The National Inventors Hall of Fame recently announced that Kerrie Holley had been inducted as part of the Class of 2025.
On the organization's citation page, Holley, who earned a BEYA for Outstanding Technical Contribution, said that he's an active engineer and innovator through every era of computing, and he's been excited about each era.
The citation reads in part that Holley pioneered service-oriented architecture (SOA), a software architecture and programming model for large enterprises.
Guiding the creation and use of business processes, packaged as services, and defining the information technology (IT) infrastructure that allows applications to participate in these processes, SOA has benefited organizations across many industries. SOA is a precursor to cloud services.
Born in 1954, Holley grew up on Chicago’s South Side, in an area known for widespread poverty and gang violence. He was raised by his grandmother, who prioritized his safety.
“When you grow up in an environment where safety is a paramount concern, you think differently about problems,” Holley said in an interview with the National Inventors Hall of Fame. “That thinking has shaped my life.”
For many years, he spent his after-school time at the Sue Duncan Children’s Center, which was run by the mother of future U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Duncan refers to Holley as his first mentor.
At the center, Holley tutored children and developed a love of mathematics. He learned about computers and programming as a teen, and by age 14, at the dawn of the modern computing era, he wrote his first computer program.
In 1986, Holley joined IBM, kicking off a career that would span the next three decades. Holley introduced several technological advancements, from creating the first e-commerce site for a major retailer to developing a patent for providing recovery assistance for misplaced or stolen mobile devices. One of his most impactful contributions in technology was the creation of IBM’s strategy for SOA.
By 2007, SOA had been adopted by half the world’s 30 largest electronics companies; the world’s 10 largest auto manufacturers; the world’s 10 largest banks; the world’s 10 largest telecommunications companies; eight of the world’s 10 largest insurers; four of the world’s 10 largest retailers; 80% of the largest American healthcare providers; and most federal government agencies.
In 2000, Holley became the first Black engineer to be named an IBM Distinguished Engineer.
He also became a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, composed of the top 300 technologists at IBM. In 2003, he launched and led IBM’s worldwide SOA Center of Excellence, and in 2006, he was named an IBM Fellow, the company’s highest technical leadership position. In 2012, he became an IBM Master Inventor. In 2023, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).
After retiring from IBM in 2015, Holley continued to make significant impacts in the tech industry. Most recently, Holley brought his wealth of experience to Google, where he engaged with healthcare executives and focused on leveraging cloud computing, Large Language Models, and generative AI to drive innovation in healthcare.
In 2017, IBM laid out artificial intelligence (AI) considerations and ethical principles for a new era of computing. Two years later, IBM Research Science for Social Good Projects shared how they were applying AI, Cloud, and deep science toward today's most pressing societal challenges.
Earlier today, MarketWatch announced that IBM is getting in on the AI deal action with an Anthropic partnership.MarketWatch observed that while many AI partnerships have focused on consumer applications, IBM and Anthropic will be looking to grow enterprise adoption.
In a press release, IBM announced that the partnership with Anthropic will accelerate the development of enterprise-ready AI by infusing Anthropic’s Claude large language models (LLMs) into IBM’s software portfolio.
According to the press release, through the partnership, Claude will be integrated into select IBM software products, starting with IBM’s new AI-first integrated development environment, designed with advanced task generation capabilities for enterprise software development lifecycles, including software modernization.
More than 6,000 early adopters within IBM are using the new integrated development environment, reporting productivity gains averaging 45 percent, translating to meaningful cost savings while maintaining code quality and security standards.
Dinesh Nirmal, SVP, Software at IBM, said the partnership enhances their software portfolio with advanced AI capabilities while maintaining the governance, security, and reliability that our clients have come to expect.
Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer at Anthropic, said Claude has become the go-to AI for developers at the world's largest companies.
This partnership with IBM will bring that same level of dedication to even more enterprise teams while building the open standards that will make AI agents genuinely useful in business environments, he said.
Using LLMs such as Claude, the new IBM IDE is built to enable developers to be more productive.
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. Thousands of governments and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications, and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift for their digital transformations.
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