About

Scott’s primary role since early 2021, and what he’s professionally most passionate about, is evangelizing Achronix Data Acceleration technology. As a director on the product planning team at Achronix, Scott focuses on SmartNICs and works with customers and partners to define new and creative ways to utilize Achronix FPGA acceleration technology.

Prior to Achronix Scott had 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, into the Financial market. Since then Xilinx has been acquired by AMD.

Scott started with Solarflare in Sales back in August of 2013 with his initial focus being IBM, Federal, and the US South East. In March of 2016, he moved over to 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 the role of Solarflare’s Technology Evangelist. Back then Solarflare was used in nearly every financial exchange on the planet, most of the world largest banks, and almost all the high-frequency traders. 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 of 2014, under his own name, he had an article printed in Cyber Defense Magazine titled “Your Server as the Last Line of Cyber Defense“, and in November 2013 HPCWire published a piece he’d written on the 10GbE server adapter market. You can regularly read Scott’s latest thoughts in his popular blog on this site, or Linkedin, and soon you’ll be able to hear them in his podcast. If your curious about Scott’s colorful history in cybersecurity here’s the short version of an interesting story to chew on.

In 1998 a Senior Vice President at Lotus Notes had emailed IBM corporate demanding that Scott and his entire IBM team be fired 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 legal, HR, and management understood the situation, nearly everyone had a good laugh. The following week Scott met with the Lotus executive and shared the security tool with them.

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