Introducing Swiss Cyber Storm 2017 Keynote Speaker Paul Vixie
We are very proud to have Paul Vixie as our keynote speaker. I do not need to tell you about Paul’s greatness or about the fact that he is a veteran with over 30 years in the IT industry. But let me tell you about two things that I think striking:
- Paul has been introduced to the Internet Hall of Fame
- Paul runs a company called Farsight Security
Paul Vixie, Godfather of DNS
We like to think of our industry as a meritocracy where the greatest minds succeed. If you look over the list of people introduced into the Internet Hall of Fame, then I think it is safe to say that this represents the highest echelons of greatness that the IT industry has reserved for people like Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee or Linus Torvalds. I had been following Paul from afar for many years. So when he was finally introduced into the hall in 2014 I felt like it was the place where he belongs.
Now let’s take a look at Farsight Security. I think it has an interesting business case, but he can explain that a lot better than I can. So let’s just think of the name: Farsight Security. Is not the ability to see far something we all aspire to? I always thought Paul had an excellent ability to extrapolate current trends into the future and to anticipate the future as the signs developed on the wall. But when I met him in April at an event of the Security Interest Group of Switzerland (SIGS), I realized that he has an equal ability to describe past developments and how the present came to be. The past can be chaotic and hard to understand, but Paul brings order into the events and suddenly it all makes sense.
Paul Vixie in his study
In fact, I met Paul at a SIGS Q&A session where he responded to a wide variety of questions in a very concise way. It was all quotable material and I went home with many, many pages of handwritten notes. See below for a link to a collection of Paul Vixie quotes.
When the session was over, I thought I had nothing to lose and asked Paul if he would be interested to speak at the Swiss Cyber Storm conference and much to my surprise, he accepted! I was so excited!
Paul has asked us to leave the topic of his keynote presentation open for the time being. I think this makes a lot of sense and we will define this together with him in time for the conference. But whatever the topic is going to be, I can assure you that it will be an excellent presentation.
Don’t forget to secure your ticket in time. The early bird sale will be closing towards the end of the month. Click here to register.
More about Paul Vixie:
