Today, fellow IBMer Ken Hannigan celebrated his 25th year anniversary with IBM, which inducts him into the IBM Quarter Century Club[QCC]. I was surprised to hear that there are over 900 QCC members currently residing in Arizona. In the past, QCC was shortly followed by retirement,but in these economic times, it marks a mid-point in one's career.

I met Ken back in 1988, I was working on DFHSM and he was part of theDFDSS team that moved from San Jose, California to Tucson, Arizona.Later, Ken and I would work in the same department as architects forthe DFSMS product that included DFSMShsm and DFSMSdss components.

Ken was then offered a chance to lead the effort to launch a new productfrom an internal project called Workstation Data Save Facility (WDSF) thatwas changed to Data Facility Distributed Storage Manager (DFDSM),then renamed to ADSTAR Distributed Storage Manager (ADSM), and finally tothe name it has today: [IBM Tivoli Storage Manager].

Over the years, Ken's had some interesting experiences. Two examples:

Saving the Democracy of Peru

During a hotly contested election in the Latin American country of Peru, there were technical problems with the ballot records. Management needed someone from Tucson to go, and my namewas floated around, since I spoke Spanish fluently. My schedule did not permit,so they sent Ken instead. Ken was able to recover the lost ballot information and avoid a revolution.

Assisted with the Technical team for a Major Motion Picture

Ken was part of the IBM technical team that helped [DreamWorks SKG] producethe movie [The Prince of Egypt],a major animated motion picture. IBM is heavily involved in the digital mediacommunity, and was instrumental in helping film-makers set up theirinformation infrastructure.

Ken has been one of my best friends over the past twenty years. I introduced him to hiswife, and was the best man at his wedding. It is quality people like Ken that makeworking at IBM so special.

technorati tags: IBM, QCC, Ken Hannigan, DFHSM, DFDSS, TSM, Tivoli, Peru, election, DreamWorks, The Prince of Egypt, Information Infrastructure

Tags:  marketing