Barbara Nelson, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer

Barbara Nelson is senior vice president and chief technology officer for iPass and an industry visionary and pioneer in voice, data, mobile communications and international communications standards.

Nelson assumed the CTO role in 2007 and drives the key elements of the company’s overall technical vision, strategic projects and initiatives addressing the growing global mobility Internet and cloud opportunities. She also leads the engineering teams to deliver the entire suite of Open Mobile products and services. Her team also researches new technologies in support of new product initiatives.

Previously she served in a variety of roles at iPass including client architect, vice president of Information Systems, and vice president of Engineering. She architected the iPassConnect client, the company’s award-winning software that seamlessly integrates connectivity to a wide variety of access methods (Wi-Fi, dial, 3G mobile data, etc.) with a rich set of mobility management capabilities.

Nelson joined iPass in 2002, with over 20 years of engineering experience. Before iPass she served as a senior architect at Extricity Software, a provider of business-to-business integration applications. She also spent seven years at General Magic, developing a patented mobile agent platform, and building a carrier-based service including voice user interface (VUI) and graphic user interface (GUI) software. Previously she worked at Retix, a software company developing platform-independent solutions for OSI protocols and while there, chaired the X.400 Special Interest Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Nelson holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science with honors from University College Dublin, Ireland.