InfoWorld CTO 25: Ravi Arimilli

As the holder of more patents -- 305 -- than any other IBM employee, you’d think Ravi Arimilli would rest on his laurels. Instead, the youngest-ever IBM fellow is pushing ahead as chief scientist on the 500-person Power7 eServer development team. Back in 1996, CEO Lou Gerstner asked Arimilli to lead the Power4 server project, with the goal of taking IBM from No. 4 to No. 1 in Unix server market share. With new caching designs, virtualization, and simultaneous multithreading, Arimilli helped achieve that goal with Power4 and Power5. “In the past, IBM was viewed as having good performance,” Arimilli says. “But no one believed we could take a Power5-like technology and drive a price point down below x86 commodity type pricing.” For his next act, Arimilli says, he wants to make sure the innovation curve stays steep: “We’re going for a moon shot. The most fun part of my job is having the technical freedom to innovate and drive almost disruptive solutions.”

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