Bitcurrent

Networking, technology, and the web

Bitcurrent’s team and background

Bitcurrent is part blog, part analyst firm, and part resource site for web operations. We’re a loose federation of pundits and entrepreneurs with experience in networking and technology.

Alex Bowyer (14 posts)

Alex is Program Manager at startup accelerator Rednod (www.rednod.com), where he is responsible for technology research and special projects. Before Rednod, Alex was a software engineer at IBM UK’s Hursley Labs, working on web & voice technologies, Java, and information management solutions; Alongside product development, he pioneered new approaches to teamwork and collaboration, improving effectiveness through wikis, agile development, and user interviewing. He also co-hosted the internal “Productivity@IBM” podcast series.

Alex recently emigrated with his wife to Montréal, Canada, continuing his pursuit for travel and new experiences. When he’s not cooking up technology ideas or helping people be more productive in their work, Alex likes to go rock-climbing, camping and walking in the great outdoors. He’s also a big movie buff and loves cooking and swimming.

Alex has a software design & development background, with a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Sheffield and ten years’ experience in the software industry. As well as IBM UK he has also worked for Logica, Datawright (a small public sector software firm), and the West Australian Government. He holds patents in the field of database transaction integrity.

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Alistair Croll (117 posts)

Alistair covers emerging web technologies, networking, and online applications. Prior to Bitcurrent, Alistair co-founded Coradiant, a leader in online user monitoring, as well as research firm Networkshop. He has held product management positions with 3Com Corporation, Primary Access, and Eicon Technology.
Alistair contributes to industry events such as Interop and Web2Expo, and writes for a variety of online publications including GigaOm. He is the author of numerous articles on Internet performance and security, and co-author of Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Applications from Prentice-Hall.

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Chris Amen-Kroeger (0 posts)

Chris is an Internet technology executive with a strong background in Web Operations, SaaS application development, and streaming media. He is currently CTO at WeBot, a San Francisco based Internet media startup, which combines remote access to content with mobility and social networking.

Prior to Webot, Chris managed development and engineering for Sony Pictures’s user generated video site, Crackle (Grouper.com). Along with delivering streaming video, Crackle also integrated streaming video into televisions, gaming consoles, mobile devices and digital cameras. Chris has lead mission critical Web Operations teams for both enterprise and consumer applications from large data center environments. Prior to Sony, Chris deployed and managed one of the world’s largest software as a service applications - Salesforce.com. At AOL Chris’s team was responsible for one of the largest CDNs in the world. He also managed web operations for the AOL music properties including Spinner.com, Winamp.com and Shoutcast.com.

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Daniel Koffler (0 posts)

Daniel Koffler is a veteran technology consultant, writer and political wonk. With over 20 years of experience in the enterprise computing space, he has a strong background in monitoring, security and distributed application design. Dan is currently president of RSM Experts, a consulting and services company specializing in remote systems management and technology implementations. Daniel has several years experience as an industry analyst writing for publications such as Network Computing and the GigaOm Network, as well as performing due diligence assessments for several large Canadian V.C. firms.

Prior to RSM Experts, Dan led the server management team for Coradiant’s MSP business which was responsible for managing hundreds of customer servers distributed in datacenters across North America and Europe.

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Dave Asprey (4 posts)

Think of me as a CTO type who can make eye contact, knows how CIOs think, and likes negotiating deals. My career experience highlights strategic planning, product management and marketing, and business development, from startup to F500, for service providers, telcos, hardware, networking, software, CDN, cloud computing, and SaaS.

I started my career on the CIO path, which has made me particularly good at creating products and services that actually work in real IT environments. I have a Wharton MBA and studied MIS and CompSci in my undergrad at UCSB and CSU.

Selected career highlights:
I owned strategic planning for the $700m Citrix Virtualization business unit before they bought XenSource.
I was a founder of the Exodus Communications professional services group, which grew to 1500 employees.
I’ve been working on Utility Computing (aka cloud computing) for nearly 10 years. The first cloud product I launched was Managed Web Hosting at Exodus, an automated hosting provisioning and operations platform. The second was at Speedera (now Akamai), called Flex Computing, which allowed a server to be reprovisioned in 30 seconds. I also drove the Exodus partnership with Ejasent.
I launched Citrix’s first virtual desktop broker.
I have been responsible for due diligence on tech M&A deals ranging in value from $20m to $6 billion across hosting, MSP, networking, hardware, and software deals.
I am an advisor to several venture capital firms.
I ran the University of California’s (Santa Cruz) Web and Internet Engineering Certification program for 5 years, teaching classes to industry professionals several nights a week.
I have been an active brain hacker since about 1998 and have an extensive collection of technologies that can modify my brain function, and I take more than 100 nutritional supplements a day in a regimen carefully designed to keep my body - and mind - running at optimal levels.
I have a beautiful wife and baby daughter and two strangely colored dachshunds.

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Duncan Hill (5 posts)

Duncan is currently an Entrepreneur in Residence at Ventures West where he’s involved in identifying and evaluating software and IT investment opportunities.

Duncan was the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Think Dynamics, a developer of data center provisioning and automation software, which was acquired by IBM in May 2003. Think Dynamics has become an integral part of IBM’s Tivoli Group where Duncan served as Director of Strategy until June 2005 guiding market and technology strategy for Tivoli’s on demand automation software portfolio.

Prior to founding Think Dynamics, Duncan established a data center consulting practice that delivered enterprise systems architecture and management services to customers that included Virgin, Norwich Union, one2one, Millipore, ADP and Teleglobe in the UK, USA and Canada.

Duncan sits on the advisory boards of Cirba, Embotics and Opalis, and the Board of Directors of RapidMind.

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Hooman Beheshti (5 posts)

Hooman is a veteran of the load balancing and web acceleration market with over 12 years of experience in these and related technologies. As an expert in these markets, he has held positions as CTO of Radware Inc, and VP of Products and Technology for Crescendo Networks. In these capacities he has helped define and develop various load balancing and web acceleration products. He has also helped lead marketing and evangelism efforts for both the products and the technology itself. If you slit open one of his veins, load balancers will actually start flowing out, which is both impressive and sad. He holds a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California at Irvine.

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Ian Rae (7 posts)

Ian is the founder of Syntenic, an application infrastructure consulting and managed services provider, primarily concerned with the optimization of performance, uptime and costs associated with running 24×7 applications over the internet. Additionally Ian consults to both investors and startups involved in the application delivery space.

At Coradiant, Ian ran the engineering team which designed fully virtualized application delivery infrastructure for application hosting, long before virtualization was a hot topic. Previously, Ian was the CIO of Canderel Investments. Ian holds a B.Sc.Hon. from McGill University in his hometown of Montreal, Canada, where he plays ultimate frisbee to unwind, and blogs casually at Infreemation.

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Kamal Jain (1 post)

Kamal has 20 years’ experience running production applications in a variety of ASP and software-as-a-service firms. He is currently Director of Operations and Customer Service at Auraria Networks, and has managed global application delivery for Kenexa, BrassRing, and Marathon Technologies.

Kamal has also worked at Shiva Corporation, Lotus Development Corporation and Digital Equipment Corporation.

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Lionel Gibbons (0 posts)


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Mike Gero (1 post)

Mike is the benefactor of a 20 year career in high-tech, leveraging a passion for the definition, positioning and strategy behind numerous market-leading products. Experienced with enterprise software, application and user monitoring and Internet technologies of all sorts, he most recently led Product teams for Coradiant, a leader in online user monitoring, and Progress Software, for the Actional SOA Management Products.

He previously held a variety of Product Management, Product Marketing and Business Development roles in e-commerce, hosting, videographics and multilingual technologies.

Born and raised in NY, Mike studied Electrical Engineering at Lafayette College and after re-locating to Montreal continued his graduate business studies at Concordia University and the Richard Ivey School of Business. He’s an avid fisherman, music-lover, big fan of Prince Edward Island and enjoys skiing and other activities with his family, in and around Montreal. He’s currently active on Twitter (@mikegero) and his personal blog oxymorontreal.blogspot.com.

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Sarah Severson (2 posts)

Coming soon.

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Sean Power (1 post)

Sean spends way too much time on the computer. Much more than he should. He’s holding his breath right now and plans to change this profile in earnest in upcoming weeks for reasons he can’t get into now. He has put up many websites in the past. Even hacked together a few components for them! He tends to think, live and breathe social networks, and is fascinated by the fundamental concepts that push us all to be part of them. Oh, and he’ll totally geek/nerd out every once in a while and start talking about httpd threads (which is when it’s usually safe to ignore him or distract him by buying him beer). He’ll dabble into aspects of community, monitoring and analytics.

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Steve Shah (6 posts)

Steve Shah is the CTO and Co-Founder of Asyncast, a new media company focused on mobile applications. Prior to Asyncast, Steve leveraged his experience of being the customer, engineer, and marketeer and founded RisingEdge Consulting, which brought his strategic marketing insight to Silicon Valley companies such as Citrix Systems, Coyote Point Systems, Coradiant, Silver Peak and Amadeus Capital. Steve also played a prominent role in the L4-7 application delivery market as the director of product management/marketing at Citrix/NetScaler and Array Networks, where his responsibilities encompassed AFE/ADC, SSL-VPN, and application firewalls. His contributions at Citrix/NetScaler helped grow the company from $10M to $100M in three years, leading to NetScaler&s $320M acquisition by Citrix Systems. In addition to his hands-on experience as a kernel/network engineer, Steve is the author of several books on Unix and networking, including Linux Administration: A Beginners Guide. Steve currently serves on the advisory board of StrangeLoop Networks.

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Where’s the name from?

Networking is about bits of data being transmitted (mostly) by electrical current. It’s also impossible to be up to date in an industry that changes so often. The name is a reflection of the fact that one can only really be a little bit current about networking technologies.

In retrospect, it may also have been an unfortunate choice of names given the popularity of a similarly named peer-to-peer file distribution system.

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