Alternative Technologies- David McGoveran

David McGoveran

Mr. McGoveran has served as President of Alternative Technologies (Felton and Boulder Creek, CA) since 1976 and is an internationally known analyst, and management and technology consultant. He has founded two consulting companies and three not-for-profit organizations, and served as a principal in each of them. He serves as CTO Pro Tem for startup companies until they can staff the position with appropriately experienced and permanent personnel. He has become well-known for his thought leadership as an analyst, consultant, and educator regarding both the business and technology of e-Business and integration (BPMS, adapter frameworks, and B2Bi), helping to set key marketing and technology strategies for firms such as IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sybase.

Though no longer associated with the company, he co-founded DataBase Associates International (Morgan Hill, CA) along with Colin White, Rich Finkelstein, and Paul Winsberg in 1989. Mr. McGoveran has authored or co-authored a number of technical books, including (with Chris Date) A Guide to SYBASE and SQL Server, has authored numerous technical articles, and often serves as technical consultant to the press, financial analysts, and venture capital firms. He has been Senior Technical Editor of the Business Integration Journal (formerly The eAI Journal) since its inception, and Founder, Chairman of the non-profit Enterprise Integration Council (EIC) which reached a membership of over sixty firms under his direction.

Mr. McGoveran provides strategic innovation services (ranging from marketing strategies, competitive analysis, and technology audits to primary market research) for many companies including software vendors. He continues to consult for end-users and vendors regarding application architecture, integration (of businesses, technologies, and enterprise applications), migration, database design, development methodology, design audits, performance tuning, database evaluation/selection, and deployment. He has consulted for virtually every major database vendor. He designed and developed the first commercial CIM system using a relational DBMS. The client/server system also used custom knowledge-based technology and was arguably the world's first business process management system. He has in-depth experience with a wide range of applications (manufacturing, bond trading and portfolio management, health insurance, telecommunications, and Web-businesses). He was the main architect of one of the first uses of object-oriented programming with RDBMSs.

Mr. McGoveran has over thirty-five years experience in mission critical applications and over thirty years experience consulting on RDBMS and distributed application problems. He has broad experience with a variety of systems, fault tolerance, scalability, and distributed systems, and is knowledgeable about a wide variety of database products, from desktop to mainframe. He is best known for his ability to blend practical solutions with a technical understanding, resulting in robust and flexible systems. In 1993 he introduced new database design principles which permit modeling of missing information without use of nulls and, in work with Chris Date, principles which guarantee the updatability of views and permit transaction optimization. A number of his innovations have been awarded patents or are currently patent pending, including work on collaborative transactions, adaptive semantic integration, and business processes.