Hal Stern is the Senior Vice President of Systems Engineering at Sun Microsystems. His responsibilities include technical leadership, training, and management of Sun's customer engineering teams in Global Sales and Services. Hal was involved in both the Sun ONE and Liberty Alliance Project architectures from their formative stages, and has been working with teams open sourcing Sun software projects. Hal's current technical interests include content delivery networks, privacy and security of large-scale systems, digital rights management for on-line and off-line use, network identity, structured data management, reliability and software quality measurement, applying telecommunications network principles to large-scale data centers, the future of horizontally scaled database systems and virtualization technologies from the chip to the filesystem levels. Hal has been at Sun more than 18 years, having previously held the titles of CTO for Software, CTO of Sun Services, Chief Architect for Sun Professional Services, CTO of the Sun ONE (iPlanet) infrastructure products division as Chief Technologist of the Northeast US sales area. Hal became the first field employee promoted to the position of Distinguished Engineer in February 1995. Hal was one of the creators of the first Java Day, held in New York City in September 1995. He received a Sun President's Award in 1993 for contribution to Sun's product strategies in clustered systems. He is listed as inventor or co-inventor on several patents in the networking and security areas. Before joining Sun, Hal developed molecular modeling software for a Boston area start up company and was on the research staff at Princeton University. Hal earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Princeton University in 1984. Hal currently blogs about everything from software economics to his latest nerd toys at blogs.sun.com. He is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi societies, and when he is not traveling he may be found playing ice hockey, aggressive skating, or playing golf very badly. Hal lives in Livingston, NJ with his wife Toby and two teenage children.