About

Today, Scott hosts “SmartNICs Today,” the LinkedIn Newsletter, website, and podcast on SmartNICs and DPUs. He also works with various companies in this market to manage technical marketing projects, develop new products, or craft technical documents. He can be reached via this form or at schweitzer.scott@gmail.com.

Scott’s primary role from April 2021 through March 2025, and what he was professionally most passionate about at that time, was evangelizing Achronix Data Acceleration technology. As a Senior Director on the Product team at Achronix, Scott focused on Networking and SmartNICs. He regularly worked with customers and partners to define new and creative ways to utilize Achronix FPGA acceleration technology. Before leaving, his last project was the development of the VP-815 board, which is now sold by both Achronix and BittWare.

Prior to Achronix, Scott joined Xilinx through the acquisition of Solarflare, which was at the time the world leader in high-performance Ethernet (10G & 40G) server adapters, the precursor to SmartNICs, in the Financial market. Since then, AMD has acquired Xilinx.

Scott started with Solarflare in Sales in August 2013, initially focusing on IBM, Federal, and the US Southeast. In March 2016, he moved to the Product Marketing team to concentrate on bringing a new security product to market. Scott has a rather colorful background in cybersecurity.

Early in 2017, with 12 years in the 10GbE NIC business, he was asked to create Solarflare’s Technology Evangelist role. Solarflare technology was used in nearly every global financial exchange, most of the world’s largest banks, and almost all high-frequency trading shops back then. At the time, Solarflare wanted to expand into cybersecurity & monitoring. They were looking to add value wherever they could, so Scott did research and wrote whenever possible. He had written some articles for other Solarflare executives, but being published is not new to Scott. In September 2014, under his name, he had an article printed in Cyber Defense Magazine titled “Your Server as the Last Line of Cyber Defense.” In November 2013, HPCWire published a piece he’d written on the 10GbE server adapter market. You can regularly read Scott’s latest thoughts on his popular blog on this site, on LinkedIn, or in this podcast he ran for several years. If you are curious about Scott’s colorful history in cybersecurity, here’s the short version of just one interesting story.

In 1998, a Senior Vice President at Lotus Notes emailed IBM corporate demanding that Scott and his entire IBM team be fired and then arrested. Luckily, at that time, Lotus was a division of IBM. Scott’s team had designed & built a product based on Lotus Notes Domino, which had booked $2B in revenue for IBM that year. To ensure the security of this revenue, Scott designed and had one of his co-op students write a security scanner for Lotus Domino web servers. One evening, another co-op on the team had successfully used this tool to hack Lotus's production Internet server. Once IBM's legal, HR, and management understood the situation, nearly everyone had a good laugh. The following week, Scott met with the Lotus executive and freely shared the security tool.

From hacking RIT’s online testing system in 1983 to being blackholed on the Internet in 2001, Scott has had some pretty interesting adventures in cyber security.