An unusual blend of vision, technical innovation, focus and leadership skills has enabled Jim Livermore and his team to produce an Application Protection System that has remained un-breached for eleven years; a truly remarkable and unequaled record. As founder and CEO of Livermore Software Laboratories and architect of PORTUS, Jim brings more than 30 years experience in development, marketing and support of computer systems.

Prior to LSLI, Jim worked with IBM Researchers and their industry counterparts to solve formerly intractable problems. During his 14 years at IBM he received more than 20 awards and was honored by corporate management as one of their top ten systems engineers. He was a recognized expert in high performance and high availability systems. He was the architect for IBM's first RAID product. He developed and applied analytical methods to predict the reliability and availability of complex mission critical systems. He developed "man-rated" mission critical software to support the Space Shuttle. At IBM he was responsible for the installation of more than $100,000,000 of complex computer systems, requiring high levels of skill in project management and technical leadership. He consulted with the highest levels of IBM and customer management on a world wide basis.

While working for the Systems Center, now part of Sterling Software, he was the architect of the industry-leading file distribution management product that has grossed more than $100,000,000.

During the last eleven years his work has focused on securing private networks from intruders. Jim has been a speaker at the three International Network Security Conferences sponsored by NASA, (Technology for Information Security Conference), IBM's GUIDE and SHARE meetings, ISSA meetings and at National Computer Security Association conferences. He has taught firewall classes at Rice University as well as at the University of Houston.

In 1994, Jim defined the functional requirements for protecting mission critical systems in the 21st century. First, application protection required both network level defenses and application specific defenses. Second, the Application Protection System (APS) must be capable of delivering multi-gigabit system throughput, Third, the APS must incorporate a High Availability (99.999%) design using fault tolerant self-healing hardware and software. The system should be highly scalable offering a cost effective solution for organizations of all sizes. The design decisions made 9 years ago have been verified. Just as important, the PORTUS APS is well positioned to support the latest IT trends, including utility computing.