George Florentine

Fastwater Associate

Software Engineering and Architecture

phone:	303.669.8628
fax:	303.265.9567
e-mail:	georgef@fastwater.com

George is a Fastwater Associate from Kiva Consulting, where he is chief technology officer. In his work at Fastwater he provides consulting services related to software engineering architecture, practice, and implementation..

George's educational background is in plasma physics and nuclear fusion engineering. Matters of conscience intervened, and in the early 1980s, George worked in the development group at Progress Software Corporation. This worked involved system administration, software porting, and the development of client/server messaging protocols. Later, at Digital Equipment Corporation, George led a team of engineers that built a distributed file cabinet server and framework that is still in use today.

After having spent much of the '80s building relational database and file system components, the '90s provided a chance for George to turn his attention towards document databases, document architectures, object technologies, and information retrieval problems. At Information Dimensions and Interleaf, George held a variety of positions doing work in product management, product planning, software architecture, and software development. George was also chairman of AIIM's Document Management Architecture Technical Committee during the development and release of the DMA 1.0 specification.

Toward the end of the 1990s George worked with OpenDisc as product architect throughout the research phase of new product initiative to provide document repository and document management capabilities to the digital pre-press market. In this work he gained familiarity with pre-press product lines, digital print hardware offerings, and software architectures for enterprise print initiatives.

With Fastwater, George has worked on a number of customer projects. He defined the requirements framework for Rational Software Corporation's net market offer; he did technology research, design work and implementation tasks on a project utilizing XML, XML Schemas, XPath, and DOM for a client building a business rules engine and visual form design tool (precursor to XForms); and he was project manager, architect, and one of several implementers for a large B2B application that provided a net market for use by buyers and suppliers of high end commercial marine spare parts and provisions. In his work with Fastwater he has utilized a variety of state of the art B2B technologies including Oracle Exchange, XPath, XSLT and a variety of J2EE technologies.

George has been a speaker at numerous industry events, including the Delphi Group's seminar series on document management, COMDEX, DECUS, and AIIM.

George has a BS in Nuclear Engineering from MIT, and has done graduate work in nuclear power engineering.