Hellmuth Broda held a variety of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) positions at Sun Microsystems Inc. for more than 13 years. He served for three years as Country Technology Manager-Switzerland and then assumed international functions as CTO Europe, Middle East and Africa. From there, he moved to a new role as European CTO, Corporate Strategic Insight Office.
His distinguished career at Sun included winning the 2005 Chairman’s Innovation Award. Until 2008 he served as CTO for Global Government Strategy, where he focused on designing open-systems policies for national and regional governments.
As a member of Sun’s Global Strategy Council, Hellmuth was the public face for Sun’s global strategic vision. He regularly met with analysts and customers – be they government officials or executives from public and private organizations and firms – to help them frame responses to the dramatic technological changes Sun and others were introducing worldwide.
Hellmuth has frequently spoken at major international conferences on technology strategic responses, open source policy and standards, open document formats, web services, and pervasive computing issues such as those presented by RFID, cloud computing’s evolution, social media, identity management, privacy and trust issues.
Since 2008, Hellmuth’s work has included a study on “ICT, Innovation and Entrepreneurship” for a Middle Eastern country in collaboration with the International Organization for Knowledge Economy and Enterprise Development (IKED in Sweden); the planning, management and moderation of a top-level security conference in Switzerland; chairmanship and moderation of the Net-ID conference in Berlin; the re-evaluation and redeployment of the IT infrastructure for a science organization; and the ongoing coaching of ICT start-up companies around the globe.
After receiving a master’s degree in chemistry and biology in 1975 from the University of Freiburg/Br. (Germany), Hellmuth worked for 10 years doing scientific research, later earning a Ph.D, degree in biophysics from Freiburg i Br. University. He also held a two-year term as scientific assistant at the Max-Planck-Institute for Cellular Biology, a three-year term as visiting scholar in biology at Harvard University, and another scientific assistant position at Konstanz University in the department of biophysics. From 1985 to 1995, Hellmuth served as IT manager with international responsibility supporting application development for R&D in the chemical and pharmaceutical industry in Basel, Switzerland.
Hellmuth was elected as a lifetime member of the Swiss Academy for Engineering Sciences, where he works as vice president of the Scientific Advisory Council. He was also elected as a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He serves on the boards of leading-edge technology companies, and as chairman of the board of Avalis Healthcare Systems AG, Zurich, and several research institutions. He has served as a member of the WEF Digital Divide Initiative, and was for six years on the Executive Jury for the European Commission’s IST prize for technology innovations. As a member of the Swiss ICT Award Jury, he helps identify and champion the selection of Swiss ICT winners for this prestigious award.