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Currently, Scott is consulting for SmartNIC companies, and he shares what is not covered by an NDA on these pages so that others can follow where the industry is headed.
A Brief History
After several decades in SmartNICs, Scott has established a reputation for selling and marketing high-performance networking and SmartNIC products. First with Myricom in 2005, then Solarflare Communications, Xilinx, Achronix Semiconductors, and now as a free agent. In 2008, while handling Myricom’s sales for the Eastern US, he launched 10GbE.net to market Myricom’s 10 GbE NICs. The then-CEO refused to have any in-house marketing; he thought that managing our corporate website in raw HTML 1.0 using Emacs was sufficient.
Scott started in computing in the spring of 1983 with a community college course, “Assembly for the System 360/370.” Mid-semester, he bought a TRS-80 Model III with 4KB of RAM and a cassette drive from Radio Shack. Soon after that, in March, he began writing educational software for the Apple II, which paid for his TRS-80 upgrades, maxing the system out at 48KB of memory and dual-diskette drives. That fall, after graduating from community college, Scott transferred to Rochester Institute of Technology. Within weeks, he’d hacked the grading system, white-hat style, and reported the vulnerability. In December, Scott became the first RIT co-op student at IBM’s famous Watson Research Center. It went so well that he helped define the program, paving the way for over 50 more students to follow.
For nearly a decade at IBM Research, he repaired PCs, served as the PC consultant to all senior executives, and wrote all the code to manage IBM’s presence on AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy, linking them to IBM’s internal IBMPC BBS. Later, he managed the Unix support department and returned to the OS/2 team to figure out how to make an OS installable from CD-ROM, the first ever OS from CD, in 1992. He even led the initial effort to publish the first issue of IBM’s Professional Developer’s Kit for OS/2, a single CDROM. He then transferred to their Systems & Technology Group in California in 1994, creating a $2B/year Intranet for eBusiness and a hacking tool for Lotus Domino, even using it to hack a Super Bowl ad website while the game was running, but that’s another story.
Scott left IBM in 2000 to be the chief data center architect for a dot-com focused on localizing the Internet, think NextDoor just 20 years too soon. In 2001, after the dot-com bubble collapsed, while making an overly aggressive attempt to get a job, he was banned from the Internet, but found a workaround. Following that, Scott managed product marketing for Intel Itanium servers at NEC Solutions America from 2003 to 2005. Myricom and the other SmartNIC vendors followed.
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