Andrew Herbert
Distinguished Engineer/Managing Director
Microsoft Research Cambridge
Microsoft Corp.

Andrew Herbert is a distinguished engineer and a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and is the managing director of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. Initially joining Microsoft Research in 2001 as an assistant director, in March 2003 he succeeded the founding director, Roger Needham.

Herbert’s research interests include networks, operating systems, programming languages and distributed information sharing.

Before joining Microsoft Research in 2001, he was director of Advanced Technology at Citrix Systems Inc., where he was instrumental in steering the company toward Internet thin-client technologies and initiating development of products for Web-based application deployment and for the emerging application service provider market.

Herbert joined Citrix in 1998 from Digitivity Inc., which he founded in 1996 to develop a product to enable secure deployment of Java clients for business-to-business applications. Digitivity was a spinoff from APM Ltd., a research and consulting company Herbert founded in 1985. APM managed ANSA, an industry-sponsored program of research and advanced development into the use of distributed systems technology to support applications integration in enterprisewide systems. ANSA’s work included research on support for interactive multimedia services, object technology for World Wide Web applications, distributed systems management, mobile object systems and security for electronic commerce. Herbert led ANSA’s technical program, built up its team, created its architecture, and made ANSA known and respected in the industry. ANSA-based technology was used by many organizations ahead of the widespread availability of commercial CORBA-based products. Notable successes included the NASA Astrophysics Data System, a European radio pager system and the online customer service system for a major U.K. utility. As part of his ANSA work, Herbert played an active role in many standards and consortia for distributed computing including the Telecommunications Information Networking Architecture Consortium (TINA-C), ISO/ITU ODP, the Open Software Foundation Distributed Computing Environment (OSF DCE) and Object Management Group (OMG) CORBA.

Before starting ANSA in 1985, Herbert was a faculty member in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in England, where he worked with Roger Needham and Maurice Wilkes on seminal developments in local area networks (LANs) and distributed computing. In 1979 Herbert helped Needham and Wilkes edit “The Cambridge CAP Computer and Its Operating System,” and in 1982 he co-authored “The Cambridge Distributed Computing System” with Needham. In 2003, Herbert co-edited a monograph of papers written in tribute to Needham, “Computer Systems: Theory, Technology and Applications,” with Karen Spärck Jones.

Herbert is a fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, a member of St. John’s College Cambridge, and a liveryman of the City of London Worshipful Company of Information Technologists. In 1975 he graduated from the University of Leeds with a B.Sc. in computational science and in 1978 with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in computer science.