John Keith

Current

President at Cloud Four

Past

President, CTO at Kavi Corporation
Corporate Secretary at DMTF
Senior Staff Engineer at Intel Corporation

Staff SW Engineer at Sequent Computer Systems
Senior SW Engineer at BiiN
SW Programmer at USDA - Winema National Forest

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Education

Capella University
Oregon Graduate Institute
Oregon Institute of Technology

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Recommended

3 people have recommended John

Connections

152 connections

Industry

Information Technology and Services

John Keith’s Summary

According to "Now, Discover Your Strengths" by Marcus Buckingham: Achiever, Futuristic, Strategic, Includer, and Arranger. Putting the pieces together to clarify the vision or goal, devising a strategy for realizing that vision, and understanding the details well enough to make it happen. Those are things I do well; other things I strive to improve every day.

I have been a participant in, and supporter of, the U.S. and global standards community since 1992. In 1997, I co-founded Kavi Corporation, a company dedicated to bringing sorely needed web infrastructure and collaboration services to standards setting organizations. My singular goal was to create the company, team, and products that could best serve the daily needs of our customers, while ensuring we also built a long term, sustainable business (which we did!).

In 2007, I joined three other Kavi employees in a new company, Cloud Four, focused on the design and implementation of web and mobile web applications. Cloud Four also works with Kavi to offer Kavi's customers the full range of web-related services they require.

John Keith’s Experience

President

Cloud Four

(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

November 2007 — Present (2 years 1 month)

Cloud Four is a new company, so every position in the company carries a wide range of startup responsibilities. At this point, we are all doing a bit of everything. So, instead of talking about myself, here is a bit of information about the company itself:

Cloud Four designs and develops web sites and applications that are tailored to your objectives. But we don’t stop there. We couple your objectives with the needs of the people who visit your site to make sure that both you and the your customers accomplish their goals.

We believe that authenticity and integrity matter. We give you the advice we would give ourselves if we were in your shoes—even if it means less work for us. You can be certain that when you collaborate with us, that we’re partners working diligently to make sure that your project is successful.
President, CTO

Kavi Corporation

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

February 1997 — November 2007 (10 years 10 months)

This position was all about technical and managerial leadership focused on the delivering the highest quality services and support for Standards Setting Organizations. As of 2007, Kavi supported more than 80 standards consortia, industry alliances, ecosystems, and other non-profit organizations in the standards arena, enabling 30,000+ companies and 240,000+ standards professionals to develop standards that affect the everyday lives of millions of people.

As one of the founders, and as the chief technologist of the company, my responsibilities were far ranging: from developing community collaboration software, to building data-center services from the ground up, to strategic business planning, to managing teams and team leaders. I met a lot of great people who joined the Kavi mission and made our success possible. Hiring good people, training them in the business, then coaching, mentoring, and leading them were among my favorite accomplishments.
Corporate Secretary

DMTF

(Non-Profit Organization Management industry)

1997 — 1998 (1 year )

With almost 5,000 active members representing 39 countries and nearly 200 organizations, the Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) is the industry organization leading the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management initiatives and standards. Check us out at: http://www.dmtf.org

As Corporate Secretary, I worked with board members and other officers of the organization to provide effective governance and operational support. Specific duties included participation in regular board meetings, annual budget review, and line item approval for budgeted expenditures.
Senior Staff Engineer

Intel Corporation

(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; INTC; Semiconductors industry)

March 1994 — August 1998 (4 years 6 months)

Software architect in Intel Architecture Labs, working with industry partners to develop common manageability standards for computer systems and networks. Significant contributor to the Remote DMI specification and Common Information Model (language and schema) invented within the governing consortium, DMTF. See the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) at www.dmtf.org. Participated as a member in good standing in technical committees and ran specialized subcommittees focusing on standard schema development.
Staff SW Engineer

Sequent Computer Systems

(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; SQNT; Computer Hardware industry)

October 1989 — March 1994 (4 years 6 months)

Lead software architect and development engineer for high performance storage and network subsystems working in a shared memory, multiprocessor environment. At that time, it was all about using fast interrupt processing and sophisticated firmware to lower latency and maximize throughput. The Sequent 4-channel SCSI I/O subsystem we built was, at one point, the world's fastest SCSI I/O subsystem and the small packet ethernet performance exceeded 14,000 packets per second through the OS.
Senior SW Engineer

BiiN

(Computer Hardware industry)

June 1985 — October 1989 (4 years 5 months)

Software engineer responsible for design and development of firmware and software supporting synchronous and asynchronous serial and I/O. This was part of a joint effort between Intel and Siemens (BiiN) to design fault tolerant computing systems from the ground up. Wrote C, C++, and RISC assembly code for an Intel special purpose I/O processor, including microcode that was fabbed into the processor itself.
SW Programmer

USDA - Winema National Forest

(Government Agency; 11-50 employees; Government Administration industry)

1983 — 1985 (2 years )

Long before the internet we had Fortran and Cobol. In addition to helping bring a beautiful new Data General minicomputer system online, I wrote software in both those languages. It was quite a different experience from today's communication-oriented web software. We were a service arm to the U.S. Forest Service, writing software to do things such as: analyze deer droppings to determine wildlife populations and the potential impact (positive or negative) of clear cutting portions of our national forests. It was good experience and taught me quite a bit about working with people who were experts in their field, but who knew very little about computers and computer software.