Robert J. Berger
CoFounder / CTO / SVP Engineering – Omnyway Inc.
President/Founder of Internet Bandwidth Development
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rberger
As CoFounder / CTO / SVP of Engineering, Rob is leading the software development and infrastructure efforts of Omnyway Inc. His long history as an early adopter of DevOps, Lean culture and Cloud technology drives Omnyway’s continuous integration / continuous delivery workflow and operations.
Omnyway is a SaaS platform of services for large retailers, financial institutions and advertisers to build their next generation, data driven in-store and online applications that integrate promotion, payments and ease of purchase.
Most recent products include VISX: Live Streaming and instant purchase for physical store retailers, Zapbuy: Online advertising with instant purchase, HaiWai: Enable in-store purchases with foreign wallets like WeChat Pay. The Omnyway Stack has evolved to be almost entirely serverless, leveraging Clojure/Clojurescript, AWS technologies including Amplify/Appsync, Lambda, ECS, API Gateway..
Prior to Omnyway, Rob was the Cloud Architect at Mist Systems Inc, where he designed, and led the implementation of the Cloud / Realtime big data Infrastructure and Continuous Delivery process. Mist’s mission is transforming the Indoor Location and WiFi Experience.
From 2008 to May 2013, Rob was a co-founder and the CTO of Runa Inc., developing and deploying a Big Data Cloud based Software as a Service for online merchants. Runa increases conversion of shoppers while on the merchant’s site using real-time, individualized promotions. While at Runa he pushed the state-of-the-art in personalization, service scaling, statistical / semantic processing and ajax technologies. Our system architecture includes the use of AWS, HBase/Hadoop, Clojure, AMQP/RabbitMQ, Redis and Opscode Chef. Runa was sold to Staples in 2013.
As the President and Founder of Internet Bandwidth Development since 1998 and as a principal at Opscale from Apr 2013 – Sept 2014, Rob has delivered hands-on design and development to many SaaS, IaaS, PaaS and Big Data companies in Silicon Valley. He has helped them deploy their services, improve their monitoring and implement Continuous Delivery on a variety of Private and Public Cloud / Virtualization Environments. He has created several custom deployment, CI, monitoring and management tools.
Rob has been a principal or founder in several other start-up network services and equipment companies including InterNex, MetroFi and UltraDevices. As an Internet pioneer in the early 90’s, Rob founded InterNex Services which was the first ISP to offer commercial ISDN Internet services, Frame Relay and higher speed business broadband services as well as one of the first o offer shared, dedicated and International Hosting Services. InterNex was later acquired by Concentric/XO.
In 2002 – 2003 Rob was a visiting research fellow at the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM) in Tokyo with a focus on Open Spectrum technology (UltraWideband spread spectrum, Cognitive / Software Defined Radios, Wireless Mesh Networks, expanded unlicensed 802.11 wireless) and how it impacts spectrum policy.
Over the years Rob has provided technology consulting in Architecture, Due Diligence & Design Review/Evaluation in the realms of backbone networks, access networks, wireless networks, DevOps, software development and innovative Internet/Web applications and services to technology start-ups, top names in Internet hardware and software, as well as venture capital firms, including NEA, Athena Ventures and Panorama Capital.
Companies Rob has worked with as a consultant or advisor include Staples Labs, RFSpot, Continuuity, ElasticBox, Deutsche Telekom Hosted Business Services, Equilar, RiverMeadow, SkyPilot Networks, ZipDx, VISA, Cisco, Ascend, iPass, and Oki Networks. Through IBD he has provided services Rob has been on the Advisory Boards of companies including Netenrich, TelTel, Covad, Alteon WebSystems (acquired by Nortel), AboveNet, WeFi, BooRah, GridNetworks, Cloudscaling, Support Intelligence, Cosine Communications and Compass.
He has been a speaker on Next Generation Networks and DevOps / Cloud Technologies at conferences including re:Clojure, RedDotRuby Singapore, HBaseCon, CTIA and APRICOT (Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies). Rob is a member of the AWS Community Builders.
It’s a matter of scale. The amount of data most IT shops are talking about is handlable with SQL and relational databases. However, it starts to break down pretty quickly when you scale up by a factor of 1000 or more (every page on the web… for instance.)
It’s critical to add the capabilities of SQL ontop of processing systems like hadoop and mapreduce. The current systems are still clunky to use and could really improve productivity with another level of indirection so they simulated the already well known semantics of SQL but on a much larger scale.