Biography

Derek Masseth leads a staff of over 100 in the central IT unit at the University of Arizona, a Research I institution with over 50,000 students, faculty and staff. The units under his direction are responsible for managing a wide array of IT functional areas, including the University's primary data centers, voice and data networks, computing labs, desktop support, help desk environments, and high performance and high throughput computing.

With over 20 years of experience building, maintaining, and growing production IT environments, Derek directs his teams to push the envelope to make campus computing as powerful, streamlined, and economical as possible to support the ever increasing technical demands of a large research university. His most recent accomplishments center on his vision for a virtual data center and include partnering with Cisco to become the first higher education adopter of Fiber Channel over Ethernet technology, an innovation that resulted in over $600,000 in cost savings during the first year of implementation.

Currently, Derek is leading the initiative to revolutionize communications at UA through a modernization of tools and a move toward cloud technology. By offering leading edge, cost effective services, Derek hopes to dissolve many of the barriers that previously prevented centralized solutions to departmental IT needs.

Derek's portfolio also includes the following projects:
-The Mosaic Enterprise Applications Replacement Project is the single largest IT project ever undertaken at the University of Arizona. Derek manages the infrastructure and middleware components of this modernization, which represents $15 million of the total $90 million cost.
-In 2007, Derek managed a 200-person discovery/recovery effort in response to a major security breach at the Main Library. Upon returning campus to a functional state, Derek received the Staff Excellence Award, the most prestigious award that UA can bestow on an employee. Since that time, Derek has been the de facto Incident Commander during all subsequent IT incidents.
-Derek provides day-to-day stewardship of UA's Network Master Plan, a long-range vision to deliver a robust, modern computing and communications infrastructure to campus.

Major initiatives such as these have made Derek a recognizable figure in the IT world: he is frequently invited to speak at conferences and trade shows and receives numerous inquiries from technologists around the world looking to virtualize systems infrastructure.

EDUCAUSE Involvement