HOWARD PEARLMUTTER


Executive Summary

An internationally-recognized IT expert and management consultant; vendor-neutral enterprise strategist, service architect, and open standards analyst; multimedia pioneer and ecosystems animator; award winning public speaker and systems developer with 40+ years of client-focused experience -- Howard Pearlmutter has served NASA, Xerox, Disney, HP, Apple, EPA, D&B, CBS, Kodak, Epson, Fujitsu, Valtech, Razorfish, DBR, Elixir, InterBit, CSC, Stereographics, SGI, Cable & Wireless, Unisys, SoftwareAG, Conexant, Symantec, SunGard, CapitalOne, Apax Partners, Bankers Trust, and The Financial Times.

Since 1997, his worldwide activities have spanned advising major organizations, training professionals, architecting web applications, speaking at public and private events, guiding teams, auditing project results, evaluating tools, developing strategic prototypes, integrating components, deploying operational systems, contributing code to open source projects, researching advanced technologies, producing advanced media products, performing due diligence for private equity placements, mentoring executives, and serving on corporate boards.

As a pioneer in applying advanced language, network, and human interface technologies to the solution of real world problems, Mr. Pearlmutter began his involvement at the cutting edge of Silicon Valley innovation in 1980. As a software developer, he has won multiple awards, coded #1 best sellers, produced "world's firsts" in multiple categories, delivered custom programs for dozens of industries, pioneered the emergence of web applications, and continued to be prolific and push the leading edge from his first days of coding in 1971 until the present day.

Through management briefings, multimedia events, hands-on workshops, strategic seminars and keynote speeches, substantial insight, skill, and advantage have been provided by Howard Pearlmutter to Intel, IBM, Sun Microsystems, EDS, CSC, Barclays, One2One, Orange, Reach, Amdocs, Nokia, Comverse, Earth Island Institute, Friends of the Earth, NASA Ames Research Center, Xerox PARC, SGI, Compaq, Motorola, PSA (Port of Singapore Authority), UPS, and hundreds of other organisations ranging from large financial, telecom, media, environmental, healthcare, government, logistics, and industrial enterprises to some some of the hottest entrepreneurs, start-ups, consultancies, and R&D organizations across 5 continents.

 
Sample Engagements

Experience
Core Competencies

History


SAMPLE INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENTS

    (all accomplished in Europe and Asia-Pacific during the 24 month period Aug97-July99)

  • Online financial information services strategic consultation. Audit, recommend, & rearchitect. Audit: remit was to recommend to higher management the cancellation, disposition, or resuscitation of a 3-year, multi-million-dollar over-budget (GBP3M (~US$5M) had already been expended) development project, responsible for handling 70M+ documents on a pay-per-use basis (which in turn was a migration from 15 years of mainframe operation). Investigation encompassed quantitative analysis of large C++ & Java codebases, structural analysis of parallel processing search engine throughput, market analysis of varying stakeholder requirements, and qualitative analysis of multiple-team, & individual, perspectives. Recommend: offered a solution that preserved investments and opened opportunities far in excess of any previously considered option. Rearchitect: planned the further migration from traditional online services to web-based ecommerce; from C++ to Java; from heavyweight CORBA interfaces to lightweight; from platform-dependence to independence. All accomplished in one week. (8 months later, the client Managing Director confirmed that things indeed panned-out "exactly as you said they would" -- and the system launch was highly successful.)

  • Investment banking consultation regarding enterprise architecture, J2EE, change management models, equities back office infrastructure, and emerging ebusiness models. Advanced-GUI "complexity visualization" tools. Legacy integration & rearchitecture strategy.

  • Technical research, presentation, and consultation in Java/CORBA/XML financial enterprise integration context.

  • Migration/platform-independence/UI evaluation (included writing 3 Java apps against 70 criteria across 6 platforms (Win NT & 95, IBM AIX, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, and Sun Solaris)).

  • Onsite Java mentoring/training of 25 professionals in 5 teams (Cobol staff, C staff, Java staff, Net Consultants, Support) for vendor of mainframe & distributed corporate financial accounting & ERP software.

  • Mentoring/managing of development team and migration process, moving a large Delphi code base to Java, and rearchitecting for web-enabled deployment and support of semi-custom small business accounting solutions. Rapid prototyping of lightweight 3tier RMI framework. Also provided market strategy and management consulting.

  • Realtime multimedia collaborative VPN extranet architecture. Cable, ISDN, xDSL evaluations.

  • At the invitation of Sun Microsystems, authored and delivered presentation at private briefing for telecom integrator alliance regarding the implications of Java technologies (RMI code mobility; embedded Java) for solving problems in the management of telecom infrastructure, and for enabling very rapid deployment, upon regulatory grant of new wireless licenses, of new switching & operational support (customer care, billing) systems.

  • Keynote speaker for regional Intel Pentium III launch event for over 120 resellers. Implications of n-tier distributed architectures, e-commerce, Java, XML, Open Source, and Linux for the future of the Intel platform and market.

  • Enabled web-to-legacy account access & realtime data/newsfeed. Provided cultural & technical bridging between Cobol datacenter and creative high-style web ad agency. Reduced 14 day hardcopy billing latency to under 1 day HTML interactive account access.

  • Taught Valtech's "Java Enterprise Architecture" training course including IT migration strategies, risk management, 2/3/n-tier approaches to server, client, middleware, security, scalability, transaction management, RDBMS, legacywrap, EJB & multi-thread/process/processor issues. Attendees were senior IT architects from major UK organisations, including: JP Morgan, Barclays, One-2-One, and Orange.

  • Designed "Java Systems Architecture" course, covering Java VM, JavaOS, JINI, mobile agents, Personal Java appliance UI, NCs, embedded Java, JavaCard, JavaPhone, JavaTV, Ecommerce. Integration of legacy enterprise resources and novel network services + broadband and narrowband web infrastructure + client delivery devices. Strategy, service development, deployment, and operational management.

  • Developed a visual, web-enabled EIS/DSS for production-chain oversight: Intranet/extranet management front end for global operations and alliances. For client Tecnomatix Ltd., a major player in the Digital Factory market (and #1 Computer Aided Production Engineering vendor): completely managed, designed and implemented, in 19 weeks, a commercial JavaBean product, including dynamic components for realtime integration and on-the-fly GUI generation. (Tecnomatix sells $30K-$100K+-per-seat software for use by engineers and planners designing factory processes.) In response to demand from GM, Ford, and other Tecnomatix automotive and aerospace customers worldwide, Pearlmutter developed a product that now allows these users to present their factory designs for executive sign-off by making animated, 3D, interactive management reports/presentations via WWW (Netscape, Java & VRML) to any authorized persons in their company (intranet) and in partner companies (extranet). Authored 100% of all Java application code. Personally performed all object-oriented analysis, design, coding, testing, and integration.


CORE COMPETENCIES


HALF A CENTURY OF EXPERIENCE

Since first gaining hands-on access in 1964, being featured on TV as a computer-using prodigy in 1968, starting programming career in 1971, being paid to code in 1975, and founding his first consulting company in 1977, Howard Pearlmutter has produced #1 best-selling software products, built cutting-edge professional service organizations, participated in patent-yielding R&D teams, and has been responsible for several industry "firsts" in the fields of: MIMD parallel processing ('78), VR input ('79), embedded systems ('81), GUI technology ('84), Virtual Machine languages ('87), evolutionary computing ('92), WWW automation ('95), Java EIS/DSS/CAD intranet/extranet('98)).

Wide geographic, technical, and application domain adaptability, evidenced by 97-02 overseas finance, telecom, and manufacturing engagements. Backed by 17 years of Silicon Valley experience in delivering advanced technology and practical applications, translating stakeholder needs into integrated solutions, and satisfing diverse market and business requirements over the entire lifecycle.

Mr. Pearlmutter has participated in well over 200 projects since 1977 as entrepreneurial founder, chief executive, principal technologist, market developer, project manager, analyst, designer, programmer, supporting team member, technology transfer agent, mentor, consultant, board member, or strategic advisor. In these capacities he has provided well over 300 analyses of internal requirements or external market opportunities.

He has built organizations of several dozen from scratch; he has managed direct and indirect reports in marketing (ranging from creatives to direct sales), operations & finance (MBAs, CPAs, former CFOs and IT directors), and R&D; he has advised organizations ranging from embryonic startups to Fortune 100. He is the recipient of over 30 awards for research, public speaking, science, public service and technical skill, including the Best Texas Programmer Award.

More than a decade ago, he was already acknowledged for coding the world's first digital spindle servo firmware for use in hard disk drives; inventing a (now patented) switching/routing breakthrough for ultrafast interprocessor connectivity; programming IBM PC MasterType, the #1 best selling educational software package of the mid 80's; and producing the world's first pen-based GUI implementation (1984), by merging the brand-new Macintosh with the best pen/tablet technologies then available.

In addition to these breakthrough accomplishments, his general technology / applications experience is unique among IT professionals in its broad coverage: interactive human-computer interfaces, digital video, adaptive web page generation, educational software, financial engineering, network management, consumer electronics, ecological simulation, audio applications, disk drive firmware, cartographic measurement, database publishing, voice processing, scientific visualization, telemarketing support, nutritional biotech, electronic voting, fast-action videogaming, real-time processing, mass customization of packaged consumer goods, electronic commerce, enterprise integration, and multimedia communications.

He has played an early (and sometimes influential) role in some of the prerequisite technologies that led up to the World Wide Web, not only in the front end areas such as interactive devices, computer graphics, digital audio and video, and the backend infrastructure areas of digital processing, storage and communication, but also in the core paradigms of hyperlinkage, source text markup, styling, abstract data typing, object orientation, neutrality / independence, indirection, virtual machine architecture, and threaded interpretation that underlie such modern standards as XML and Java.


HISTORY

As a youth, Pearlmutter's non-traditional, interdisciplinary education included extensive participation in special programs for "gifted" students sponsored by organizations such as the National Science Foundation. (Fortunate enough to get "hands-on" at the age of seven, he was featured four years later (1968) by WOR-TV as the prototypical "computer whiz kid.") By 1971 he was programming in Fortran and assembly language, and wrote his first Monte Carlo simulation program in 1973. After a year (1977) of freelance programming in alliance with a Burroughs district sales office (which doubled its low-end minicomputer sales due to his availability as a custom software development resource), at the age of 20 he was selected (in part because his creativity was "untainted" by university computer science teachings, having had only one year as a Princeton undergrad at the time) by the Burroughs Advanced Development Organization to be one of the 3 initial researchers chartered with inventing a MIMD parallel architecture to yield gigaflop throughput, to be the world's fastest supercomputer (20 times faster than the Cray), for NASA Ames Research Center. He contributed a topology breakthrough that radically reduced interprocessor bottleneck blockage, designed the parallel programming language, used it to rewrite the Goddard Institute for Space Sciences 9-Level Atmospheric Model (a "grand challenge" benchmark, embodying the Navier Stokes equations that are the heart of Computational Fluid Dynamics) and reported quantitative analytical results to Ames that demonstrated a 22:1 advantage over the competing architecture (CDC's proposed pipeline).

But he also posed a challenging question: how would human beings interact with such a powerful computer - would the weather simulation results be a tall stack of green and white numeric printout? Based on that 1978 proposition, he carried out the 1980-81 NASA Ames study "Interactive Computer Graphics: The Human Interface to Dynamic Simulation" - a year long harvest from academia, government, and industry of the state of the art in computing & human factors, input and output technologies, and low level hardware to high level software, culminating in a 700 page report which was perhaps the first comprehensive analysis of the then-embryonic "revolution" now known by such terms as Virtual Reality, Computer Graphics, Interactive Multimedia, Scientific Visualization, World Wide Web, and Cyberspace. He organized dozens of Silicon Valley events in the early 80's on these themes (from which emerged several of the start-up ventures that carried out the "revolution"), and chaired the landmark 1984 Siggraph session "Microcomputer Graphics" which set the world record for largest realtime interactive gaming event, introduced the Macintosh to the computer graphics world, and was the first-ever showing (outside of nondisclosure) of several not-yet-released historic products: the Amiga Computer, and Lucasfilm's "Ballblazer" and "Rescue on Fractalus."

By 1984, he had also built up a software development network of substantial ability and agility, which allowed the rapid staffing and concurrent execution of multiple projects, exemplified by: educational and entertainment videogame title development and porting projects, such as IBM PC Donkey Kong for Atari, and several others based on the Knoware real time multimedia virtual machine (running on PC, Apple ][, Atari, C64, and Macintosh platforms); media and audio projects, such as an AI program that allowed "typing" graphical music notation by playing a MIDI keyboard; CDROM, desktop publishing, database publishing, CAD, GIS, and digital cartography technology products and market development projects in partnership with Apple and others; technical marketing communications for Hitatchi's mainframe division; and Executive Information Systems consulting for Kodak. Examples of projects on the "Input" theme: the first pen-based windowing GUI ('84), a #1 best-selling keyboard-skill training game ('83), 1000 point-per-inch input of maps and blueprints ('87), input device interface language & virtual machine ('88), the first Mac speech recognizer('85), and 8 scanner/image products for Epson ('93). [for multiyear projects, main year is listed.] Within the higher level business relationships that increasingly accompanied these technical successes, he provided opportunity analysis, overall strategy, technology architecture, entrepreneurial vision, IP licensing, deal structuring, financing, market development, technology transfer, and/or management consulting. In some of these he served in management, executive, board, and/or advisory roles, and in some has had substantial equity holdings. His management and marketing experience over the past 15 years allows him to tightly integrate these perspectives when providing or managing advanced technology services. He continues to synthesize this broad range of experience for the benefit of strategic clients, who draw upon his abilities as a visionary futurist and creative architect during the early conceptualization stages of new projects and organizations.

Since the late 80's, he has been involved with a number of projects and ventures in groupware/collaboration, knowledge management, CRM and database/web marketing , and ecommerce business models. Analysis topics since 1990 have covered fiber and broadband infrastructure, Computer-Telephony Integration (CTI), voice over IP, digital wireless, and embedded software for consumer electronics. Research work (on SGI parallel processing/3D platforms) during 1991-1994 (culminating 20 years of study in General Systems Theory, Operations Research, and Systems Dynamics, especially in the context of understanding ecological, cybernetic, biological, and economic systems) included architecting and programming numerous interrelated visual simulations in fields commonly known as Computational Intelligence, Artificial Life, Evolutionary Programming, Dynamical Systems, Genetic Algorithms, Cellular Automata, Fractal Mathematics, Complexity Theory, and free-market / self-organizing / agoric systems. Using only C and GL, he also developed modeling and rendering software for Buckminster Fuller's "Synergetic Geometry" on the Silicon Graphics Onyx and Reality Engine, producing the animation seen in the award-winning documentary film "Ecological Design: Inventing the Future." Other SGI platform projects included: stereoscopic abstract mathematical visualization, nonlinear video editing tools, FDDI prototyping of broadband media infrastructure, electronic commerce with manufacturing integration, and a variety of web services. Since 1995, his focus has been on business strategy, technology application, intellectual property, and human skill development in relation to the enterprise and telecommunications spaces, especially based upon the standards driving the evolution of the World Wide Web -- TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, Java, XML.


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