Biography
Robert Ames is Senior Director, National Technology Strategy at VMware where he acts as a key link between government customers with challenging missions and VMware’s cutting edge Research and Development capabilities. Mr. Ames has made a career of driving innovation in government and public sector. He was formerly at In-Q-Tel where he led several practices, creating and executing investment strategies while building deep relationships with government leaders, technology startups and entrepreneurs. Through those activities, Mr. Ames has had a foundational role in modernizing big data architecture and analytics over the past decade. Prior to IQT, Mr. Ames was Director and Deputy CTO for IBM Federal, where he worked to apply innovations from IBM’s Research and Development organizations to government missions, bringing advancements in Virtualization, Automation and the early days of Cloud Computing to the Government.
IT is not Mr. Ames’ first career. He started his professional life as an opera singer. As a former musician in IT, Mr. Ames is passionate about the value of alternative disciplines in delivering innovative and ground-breaking approaches to complex problems. Mr. Ames is an active career mentor and an avid guitarist in his spare time.