My Story
I was born and raised in Mexico City, Mexico. I graduated from the Universidad Iberoamericana in 1995 with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Systems. I had a fantastic experience in college. I joined many activities and made a lot of friends while keeping a high GPA and playing for the baseball team. I became president of the student's association, captain of the baseball team, and graduated with high honors.
I started my career as a Technical Support Engineer for a partner of Ingres (relational database) in Mexico City. This was a great first job where I had the opportunity to learn and work with customers. In addition to database support, I did consulting, coding, and even delivered training; all skills that I used the rest of my career. From there, destiny took me to work in the telecom industry for Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) a consulting role deploying billing systems for mobile operators, yes, back when mobile phones were a brick size, we had 2G networks and texting was the only data service.
At the age of 24, I accepted a job in Champaign, Illinois within CSC and with that, I officially migrated to the United States. I was told it was south of Chicago, I found out it was about two hours south of O'Hare airport driving through beautiful cornfields.
I completed an Executive MBA program in 1998 and in August 1999 I moved to the Boston area to work for ADC Telecommunications. I joined as Technical Account Manager in the Metrica group, integrating and deploying network performance software for communications service providers globally. That's when I started working with customers all over the world, and that hasn't stopped.
The next big jump in my career was to work for a startup. Hard work and rewarding experience working for an Irish startup, Arantech as a Director of Sales Engineering for the Americas. My world travels continued and after going from zero to many tier-1 customers during my tenure, the startup was acquired by Tektronix, now part of Netscout.
I worked for a couple of other organizations after that, including EXFO. There, I officially moved into Product Management, a job I wanted the moment I first understood the role. The decision making, technical research, and value you add as Product Manager impacts directly products and the business.
A highlight in my career was my next job back at a startup, FeedHenry. As Vice President of Product Management and Services, I had the privilege to drive product strategy, services, and execution of a successful business in the mobile development platform space. A great team mostly based in Waterford, Ireland built a world-class enterprise SaaS offering with a successful exit via an acquisition by Red Hat. Working for Red Hat and learning more about open source made me an enthusiast and advocate for open-source software.
I worked at Red Hat for over two years driving the integration of FeedHenry and that experience helped me in my next two jobs. I led the integration and go-to-market of two recently acquired startups: Appcelerator by Axway and SourceClear by Veracode.
In the application security space I worked at Veracode leading the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) product line. Technology to identify vulnerabilities in open-source software. I had constant interactions with customers and participated at industry events presenting to technical and executive audiences all over the world.
Then to IBM, a company that I was very close to join a couple of times including an acquisition that I missed by a few weeks. Great role promoting open-source and running the open source program for the growing ecosystem of solutions for IBM Z & LinuxONE platforms. I also worked with the extended open source organization at IBM promoting and contributing to strategic open source projects as a voting member of the IBM Open-Source Technical Steering Committee, and I also became a voting member of the Open Mainframe Project Technical Advisory Committee, part of The Linux Foundation.
My experience in open source and advocacy brought me to Perforce. I'm now Chief Open Source Evangelist and Sr. Director of Product Management. I'm responsible for technical thought leadership and advocacy for open-source software while driving the OpenLogic by Perforce offering. I am responsible for expanding open source awareness in all areas of the development life cycle including support.
From mobile networks to mobile apps, to application security, and open-source software, I help organizations build great products and innovate with software. I continue to be very close to customers with my ongoing business travel from home in the Boston, Massachusetts area.
I have always enjoyed my job because there is so much to learn, there is so much innovation and so much to share with the rest of the world.
- Javier