-an-Executive-Order-Focused-on-Federal-Leadership-in-Environmental-Energy-and-Economic-Performance

Agencies will no longer be able to ignore the cost of energy for their IT.  The Federal Government will be required to lead by example in IT efficiency.  Agencies are required to promote electronics stewardship, acquire energy efficient IT, enable IT power management, and implement best management practices for energy-efficient management of servers and Federal data centers.

What is the “so-what” here?

In most cases in the federal government, the agency CIO does not have to share in the energy bill. The CIO gets energy for free.  So energy costs have never been a driver in CIO decisions.  Now, even if CIOs do not have to pay for energy, they are going to be measured by energy efficiencies.  This will give them more reason to modernize.   By selecting newer multi-core servers and newer storage devices (like Solid State Disk (SSD)), dramatic energy efficiencies can be gained in ways that also dramatically increase performance.  They will also be encouraged to virtualize more, and will also be encouraged to build in more collaborative technologies that let humans interact across great distances.  All this will increase performance.

So now we get to the “so-what” of my thesis.  Saving energy in IT requires modernization.  And modernization also improves performance.  So we all win! We save energy, reduce pollution, and improve IT performance!

Do you buy that thesis?

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I’ve mentioned before that I run my small business, Crucial Point LLC, primarily by leveraging cloud computing capabilities. With this post I’ll mention a book that helped me do that: Google Apps: The Missing Manual.

This book does a great job at capturing the core functionality of Google Apps. However, no book can keep up with the capabilities and features of the Google Apps suite.  In cloud computing, features can be developed and fielded fast, and since Google intentionally invests in driving more and more features, a continuing stream of announcements on new functionality has occurred since I bought this book.

That said, the Manual is full of tips, techniques, suggestions and guidance for making the most of your Google Apps that remains very relevant.  Whether you are a user of the free personal/educational/non-profit editions or a business users these are very powerful tools and a book like this can help you think through ways to transform your workflow.

I’d recommend the book to anyone thinking about making the switch to cloud computing.  I should also point out that they give away some great free content from the book online at Amazon, right in the book review. For example, the following list of tips:

QUOTE:

Top 14 Google Docs Tricks

1. If you install Google Gears (http://gears.google.com/), you can edit Docs word-processing documents offline, and Docs automatically syncs them with the online version the next time you sign in online.

2. If you make other folks collaborators on Docs documents and spreadsheets, everyone can work on the files simultaneously. To invite collaborators, head to the upper-right Share button (for documents) or Share tab (for spreadsheets).

3. It’s a snap to publish documents created in Docs as blog posts—just select “Publish as web page” from the Share menu, and then click the “Post to blog” button.

4. If you want to embed a Docs presentation in a Web site, just go to the Publish tab, click “Publish document”, and then copy the HTML that appears in the Mini Presentation Module box. Paste the code into your site’s HTML, upload the revised version of the site, and voilà!

5. Google gives you a whole slew of functions to help make working with spreadsheets more efficient. For the complete list, go to www.docs.google.com/support/spreadsheets. (The GoogleLookup function is particularly nifty.)

6. If your Docs list is getting cluttered, you can hide files (documents, spreadsheets, or presentations) to keep your list clean. Just turn on the checkbox next to any file you want to hide (you can select more than one), and then click the Hide button. To make a hidden file reappear, find All Items in the left-hand menu and, if necessary, click its + sign to expand it. Then click Hidden to see your hidden files; select the one(s) you want to see in your Docs list, and then click Unhide.

7. You can easily turn spreadsheet data into all kinds of charts: column, bar, pie, line, area, or scatter. To create a chart, open your spreadsheet to the Edit tab, select the range of cells you want to convert into a chart, and then click the “Add chart” button. In the Create Chart box that appears, tell Docs what kind of chart you want to create and fill in the other info it needs, and then click “Save chart.”

8. If you create a chart based on a Docs spreadsheet, you can save it as an image and insert it into a Docs document. After you create your chart, click its upper-left Chart link and select “Save image”. Save it to your computer, and then open the document you want to put it in. Click Insert and select Image, then tell Docs where to find the file on your computer.

9. If you don’t like a change that you (or someone else) made to one of your Docs files, no problem. Just head to that file’s revision history (click File and then choose “Revision history”) and pick a previous version that you like better.

10. If you’re working on a computer that doesn’t have Adobe Reader and you need to print a document, click Share and select “View as web page (Preview)” to open the formatted document as a Web page. You can then print it from your Web browser. The formatting isn’t quite as good as if you print from a PDF—and you’ll probably have the browser’s header and footer—but all the content is there.

11. If you’ve published a Docs document as a Web page, you can make the Web page update automatically whenever you edit the document. Just click Share and select “Publish as web page”; then turn on the “Automatically republish when changes are made” checkbox.

12. To see how your Docs document will look to folks you share it with, click the Share This Document page’s “Preview document as a viewer” link. If the preview doesn’t look quite right, then go back and edit the document before you share it.

13. You can add YouTube videos to your Docs presentations. In the blue bar above the edit pane, click “Insert video”. Google opens a box where you can search YouTube videos by keyword. Find the one you want and click it to select it. Then click the Insert Video button to put the video on your slide. Once it’s there, you can move, resize, or delete it, just like any image or shape. During a slideshow, viewers can play the video by clicking the Play button on its slide.

14. When you’ve got several collaborators editing the same document all at once, have each person choose a different color for his text to help sort out who made what changes. (The simplest thing is to have each person use the same text and highlight color.) Then, when you finalize the document, simply select the whole thing and click the “Text color” button to change the rainbow of text colors to basic black.

UNQUOTE

The Amazon review also provides a list of the “Top 10 Cool Things about Gmail” and “11 Ways to Save Time with Google Apps.”

You can find many other user-focused books on Cloud Computing, but in my opinion, Google Apps: The Missing Manual remains the best.

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I previously mentioned the DoDIIS Worldwide Conference, which was held 17-21 May 2009.  I took lots of notes from the conference: enough, in fact, to fuel this blog for a long long time.  My associate Ryan Kamauff took even more (and more relevant) notes on the sessions there, and both of us kicked the tires on as many technology demos as we could.  This was a great education for us and the many other atendees there. I was also allowed to give a presentation at the conference (see: Five Megatrends in Enterprise IT).  Overall it was really a great time.

The following is a run down of some of the more salient parts of the conference.

Presentations were given by:

* Grant Schneider, DoDIIS CIO
* LTG Ron Burgess, DIA Director
* Ms. Sherrill Nicely, ODNI CIO
* Dr. Prescott Winter, ODNI ADDNI for Information Integration
* MG John Custer, CG, USA Intelligence Center
* Ms. Lauren States, IBM Cloud Computing director
* Mr. Mark Bregman, Symantec CTO
* Mr. Marlin Forbes, Verizon Federal
* RADM Tom Atkin, US Coast Guard
* Mr. Kurt Rao, CIO, Time Warner
* Mr. Bill Vass, COO Sun Federal
* Panels including all intelligence community CIOs and several senior customers were also held.

Our views of the most relevant/actionable information:

LTG Burgess very clearly demonstrated his strong support for and high expectations for the IT components of the enterprise, but he also laid down some requirements for the current team to achieve. He expects the mission to be served with highly reliable IT. And he expects that will be done in a way that does not give DIA customers “headaches.” DIA and the IT it provides is supposed to speed up mission success not slow it down (when customers touch DIA networks it should be “Like race time at Talladega”). He expects DoDIIS to deliver timely intelligence (“Intelligence without communications is nothing more than history”). He also expects DoDIIS to be in a mission support role. DoDIIS is to enable and support the mission. He reminded us all that he does not know the future but for planning purposes he believes FY11-15 will be an age of flat lines in the budget. “Not everyone will get what they want, but the mission will get what it needs– deployed in an enterprise style.”

Grant Schneider hit three themes hard: creating a change environment, moving DoDIIS forward to meet this change, and decreasing time to market for DoDIIS IT. Grant wishes to have an environment in DoDIIS that welcomes a change from the current policies. He also mentioned the movement towards “Green IT”. He underscored several other important capabilities, including the need for cross domain solutions and the need for collaborative tools. He established three focus areas for 2009: customer service excellence, enhanced requirements planning/management processes, and decreased time to market.  Upon closing of the conference Grant returned to many of these same themes, and also underscored that social networking is going to be driving much of the communication in the enterprise.

MG Custer provided one of the most exciting presentations of the conference. It was a very technology focused presentation that hit on the complex dynamic between the acceleration of technology and the need for customers to drive requirements. He is a clear believer that innovation on the edge should drive the systems we use, the architectures we employ and the methodologies we utilize on the battlefield. MG Custer provided thoughts on how DIA DS could better serve, and he did so in a way that made many of us think he was not getting responses to his needs in formal channels. Areas he said could use more DIA attention include:

• Designate GISA as Army JWICS regional support center (RSC)
• Develop cross-fertilization exchange program between GISA and RSCs
• Develop personnel exchange between G2 and DS
• Eliminate agendas and ‘not invented here’ syndrome
• MOA to establish battle hand-off between G2 and DIA

General Custer also showed the audience a YouTube video I reported on at this site (see:  http://ctovision.com/2009/03/you-really-have-to-see-this-from-mit-media-lab ).

Many speakers hit on common themes of the need for enhanced data sharing, the need for smarter data center strategies, the need for continual work in cross domain solutions (and smarter networks), the need for rapid implementation of ICD501, and the need to be able to share the results of programs and projects from elsewhere in the community. Speakers hit on the fact that A-Space is a positive thing but still pretty much limited to a small number of beltway analysts (J-space is coming and should be more broadly applied). Other speakers hit on the need to improve the acquisition processes.

The need for continual work in cross-domain solutions is particularly noteworthy. Progress has been made in many fronts regarding cross domain, and the government has done smart things like establish cross-domain management offices to help bring focus to this area. However, in some ways the establishment of cross-domain management offices and the regulations that come with it have actually introduced challenges regarding innovation. The government has focused so hard on reducing cross-domain solutions and narrowing the set of capabilities that new capabilities are very hard to introduce.

Technology themes during the conference mirror the technology themes elsewhere in the IT world: Virtualization, Storage, Cloud Computing, Open Source and Security were all key topics.

This conference informed our thoughts on high interested technology and was a fantastic opportunity to connect with old friends.  Thanks DoDIIS friends for letting me attend.

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What do you think of when you hear the word Adobe?  Many folks immediately think of the open standard Portable Document Format (PDF) that was created by Adobe Systems for document exchange.   PDFs are everywhere and so is Adobe’s free PDF readers, so it is commonly the first thing that comes to mind.

But things have been changing fast in that company and the dramatic changes they kicked off in the digital publishing world in the 1990′s are being duplicated in the collaboration, content management and application development worlds.  This post provides a few opinions on those areas.

(NOTE:  As a disclaimer, I’d like you to know I really like Adobe and act as an adviser to them from time to time.  I’m proud of my bias towards them, but if you need to make decisions I encourage you to check them out yourself- which all good CTOs would do anyway!).

Collaboration:

• I’m not sure what the largest single collaborative environment is, but a contender must be Defense Connect Online.  DCO has about 150,000 registered users and does about 20 million meetings per month.  This system scales well.  DCO is based on Adobe’s flaship collaboration tool, Adobe Connect.  Connect works via your web browser.   It is built to leverage the Adobe Flash player that is probably already in every browser you have.   It provides well thought out web conferencsing, eLearning, web seminars, document sharing, application sharing, video and of course audio.   There are a couple varieties of Connect.  And, if you have a small firm like mine, there is an online version you can use for free at acrobat.com (see my previous post on “The New Acrobat.com vs The New Acrobat Connect“).
• By the way, this post was drafted using Connect’s collaborative capabilities, and I used Acrobat.com to ask some friends to check it out before going final.
• So, Adobe has built a collaborative tool that has been proven to meet the needs of the smallest and largest groups.

Content Management:

• Adobe continues to enhance Adobe Acrobat and many other capabilities related to content creation, development, dissemination and rights.  PDFs can now contain 3D renderings, videos and all sorts of other content.  The Army sends GeoPDF DVDs to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan already, and many advanced 3D modeling and mission rehearsal capabilities are provided right in PDFs now.  Flash and Flex can also be used in PDFs (see section below on Application Development).
• Adobe’s enterprise class content management and business process system is Adobe LiveCycle.  LiveCycle and PDF together have a comprehensive solution for solving many content deployment issues including security, accountability and need to share.  LiveCycle provides an end to end solution for creating, editing and sending info forward to others using defined policies where there can be confidence in the identity of senders, the authentication of the receiver, the authorization of their user, the logging/auditing of their activity, and the enablement of their offline use.
• LiveCycle enables workflow development and deployment that goes across boundaries in your organization, as well as to other organizations outside your firewall (customers, suppliers, clients, users, employees).   LiveCycle software is a server based solution that blends data capture, information assurance, document output, process management and content services to help create and deliver applications.
• Adobe also builds in enhanced document security for information sharing and content management. Imagine having information you provide to a customer and then when you want to remove that customers ability to read that info, for what ever reason, you do so. Or you give info to a customer or external partner and want to limit who else can see it. That can be done as well, which, although this sounds counter to information sharing guidance, actually will increase the amount of info that can be shared, since now there will be less fear of compromise.

Application Development:

• For years, Adobe has provided web developers with capabilities for rapidly developing and fielding applications to any user with a browser.  Flash has an incredibly low barrier to entry and low cost of deployment and low total cost of ownership.
• But Adobe now provides development solutions that are changing things in even more positive ways.  Adobe Air, for example, allows developers to use the same skills they learn in web development to field desktop applications.   It is a runtime environment that lets developers build rich Internet applications that run outside the browser in multiple operating systems. Adobe Flex is a free open source framework for enterprise applications that is based on the same application development and deployment principles as Air– Flex dramatically accelerates the ability to deploy applications in an enterprise (I have built Flex applications myself- it is really easy to work through examples and tutorials provided in the SDK).
• While on the topic of application development I should mention the fact that there is no such thing as perfect code. Even code you write might need to be updated or patched one day to deal with a new threat. So, even good code like those provided by Adobe needs a good management system in place to ensure it is well maintained and, when required, patched.

The “So-What” for CTOs:

• Adobe has adopted a philosophy of being able to work with every other capability in the IT stack. So if you are using Sharepoint or Oracle Fusion Middleware or Java or Endeca or whatever else, Adobe is likely going to work just fine.
• It is certainly ok to think of PDF when you think of Adobe.  It is a great, open format.  But think also of the other great enterprise-class capabilities they are providing.
• Stand by for change.  We IT folks are used to change.  But Adobe is helping kick off change that goes far beyond the IT department.  When users are empowered with capabilities like these they quickly learn that they can band together to serve the mission in ways that their bosses never predicted.  This can produce significant workflow changes.  User empowerment is coming, and once this revolution gets underway it will set off second order requirements we should be anticipating now:  like the need for always on five-nines comms to every device everywhere.  No one is going to want to be disconnected ever again.  Tolerance of IT department performance “issues” will become lower and lower and lower.
• Stand by for faster application development/deployment.  Imagine deploying applications in a third the time you used to.
• Get ready for new ways to empower decision-makers.  For example, consider using these content management systems to create dynamic dashboards for decision-makers.  A dashboard that auto-synchs with a server can provide decision-makers with always updated information.

Concluding Thoughts:

There are some big moves afoot in the enterprise IT world. Enterprises everywhere, including, the federal enterprise, are making pushes to be more open and transparent on items that should be open and more secure and protected on items that need to be kept private. These mega trends are important factors that will keep driving IT forward. Adobe seems well positioned to serve as these trends continue.

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Today’s news on Vivek Kundra’s role in the federal space made me think of another CTO, Yuvi Kochar. Yuvi, the CTO of the Washington Post, is a great connector of CTOs who leads the informal collective of the Washington Area CTO Roundtable.  Although I had heard Vivek speak a time or two, the first really deep interactions I had with Vivek were through Yuvi’s work in service to the tech community and I much appreciate that.

For a quick update on Vivek from a CTO perspective see:

Vivek Kundra: The Alpha CTO - My interview of Vivek

Federal Government Technology Directions and the Fed CTO – A pointer to tech work of the transition team.

Vivek Kundra: Democratizing Data and Putting it in the Public Domain – Some comments on Apps for Democracy.

The Technology Implications of the Obama Win - Megatrends, including some driven by Vivek.

So, congrats Vivek.  Your country wishes you well and we all appreciate your service.  We look forward to a more widespread use of your models and methods and look forward to more delivery of services to our citizens.

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Carahsoft is a fantastic company in Reston, VA run by the hardest working, most modest, ethical, business leader I have ever met.   His behind the scenes style means he would probably not want me to mention much more about him, but if I have your curiosity up about them you can read more here (read the one about their winning the Smart CEO magazine Future 50 in Jan 2009, or Fairfax County economic development authority award for 2009, or other award after award after award).

One thing I like about Carahsoft is their desire to help government customers think through hard problems and their desire to help their extended team mates and partners learn about customer hard problems so enterprise solutions can be developed.  One of the many ways Carahsoft does that is by hosting venue like the Intelligence Community Executive Forum (ICEF).  This periodic venue brings together executives and thought leaders from government and industry to listen to lessons learned, hard problems and successes in creating CONOPs to address mission needs.

I’ll be helping Carahsoft with the next ICEF on 17 Feb 2009.   This one will focus on Web2.0, collaborative enterprise solutions and cloud computing capabilities like those provided by Adobe.   Panels will be held on topics like real-time collaboration, secure information sharing and Integration/web2.0.

Please check out the agenda and register if you can make it.   More info is here: http://www.intelligencecommunityexecutiveforum.com/

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On Wednesday 28 Jan 2009 at 10am Eastern I’ll be on CIO Talk Radio with one of the stars of the global technology community, Vint Cerf.

The topic we will be discussing is cloud computing and the next technology revolution in the US.  Vint is fantastically qualified to discuss this topic, and I’m honored to be sharing a microphone with him and look forward to learning from the interaction.  Every time I get the pleasure of interacting with Vint it ends up influencing me.  I hope to capture some of our interaction for future blog posts here at ctovision.com

Vint’s bio is incredible and I learn something every time I read it.  I’ve pasted it below.

But first more on CIO Talk Radio.  CIO Talk Radio is an Internet radio talk show, broadcasted live every Wednesday at 9:00 AM Central/ 10:00 AM Eastern, about how technology has changed and is changing the way we live our lives as well as do business.  Guests are business leaders, subject matter experts, and thought leader who are responsible for shaping the way we use technology. Visit the site at: http://ciotalkradio.com and click on LIVE BROADCAST to listen. A popup window will open and if you have Windows Media Player installed, in 10 – 15 seconds, you will listen to the live radio. In case of issues you may also open broadcasting station websites.  Call 866.472.5790 to ask questions during the live broadcast.

Now for that incredibly interesting bio:

Vint Cerf
Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google

Vinton G. Cerf has served as vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google since October 2005. In this role, he is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies to support the development of advanced, Internet-based products and services from Google. He is also an active public face for Google in the Internet world.

Cerf is the former senior vice president of Technology Strategy for MCI. Previously, Cerf served as MCI’s senior vice president of Architecture and Technology.

Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” Cerf is the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet. In December 1997, President Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to Cerf and his colleague, Robert E. Kahn, for founding and developing the Internet. Kahn and Cerf were named the recipients of the ACM Alan M. Turing award in 2004 (sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science”) for their work on the Internet protocols. In November 2005, President George Bush awarded Cerf and Kahn the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award given by the United States to its citizens. In April 2008, Cerf and Kahn received the prestigious Japan Prize.

Prior to rejoining MCI in 1994, Cerf was vice president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982-1986, he led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet.

During his tenure from 1976-1982 with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Cerf played a key role leading the development of Internet and Internet-related packet data and security technologies.

Vint Cerf served as chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000-2007. Cerf also served as founding president of the Internet Society from 1992-1995 and in 1999 served a term as chairman of the Board. In addition, Cerf is honorary chairman of the IPv6 Forum, dedicated to raising awareness and speeding introduction of the new Internet protocol. Cerf served as a member of the U.S. Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1997 to 2001 and serves on several national, state and industry committees focused on cyber-security. Cerf sits on the Board of Directors for the Endowment for Excellence in Education, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Advisory Committee and the Board of the Avanex Corporation. He also serves as 1st Vice President and Treasurer of the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation. Cerf is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the International Engineering Consortium, the Computer History Museum, the Annenberg Center for Communications at USC and the National Academy of Engineering.

Cerf is a recipient of numerous awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet. These include the Marconi Fellowship, Charles Stark Draper award of the National Academy of Engineering, the Prince of Asturias award for science and technology, the National Medal of Science from Tunisia, the St. Cyril and St. Methodius Order (Grand Cross) of Bulgaria, the Alexander Graham Bell Award presented by the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf, the NEC Computer and Communications Prize, the Silver Medal of the International Telecommunications Union, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal, the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award, the ACM Software and Systems Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the Computer and Communications Industries Association Industry Legend Award, installation in the Inventors Hall of Fame, the Yuri Rubinsky Web Award, the Kilby Award, the Rotary Club International Paul P. Harris Medal, the Joseph Priestley Award from Dickinson College, the Yankee Group/Interop/Network World Lifetime Achievement Award, the George R. Stibitz Award, the Werner Wolter Award, the Andrew Saks Engineering Award, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, the Computerworld/Smithsonian Leadership Award, the J.D. Edwards Leadership Award for Collaboration, World Institute on Disability Annual award and the Library of Congress Bicentennial Living Legend medal. Cerf was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in May 2006.

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