Valid Tech Names Pat Botz Its President

Published: July 13, 2009

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Valid Technologies, a maker of biometric security technology located in Boca Raton, Florida, has named long-time IBM security expert and independent security consultant Pat Botz to be president of the company.

Botz, who has been gracious enough to contribute a number of security articles to our Four Hundred Guru newsletter, has a long career that began at supercomputer makers Control Data and ETA Systems, a Unix workstation spin-off of CDC. (Botz led the design of ETA's computer-aided design software.) In his 19-year career at IBM, Botz had a lot of positions, eventually becoming the security architect for the AS/400 and successor platforms and running IBM's security consulting services lab.

He left IBM at the end of 2007 and started his own consulting gig with some partners, called Group 8 Security, focusing on trying to bridge the gap between the technical aspects of security--setting up software to be secure--and the business aspects of security--setting down rules in plain English that govern who gets access to what information and applications, and under what conditions.

As you might imagine, the experience that Botz has had at IBM and as a consultant made him particularly valuable to companies like Valid Tech, where, as it turns out, Botz has been working as a consultant since May, prior to when he was tapped to be the company's president by Greg Faust, Valid Tech's managing partner.

"Pat is recognized throughout the industry for his security expertise and his work on eliminating the need for passwords," explained Faust in the statement announcing Botz' appointment. "He brings a unique understanding of both the technical and business aspects of the problems facing our customers. He has a wealth of experience working with all levels of an organization from executive management to skilled technical resources and knows how to help them balance security, cost, and ROI. Pat will help us make these key benefits of VSSA more apparent to the marketplace."

VSSA is, of course, short for Valid Secure System Authentication, which is available for i5/OS, Windows, AIX, Linux, Solaris, and other platforms to give systems and applications biometric security instead of passwords. Botz is now in charge of the marketing and technical programs behind the VSSA products and is going to be instrumental in driving its use among midrange and enterprise customers.

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