Glenn Ricart is the founding Managing Director of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Center for Advanced Technology. Dr. Ricart has been a change agent in a career which has spanned private enterprise, academia, medical research, and military technology. In private enterprise, he was EVP and CTO at Novell and founder or co-founder of 3 successful startups. In academia, he was associate professor, associate vice chancellor, and CIO of the University of Maryland College Park, the 8th largest campus in the United States. For nearly a dozen years he developed and provided computer technology services to aid medical research at the National Institutes of Health. He also served as Program Manager at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) with programs in advanced networking, end-system security, operating systems, and middleware, and he was technology liaison to the Clinton White House and The Library of Congress.
Glenn broke into computer networking in the 1970s by implementing DECnet in nontraditional environments and by networking the IBM 2741 communicating typewriter. Later, in the early 1980s, he used PDP-11s running the Fuzzball code to implement the first campus TCP/IP network and the original NSFnet backbone before commercial routers existed. He won the first grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation in networking and used it to create the first operational regional TCP/IP network, SURAnet. SURAnet also established the first internet exchange point, the FIX (later FIX-East and later still MAE-East). SURAnet was the first TCP/IP network of any kind to accept fully commercial traffic for a fee and therefore can be regarded as the first ISP. Other networking firsts included managing the first implementation of TCP/IP for the IBM PC, the first Internet connections to South America, and the first reference implementation of OSPF.
Dr. Ricart has served on the boards of several public companies as well as founded or co-founded the Common Solutions Group, the Bay Area CTO Forum, Edupage, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the Federation of American Research Networks. He is a frequently requested speaker on the future impacts of technology.
