Joel Horwitz is the Vice President, Ecosystem and Partnership Development, IBM. He graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle with a Masters in Nanotechnology with a focus in Molecular Electronics. He also hails from the University of Pittsburgh with an International MBA in Product Marketing and Financial Management. Joel designed, built, and launched new products at Intel and Datameer resulting in breakthrough innovations. He set and executed upon strategies at AVG Technologies that led to accretive acquisitions. He established a big data science team and the first Hadoop cluster in the Europe. Most recently, he spearheaded new branding and positioning for Alpine Data Labs and H2O resulting in a new website, sales collateral, product messaging that resulted in significantly increased sales. He launched IBM | Spark and is now focused on building strategic partnerships and ecosystem.