Biographical Sketch: Doug Balog, General Manager, System z, is responsible for IBM’s worldwide mainframe server business and the IBM System z franchise. Doug has been part of IBM’s System’s and Technology group for 29 years with product development leadership and brand leadership roles across IBM System z, System x, BladeCenter and System Storage. During that time, he has led major portfolio transformations across the brands. Most recently, Doug was the worldwide business line executive for IBM System Storage where he led the complete transformation of IBM’s storage portfolio through new organic development, acquisitions and new partnerships. With this transformation, the IBM storage portfolio is the strongest it has ever been since IBM first invented disk drives in 1956. Doug graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a B.S. in Computer Science in 1983 and immediately joined IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY, working on the architectural validation of IBM’s next-generation mainframes. He spent 18 years in New York in a variety of development, brand and corporate roles until 2001 when he moved to San Francisco to help one of IBM’s largest clients deploy and operate one of the largest Parallel Sysplexes for Web trading at that time.