Interoperability's own General Patton

摘要

For relaxation, Fred Wettling zigzags his Yamaha sport-touring motorcycle along a serpentine stretch of North Carolina Highway 129 known as the Tail of the Dragon. The 11-mile route, stuffed accordion-like into 318 corners with such names as Hog Pen, Little Whip and Gravity Cavity, is as much a spiritual recharge as it is a metaphor for Wettling's IT career ― a journey filled with twists and turns where he's always been at the controls with his hand on the throttle. As infrastructure architect for San Francisco global engineering and construction firm Bechtel, Wettling dissects the future and extracts the technology that drives the company forward. A self-taught computer fanatic, he also chairs the Network Applications Consortium (NAC), a small group of like-minded network executives from corporate giants such as Bechtel, Boeing, Disney and Nike that promotes integration, interoperability and vendor collaboration. The NAC politely pins big-boy vendors such as Cisco, IBM and Microsoft up against the schoolyard fence and convinces them to play nice. "The level of trust and the competence we've established in the NAC allows us to exert our influence," says Wettling, who joined the group in 1997 after wandering into a meeting to check out the agenda."It's something individual members couldn't do on their own."