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Christine Kay Wellens (born August 22, 1952 in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an American business executive. She is founder and CEO of InterWorking Labs, the first company to offer comprehensive computer network testing to implement IETF protocol standards. InterWorking Labs' clients include a long list of Fortune 500 companies, such as Apple, AT&T, Cisco Systems, Diebold, Hewlett Packard, Juniper, Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung, as well as the U.S. government. Wellens has been involved in Internet design since the early 1970s. Her company, InterWorking Labs, creates network testing and emulation products that enable fully functional network operation even during adverse conditions.

Early life and education
Wellens was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and graduated from Minnetonka High School in 1970. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1975 and received an MS from the University of Southern California in 1990. In 1995, she married Karl Auerbach. They live in Santa Cruz, California.

Career
From 1986 to 1993, Wellens worked as Product Line Manager at Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), with responsibility for Sun's Network File System (NFS) and its desktop SPARC operating system and application software. As Group Manager of Market Development Engineering, she was responsible for porting third-party hardware and software products to the Sun environment.

In 1992, Wellens joined the Interop Company, in Mountain View, CA, which manages the annual trade fair for information technology. As Director of Technology at Interop, Wellens oversaw the Interop trade fair's 5,000-node "InteropNet" and facilitated interoperability for technology showcases. Because engineers from different companies interpreted network protocols differently, they sometimes struggled to make products send and receive data to one another—sometimes only minutes before public demonstrations. When engineers asked Interop to create an interoperability lab where network communication issues could be worked out in a private and less stressful environment, Interop's founder and CEO Dan Lynch recognized that the industry needed interoperability testing and asked Wellens to write a business plan for a permanent Interoperability Lab at Interop.

Also working with Interop at that time was Marshall Rose, who was Working Group Chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and an outside consultant on the Interop Program Committee. Rose suggested that the new Interop Lab's first task should be to create a set of tests for compliance with the SNMP protocol, since it was a topic in which he was expert and engineers at the Interop trade fair seemed to be having more than usual trouble with SNMP. Wellens proposed that she would organize a group of developers for an interoperability test summit if Rose would create a set of tests and assist in developing the initial plan.

At about the same time, however, Ziff-Davis acquired Interop and chose not to proceed with the Interoperability Lab. In 1993, Wellens left Interop to found InterWorking Labs and by January 1994 had organized the first SNMP interoperability test summit based on 50 SMNP tests created by Rose.