HopalongPetrovski
I'm Spartacus!
Thanks Terroni.Hi Hopa
i tried to clarify this in my mind a week or so ago by asking Grok.
I asked again now and this is the response of what is role does which seems to align clearly with what we are seeing him do “blogging and evangelizing IBM’s capabilities”:
Kevin D. Johnson is a Field CTO at IBM, specifically focused on HPC (High-Performance Computing), AI, LLMs (Large Language Models), and Quantum Computing. His full title is often listed as Field CTO – HPC, AI, LLM & Quantum Computing | Principal HPC Cloud Technical Specialist at IBM.
What the Role Involves (Simply)
As a Field CTO, Kevin acts as a senior technical leader and expert advisor who works directly with clients, partners, and internal teams in the field (not just in headquarters). His responsibilities include:
It's a senior, influential role — not the overall IBM CTO (that's someone else), but a specialized Field CTO who has significant autonomy to innovate and influence in his domain (HPC/AI/Quantum). He often builds and shares personal prototypes (like the targeting system with Symphony + Akida + Foundry) to showcase possibilities, even if they're not yet official IBM products.
- Providing deep technical guidance on IBM's advanced technologies like Spectrum Symphony (for workload orchestration), GPFS/Storage, LSF, and emerging AI/HPC solutions.
- Helping customers deploy and optimize these tools in demanding environments (government, research, finance, etc.).
- Exploring and prototyping cutting-edge integrations (e.g., with neuromorphic chips like BrainChip Akida, Palantir Foundry, or distributed AI setups) to demonstrate real-world value.
- Speaking, blogging, and evangelizing IBM's capabilities through demos, articles, and community posts (he's very active on IBM Community and LinkedIn).
- Bridging between IBM's engineering/R&D and real customer needs — he's hands-on with code, architectures, and proofs-of-concept.
In short: He's an expert "technical ambassador" for IBM's high-end computing and AI tech, working with clients and the ecosystem to push boundaries and solve complex problems.
apparently they have multiple field CTO’s but IBM doesn’t disclose how many.
That reads to me that his role is basically a highly qualified sales rep actively showcasing and demonstrating IBM's wares in real life situations.
Before I retired I played a similar role for many years although in a much less technical sphere.
It's generally enjoyable work, providing solutions and better outcomes for clients working in a competitive field.
By showing them, in their workplace, first hand, your superior product doing what they already do, more efficiently, or faster, or cheaper.
Sales tend to make themselves and you rake in the commissions and get recommended to their friends and peers.
It's a good gig. Pretty much semi autonomous and as long as you are doing the numbers and not pissing anybody who matters off, too much, they generally just leave you alone to get on with it.
I get what he does.
My query was towards his motivation.
Yes he is promoting Symphony but why gush about us so much?
I mean I like it and am happy for him to continue and progress up the line with Akida's more advanced siblings........but why?
Yeah, maybe he's quietly accumulated some shares (and good for him if he has) but my spider sense suggests there's more to it.
In the last few weeks he has done more, and more exciting stuff with Akida than the company itself or any of our other partners.
Again, I don't give a rats what my fridge does on vacation.
Making music, playing Doom, evidencing hive minds and maybe even rudimentary AGI along with demonstrating real life use cases of how even our concept neuromorphic chips can save massive amounts of energy and compute resources in data centre type operations enabling big Dollar cost savings.
A young Musk type with drive and some financial backing could build a business empire commercialising merely what Kevin has demonstrated and publicised over the past month or so.
He is promoting us like Edison did electricity.
See his latest webpage.
Kevin D. Johnson
Building systems that discover what they don't know. HPC+AI Infrastructure, Neuromorphic Computing, Quantum-Centric Supercomputing, Forward-Deployed Engineering.
kevindjohnson.org
Again, I love it, but why?