Biographical Sketch: Sandy Carter is Vice President, Social Business and Collaboration Solutions Sales and Evangelism, where she is responsible for setting the direction for IBM’s Social Business initiative, working with companies who are becoming Social Businesses, and being the evangelist for the concept and best practices around Social Business. Prior to her current position, Ms. Carter was VP, Software Business Partners and Midmarket where she was responsible for IBM’s worldwide software ecosystem initiatives, achieving 5 consecutive quarters of General Business growth, 20%+ Software Value Incentive (SVI) growth, and double digit Application Specific License (ASL) growth. She has won recognition from VAR Business, CRN Channel Champions, Xchange Excellence, and Forrester ISV Partner Program for IBM’s Business Partner program. She was also VP, SOA, BPM and WebSphere Strategy, Channels and Marketing where she drove IBM’s Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) marketing efforts to achieve 70% market share for SOA, and where IBM WebSphere® became a market leader, receiving more than 34 industry awards. Fast Company named Ms. Carter one of the most influential women in technology, and Everything Channels CRN magazine named her one of the most powerful 100 women in channels in 2010 and 2009. Ms. Carter is the best selling author of two books: “The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0”, which won the Platinum MarCom Award in 2008, and “The New Language of Marketing 2.0: Social Media”, which won the Silver MarketingSherpa award in 2009. She is an avid social media evangelist , leading an award winning marketing team to 27 awards, and is one of the top Bloggers and Twitter-ers in IBM. Ms. Carter received MarCom awards for her blogger and Twitter communities and for the 2010 Business Partner Virtual Event. She has also been recognized by World Brand Congress as 2009 Brand Leader of the Year, and by Altimeter Group as one of the top 10 women in social media. She is on the board of WITI (Women in Technology International) Executive Advisory Council, WITI GEN (Global Executive Network), the Forrester CMO Council, and International Child Art Foundation (ICAF). She also serves as a Board Member of the Grace Hopper Industry Advisory Committee. She is a member of the Marketing Focus Advisory Council; the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Inner Circle, the American Management Association (AMA), and the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). She was honored twice with the AIT United Nations Member of the Year award for helping developing countries in the area of technology. Ms. Carter is listed in Madison’s Who’s Who and the Cambridge Who’s Who. She was named “Best Speaker” by Baptie & Co for receiving the highest speaker rating of 4.9 at the Baptie 2010 Channel Focus North America/Latin America conference. AlwaysOn named Ms. Carter to the “Top 25 Women in Tech to Watch” list in 2010. She was inducted into the WITI Hall of Fame in September 2010. The WITI Hall of Fame Award was designed to recognize women's innovation across different fields of science and technology and to encourage young girls and women to become more technologically literate, as well as choose careers in science and technology. Ms. Carter holds a Bachelor of Science degree in math and computer science from Duke University and an MBA from Harvard, and is fluent in eight programming languages. She received a patent for developing a methodology and tool to help customers create a technology deployment path in automation of their IT processes. Visit her best rated blog at: http://socialmediasandy.wordpress.com/ and Twitter - http://twitter.com/sandy_carter