Growing Data Center Energy:  A Global Threat and Opportunity

Abstract: For the first time in the long history of information technology, the limit to growth is now a factor external to the industry:  the availability of electricity.  Effectively all enterprise computing occurs in data centers and data center energy use has been accelerating while energy availability is limited to only modest linear growth.  Addressing this growing gap between energy supply and demand, will require improving energy efficiency for enterprise computing by an accelerating rate.  Energy efficient computing technologies in data centers have just started to reach the market with many opportunities for technology advancements on the horizon.

Bio: Chris is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ocient, a company providing the software platform for the largest data analyzing systems in the world.  He also is the Chair and Co-Founder of P33, an organization that is helping transform Chicago into a globally top-tier tech region. And Chris is the Chair and Co-Founder of The Forge which provides amazing recreational and environmental experiences along with ecosystem revitalization. 

In 2004, Chris founded Cleversafe which became the largest and most strategic object storage vendor in the world.  He raised $100M and led the company to a $1.4B exit in 2015 when IBM acquired the company.  The technology Chris invented and Cleversafe commercialized is used by most people in the digital world every day and became one of the ten most powerful patent portfolios in the world.  Prior to Cleversafe, Chris was the Founding CEO of MusicNow, which provided the first digital music services in the U.S., and was the founding CEO of Cruise Technologies, the leading provider of wireless thin client computers. Previously, he managed product strategy for Zenith Data Systems and was a database programmer at Lockheed Martin.  Chris has an engineering degree from MIT, a PhD from Illinois Tech, and is an inventor on over 280 patents.