Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a Senior Vice President and Founding Partner with Nemertes Research, where he develops and manages research projects, conducts strategic seminars and advises key clients. Andreas is a computer scientist, a master of data communications and distributed systems, a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and a self-professed geek, with an engineering, programming and consulting background.

For the past 16 years, has advised a range of global industries on emerging technologies and trends, and developed business strategies for the efficient and effective use of technology. An early pioneer who saw the potential of the Internet in 1988, Mr. Antonopoulos helped many businesses harness new processes to take advantage of the rapid developments in telecommunications.

In 1990, Mr. Antonopoulos started teaching on various IT topics in private, professional and academic environments. Mr. Antonopoulos honed his speaking skills in front of audiences ranging in size from five executives in a boardroom to hundreds of people in large conferences. In 1995 and 1996 Mr. Antonopoulos scored the highest instructor yearly average for attendee evaluations worldwide delivering more than 20 rounds of Learning Tree's intensive 4 day hands-on security workshops . With more than three hundred speaking engagements under his belt he is considered a world-class and charismatic public speaker and teacher.

Mr Antonopoulos writes the security column Risk and Reward for Network World magazine.

Mr Antonopoulos is currently involved in the following conferences and events:

- Speaker, Application and Content Security, Network World IT Roadmap
- Content and Speaker, The New Data Center, Network World IT Roadmap
- Advisory Board and Program Committee, Next Generation Data Center Expo
- Advisory Board, LinuxWorld
- Speaker, AFCOM Data Center World 2007
- Speaker, Panelist, Moderator, BladeSystems Insight

Mr. Antonopoulos is a true “generalist” who is well-versed in many diverse technology subjects. With experience ranging from hardware and electronics to high level business consulting, he combines authority and deep knowledge with an ability to make complex subjects easy to understand. He often brings a fresh perspective to a topic with surprising insights and his ability to identify underlying principles and connections between different topics.
In 1991, he also became involved in cryptography, which at the time was considered a “suspicious” technology that was strictly controlled by government agencies. He became an expert in the area of computer security while the field was still in its infancy.

Throughout his career, Mr. Antonopoulos has maintained an entrepreneurial spirit, creating and managing several companies as well as advising startups. As a consultant he has led large teams on multi-million dollar projects for Fortune 500 companies, designing large and complex secure networks. Advising clients at the board level, he is able to combine his deep technical knowledge with a solid grasp on business goals and objectives. Mr. Antonopoulos has years of experience working with CXOs, then translating their business goals into detailed designs for the technical teams he leads.

Mr. Antonopoulos is also an early pioneer in the open source software space. Starting with 386BSD in 1991 and then Linux in 1992 (version 0.95), he participated in the launch of the open-source phenomenon into mainstream use. Two of the businesses he launched leveraged Linux both internally and for providing services to financial companies, before the emergence of "corporate" Linux distributions such as SUSE and RedHat. He has contributed code to and project managed a number of open source projects.

Mr. Antonopoulos studied computer science at UCL in the UK and then earned his Master’s degree in Data Communications, Networks and Distributed Systems. As part of his undergraduate thesis project, Mr. Antonopoulos designed and implemented a distributed whiteboard and desktop sharing P2P application for X-Windows on Unix, long before the emergence of Webex and collaborative applications in the mainstream. He then continued as a research fellow for the University of London, researching distributed systems and security and lecturing on electronic commerce. Later he founded Phaia Limited, a UK consulting firm, specializing in the use of Linux systems for security and small business networking when Linux was in its infancy (1995).

Starting in Greece in the late 80’s Mr. Antonopoulos founded his first business as a radio producer for a radio station he built from scratch using vacuum tubes. He leveraged his early experiences in the nascent personal computer scene to co-founded two businesses: one of the largest greek bulletin board systems using the very first consumer modems (1987) and one of the first commercial Internet nodes in Greece (1990).

Before joining Nemertes, Mr. Antonopoulos was the Security Practice Director at ThruPoint Inc, where he was responsible for a global team of security consultants who deliver solutions to multinational clients. Prior to ThruPoint he was a Security Practice Lead at Greenwich Technology Partners, where he designed the security architecture of a global wire-transfer network interconnecting the world’s banks.