User:Russelldwilson/Russell D. Wilson

Russ Wilson is a high tech executive and entrepreneur.

Education
Russell received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, and a Master of Engineering in Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Career
Russ began his career at IBM where he started as an AIX Technical Support Specialist. He was first promoted to Lab Administrator and then asked to lead an internal project. After successfully completing the project, Russ left IBM to found his first startup, Aviva, where he built custom PCs and offered customer software development. Following the success of Aviva, Russ founded ALVE Technologies, where he closed several large contracts and became a premiere Southwestern Bell business partner specializing in computer telephony software. Seeing an innovative opportunity in the computer telephony space, Russ secured $2 million in seed funding to launch a product under the ALVE brand, "Unified Enterprise Reporting" or "UER", that would unify data across various disparate call-center technologies including IVR's, PBX's, ACD's and auto-dialers. Russ and team created a prototype but failed to raise a series A investment round to continue executing on their business plan, and Russ left ALVE to join HyPerformix as Director of Software Engineering. At HyPerformix, a company that created discrete event simulations of complex IT environments, Russ recognized the need for a simpler solution based on analytical modeling. Russ was promoted to VP of Engineering and lead the design and architecture of HyPerformix's next generation of simulation products. Looking for better sources of data for HyPerformix's models, Russ met with Joel Trammell CEO of NetQoS to discuss the potential of combining NetQoS's data with HyPerformix's simulations. This chance encounter lead to a long business partnership and personal friendship. Russ joined NetQoS as Director of Product Design where he applied user and market research and design thinking to simplify the product portfolio. He helped to educate the company on design thinking and make user experience design a top priority. Russ was promoted to VP of Design and a year later NetQoS was sold to CA Technologies for $200 million. Russ was offered a position as VP of Product Design at CA following the acquisition. In this role Russ began evangelizing the need for design thinking at CA. Russ and team devised an approach to improve the design quality of CA's products by creating a common platform, code named "Panther". The success of Panther lead to Russ's promotion to SVP of Product Design worldwide. Another chance encounter, this time with Phil Gilbert, GM of Design at IBM, ultimately resulted in Russ joining IBM as Director of the Mobile Innovation Lab and Head of Design for MobileFirst and WebSphere.

Russ speaks at various conferences on topics ranging from design to innovation, and mentors designers, software engineers, executives, and entrepreneurs.