Skip to content

Danny Barnett Curriculum Vitae

Danny Barnett

Technology Executive | AI Platforms and Infrastructure | Enterprise Transformation | Cloud

New York, NY | danny@dannybarnett.com | linkedin.com/in/dannybarnett

Profile

Technology executive who builds and runs AI infrastructure at frontier scale. I led the engineering organisation behind IBM Research, the AI, cloud and research-computing platforms on which IBM’s Granite foundation models are built, and have led global organisations of up to 2,000 professionals with annual technology budgets of $250 to 300 million. I held the Information Security Officer accountability for IBM Research, governing export-controlled and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-regulated data. Twenty-five years of converting technology into business outcomes: a CIO 100-winning analytics platform, IBM’s global Salesforce transformation, and the technology function that launched Kyndryl.

At a glance

$250 to 300M annual budgets  ·  2,000 professionals led  ·  4,000+ researchers enabled  ·  28,000 sellers on Salesforce

Capabilities

Strategy and leadership: Technology Strategy, Enterprise Transformation, Operating-Model Design, Talent and Culture, Executive Leadership, Strategic Partnerships, Financial Stewardship

AI platforms: AI Platform Engineering, LLM Gateway and Model Serving, Agentic AI Infrastructure (MCP, watsonx Orchestrate, LangGraph), GPU and Research Computing (HPC), Model Governance and Export Controls, Generative AI, FinOps and Cost Attribution

Infrastructure and operations: Infrastructure Strategy and Operations, Data Centre and Hybrid Hosting, Compute, Storage, Backup and Network Services, Platform Engineering and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible), Service Management and Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, Vendor and Managed-Services Governance

Security and risk: Security, Risk and Compliance (ISO 27001, HIPAA, Export Controls), Vulnerability Management

Enterprise applications: Enterprise Applications, Salesforce, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Marketing Technology, Sales Analytics, Agile Transformation, DevOps and CI/CD

Experience

VP, Emerging Technology Engineering, IBM Research – IBM, New York, NY | December 2021 – August 2026

Led a global organisation of 100 professionals delivering the AI, cloud, research-computing and operational platforms used by more than 4,000 researchers across artificial intelligence, quantum computing, semiconductors and hybrid cloud.

AI PLATFORMS

  • Deployed enterprise AI tools to 4,000+ researchers, with governance, evaluation frameworks, FinOps and export controls designed in from the start.
  • Delivered Blue Vela, IBM Research’s purpose-built on-premises AI training supercomputer: 6,144 NVIDIA H100 GPUs on an InfiniBand fabric. Made “Time to Models” the engineering measure for accelerating Granite 3.0 foundation-model development.
  • Built the executive case for IBM’s strategic CoreWeave partnership, contributing to the world’s first commercial deployment of NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 systems for Granite model development: 4,032 GB200 GPUs on InfiniBand.
  • Operated the enterprise LLM gateway (LiteLLM) connecting on-premises inference services with Vertex AI (GCP), Amazon Bedrock (AWS) and Azure AI Foundry, organising access by business objective, setting per-team budgets, and reporting portfolio-wide AI spend to the Director of IBM Research.
  • Governed which models researchers may use and where they may run them: data-governance and export-control rules restrict controlled workloads to approved environments, with sandboxed clients to prevent intellectual-property loss.
  • Built agentic AI infrastructure: an agent orchestration layer on watsonx Orchestrate (LangGraph under evaluation) and MCP servers that expose IBM Research’s application layer to models as governed, callable tools.
  • Delivered AskResearch, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) assistant answering questions across the whole of IBM Research, from booking a meeting room to opening a ticket to in-depth research work.
  • Ran a network of research teams across every geography, fluent in the training technology and in emerging practice, with programmes to spread what worked across all of them.
  • Built prototypes, wrote configuration and ran model evaluations personally, leading from the front on new tooling.

INFRASTRUCTURE AND OPERATIONS

  • Ran the full IBM Research estate: storage, backup and network across GPU, quantum and CPU compute; 21 petabytes of storage across three data centres; cloud environments on AWS, GCP and IBM Cloud.
  • Delivered 95% availability across the GPU estate with 18×6 operational coverage and site recovery plans.
  • Led the technical decision to select InfiniBand for Blue Vela, taken after extensive consultation with NVIDIA’s senior network engineers.
  • Ran the schedulers across the estate: Slurm on the CoreWeave cluster, LSF on Blue Vela and Kueue on the OpenShift clusters.
  • Ran 160 OpenShift clusters on IBM Cloud for IBM Research.
  • Provisioned AWS, GCP, IBM Cloud and on-premises environments with Terraform and maintained them with Ansible; automated management spanned more than 1,000 devices and cut security exposure by a third.

SECURITY AND FINANCIAL STEWARDSHIP

  • Held the Information Security Officer accountability for IBM Research: implemented IBM’s corporate security framework (an adapted ISO 27001), defined Research-specific data-management policies covering export-controlled and HIPAA-regulated data, and reported vulnerability posture to the Director of IBM Research.
  • Reduced annual cloud expenditure from $40 million to $30 million through FinOps governance, observability and operational discipline, while AI demand was rising.
  • Governed strategic vendors including CoreWeave, AWS, GCP, Cisco and Palo Alto Networks at enterprise scale.

VP, Sales and Marketing Technology – IBM, New York, NY | July 2016 – December 2021

Led IBM’s global Sales and Marketing Technology organisation: 2,000 professionals delivering business-critical platforms for 28,000 sellers, 100,000 business partners and worldwide marketing operations.

DELIVERY AND TRANSFORMATION

  • Delivered Salesforce Sales Cloud to 28,000 sellers in under a year, built on simplified global sales processes.
  • Built the Sales and Marketing technology capability required for Kyndryl’s launch, delivering a fully operational function of 600 people in nine months.
  • Created a real-time, event-driven sales analytics platform giving executives live pipeline and quarter-end visibility from seller to CEO; recognised with a CIO 100 Award.
  • Owned IBM’s sales data warehouse, covering sales opportunities and their linkage to financial reporting, and moved it to real-time event-based ingestion on Spark.
  • Modernised the application portfolio, moving 80% to cloud and funding the transformation from its own efficiency gains.

OPERATIONS AND COMPLIANCE

  • Ran revenue-critical systems 24×7 to formal service level agreements, with formal help desks, through quarter close and Sales Incentives financial close.
  • Ran revenue systems that fed IBM’s financial close and were subject to Sarbanes-Oxley review.
  • Ran the Watson Health IT team (2017 to 2019): all infrastructure and applications externally audited and HIPAA-compliant.
  • Led disaster recovery planning under IBM’s corporate compliance programmes.

PEOPLE AND OPERATING MODEL

  • Led Brilliant at the Basics across 2,000 professionals and 280 Agile teams, raising engineering maturity from 2.5 to 4.0 and employee Net Promoter Score from 37 to 57.
  • Rebuilt hiring for a function with 10% annual attrition, 25% in some geographies: a rigorous trust-based interview practice adapted from Google’s, which raised the bar and kept a constant pipeline of candidates.
  • Rebalanced the global delivery model over 18 months, reducing reliance on a single geography from 650 engineers to 13 without missing delivery commitments.

Chief of Staff to the IBM Chief Information Officer – IBM, New York, NY | November 2014 – August 2016

Chief of Staff to IBM’s CIO through one of the largest Agile transformations attempted at enterprise scale, a 20,000-person technology organisation.

  • Defined the operational metrics framework used across 2,000 Agile squads, creating consistent measures from individual teams to the CIO.
  • Designed the global delivery-location strategy, consolidating teams from 140 locations into 14 strategic centres.
  • Briefed more than 160 customers and industry audiences and coordinated decisions across the CIO leadership team and IBM executive management.

Senior Manager, Web Marketing Innovation – IBM, London, UK | July 2010 – October 2014

Led technology strategy and delivery for IBM Software’s global digital marketing platforms, serving 60 million annual visitors and supporting a multi-billion-dollar sales pipeline.

  • Consolidated the worldwide web estate and redesigned the production model, reducing annual operating cost by $2 million.
  • Led the London Marketing Experience Lab as a concurrent assignment, bringing IBM Marketing, CIO teams and agencies into startup-style Agile product teams; recruited its technical team and built its CI/DevOps environment.
  • Served as product owner for REACH, which applied IBM Research machine-learning technology to identify influential external voices and measure their effect on IBM’s market perception.
  • Developed the investment cases that secured executive funding for worldwide digital marketing technology.

Consultant and Programme Manager, Multiple Roles – IBM, London, UK | July 2001 – July 2010

Held successive consulting and programme-management roles in IBM’s CIO organisation, leading global e-commerce and digital-experience programmes for IBM Software.

  • Designed and delivered enterprise e-commerce platforms generating more than $75 million in online sales, including an SAP-integrated self-service environment for trials, purchases, downloads and renewals.
  • Led worldwide web transformation programmes twice recognised by SiteIQ as the leading enterprise software website.
  • Introduced early Web 2.0 and content-syndication capabilities to the ibm.com estate.

Advisory and Governance

Customer Advisory Board Member, External Advisor – CoreWeave | August 2025 – Present

Serve as an external enterprise advisor on AI infrastructure requirements, platform capabilities, resilience and governance.

Victim Support, London, UK

Member of the national Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Board (October 2013 to February 2015), providing board-level oversight of the charity’s EDI strategy so that services and governance reflected the communities served. London Assembly Member (April 2011 to August 2013), the senior elected volunteer representative, working with trustees and staff on governance and volunteer engagement; led a national programme to strengthen volunteer participation and chaired the working group that redesigned the Assembly election process. Long-term frontline volunteer working with people affected by crime.

Recognition and Thought Leadership

  • CIO 100 Award for the real-time sales analytics platform that gave IBM executives live global pipeline and quarter-end visibility.
  • Co-author, “The infrastructure powering IBM’s Gen AI model development” (2024), documenting the engineering behind IBM’s large-scale foundation-model platforms.
  • Featured in CoreWeave’s IBM AI Cloud customer case study on operating AI infrastructure at enterprise scale.

Education

University of Oxford – MA, Literae Humaniores
Warwick Business School – MBA

Credentials and Languages

Fellow, British Computer Society – The Chartered Institute for IT (FBCS)
Chartered IT Professional (CITP)
Fellow, Royal Society of Arts (FRSA)
Languages: French, Urdu and Yoruba