RSA – At the Booth with Tim Keanini of nCircle
Q. What is your role at nCircle?
A. I am the Chief Technology Officer. In terms of responsibility, it means that I try to add value in technical areas of the company and stay out of areas where I don’t add value. nCircle has a ‘whatever it takes’ culture and it keeps things fresh and new. I’ve been here since 2001 and I am still having a great time and learning something new everyday.
Q. What got you into IT/IS?
A. My computer career began at Broderbund Software where I worked on audio (auditory display) for the games. In those days, there was a very fine line on the BBS’s between the gamer community and the hacker community. I immediately got into the design of online games and a prerequisite was to know IT infrastructure inside and out. I saw my infrastructure as instrumentation of the game and at some point, I was hacking kernels, applications and routers more than I was doing audio game interfaces.
Q. What do you do outside of IT/IS?
A. No surprise here but I still spend a lot of my time playing games. I see ‘play’ in general as the method by which I learn and make sense of the world. If I can’t play with it, I cannot truly understand it. Lately, I’ve been ranking up on the Gears of War 2 online play so if you are into that stuff, drop me a line.
Q. What are you most looking forward to / what did you most enjoy about RSA this year?
A. RSA for me is all about conversations. I plan on having at least a dozen incredible conversations with customers, other vendors, and peers who are passionate about their work. Last year at RSA 2008 I did a talk on Game Theory and its application in defensive strategies. This year, I’ll be spending more time hanging out with peers and having great discussions.
Q. Was this your first time at RSA? Will you return?
A. It is not my first time to RSA and I have lost count. It is difficult to imagine being in the information security domain and not being at RSA in some capacity.
Q. What will you be doing at your both?
A. I have a presentation to deliver on Tuesday and Wednesday which you may find interesting. It makes the assumption that your network is made up of a prey species and through a discipline called Biomimicry we explore the dominant strategies of prey and how they can survive in a hostile environment. Other than that, I’ll be just looking to have a great conversation with visitors.
Q. Is there any swag available at your booth?
A. The remote controlled helicopters have been a hit and I think we have a contest for a Kindle 2.
Q. If people wanted to chat with you when could they stop by the booth?
A. 11am to 2pm on Tuesday and Wednesday. That is the plan so far but this week is all about exception handling.
Q. Prediction for the future of IT/IS during 2009 and into 2010?
A. I’m not a big fan of predictions but I can tell you an area of interest that I hope to influence its outcome. I would like to finally see multi-vendor interoperability at the semantic level for customers. I’m not talking about syntax level sharing of content, I’m speaking of the sharing of data _in context_ – sharing data with sense-making models and ontologies. Come by the booth and I will talk your ear off on this stuff.
Q. Any comments?
A. Game on!