Stephen Walli has worked in the IT industry since 1980 as both customer and vendor. Prior to joining Outercurve Stephen served as a consultant on software business development and open source strategy for customers including Microsoft, the Eclipse Foundation and the Linux Foundation. He is an adviser to Bitrock, Continuent, and eBox. Stephen was VP Open Source Development Strategy at Optaros, a business manager at Microsoft on open source, and VP R+D and founder at Softway Systems, a venture-backed company that developed a UNIX portability environment for NT from open source software before being acquired by Microsoft. Stephen was a long-time participant and officer of the IEEE and ISO POSIX standards groups, representing both USENIX and EurOpen (E.U.U.G.) and has been a frequent speaker and writer on open systems standards since 1991.