Chris Carlson

Chris Carlson is an entrepreneur and technologist who has been a leader in a number of successful start-ups and innovative small companies throughout his career. Chris is the Founder of IOEDNA Incorporated. IOEDNA’s mission is to enable secure and intelligent application and actionable data services for Internet of Everything, Enterprise of Things, and Human Networks. IOEDNA brings practical solutions and product experience supported by internationally recognized industry leaders. As a small startup, IOEDNA is nimble enough to respond to changes in real-time and deliver measurable results timely and consistently.

Chris is also the Founder and CEO of Retriever Consulting LLC, where he helps clients successfully design, develop, deploy and manage complex information technology projects for rapid mission and business transformation. His clients leverage, and optimize cloud computing, mobility, and Web2.0 information technologies to create innovation environments and rapidly deliver new capabilities. While maintaining a broad list of technology partners, Chris has focused on enabling customer migration to the Amazon Web Services platform for time to market, cost, and security benefits.

As a leading advocate for cloud computing he has worked with the vendor community to identify and support best practices, education, readiness, security and standards across the federal government. He has participated in government wide seminars and forums as well as consultative conferences with federal agencies in the areas of DevOps, governance, security, standards and best practices and has authored articles and papers in these areas.

Prior to forming Retriever Consulting Chris was the first Cloud Computing Solutions Architect in the IBM Federal organization. In this role he was responsible for helping US federal government clients through the lifecycle of cloud computing and represented the entire IBM portfolio of services, software, and systems. He was responsible for ensuring IBM delivered solutions that meet the needs of the federal customer and that his customers were achieving mission and business impact with their solutions. Chris was part of the IBM Global Defense Team, assisting in developing reference architectures and operational best practices in addition to presenting at conferences and meeting with key defense clients around the world.

He was the government standards technology lead for more than five years for the Tivoli Software brand. As the technical manager for Tivoli Software in the U.S. federal market, Chris was responsible for customer excellence in management of their information technology infrastructure: data center operations, telecommunications network management, identity and access management, security operations, and enterprise storage management.

Chris came to IBM through the acquisition of Micromuse, a leading telecommunications network management provider, in 2006, where he served more than six years in customer facing technical management roles. His commercial customers represented the service provider sector, the aviation sector, and the financial services sector. His public sector experience includes state and local governments, US federal civilian and intelligence agencies, the US Department of Defense, the US Joint Forces Command, NATO, and a number of foreign Ministries of Defense.

Before joining Micromuse, Chris was responsible for applications development and systems integration at several small companies. Chris served on active duty in the US Army for 11 years as an Infantry Officer, with roles in staff and leadership positions. Chris holds a Master of Arts in Arab Studies and International Business from Georgetown University and a Bachelor of Science from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. In addition to skills in business, leadership and technology, Chris has exceptional linguistic aptitude with strong abilities in Modern Standard Arabic.