Robin Gareiss is Executive Vice President and Senior Founding Partner for Nemertes Research, where she oversees research projects and direction, conducts strategic seminars, develops cost models, and advises leading enterprises, vendors, and carriers. She currently serves as chief financial officer, as well.

For the past 17 years, Robin Gareiss has worked closely with hundreds of senior IT executives, analyzing their use of technology and capturing best practices. Ms. Gareiss is a widely recognized expert in voice over IP, convergence, collaboration, carrier services, IP networking, and branch-office technologies. She is a sought-after speaker at conferences and trade shows, including Interop, where she serves as chairperson for the Branch Offices track, VoiceCon, Mobile Business Expo, Supercomm, Telecom, and CeBit America. She also writes the Branch Offices Best Practices column for Network World.

Ms. Gareiss also has personal experience managing operations and developing new product offerings. Her entrepreneurial experience includes co-founding and overseeing marketing and business development for American Eco-Systems, a water-purification business in Illinois. She also served as president of Living Hope Lutheran Church, and ran several successful fundraisers for children’s cancer and other charities.

Before joining Nemertes, Ms. Gareiss shaped technology and business coverage as Senior News Editor of InformationWeek, a leading business-technology publication with 440,000 readers owned by the $359 million organization CMP Media. Prior to joining InformationWeek, Ms. Gareiss served in a variety of capacities at Data Communications magazine, where helped set strategic direction, oversaw reader surveys, and provided quantitative and statistical analysis. At these organizations Ms. Gareiss also helped develop, organize, and operate Web sites, TV, and print coverage of major trade shows. She has won numerous, prestigous awards for her in-depth analyses of business-technology issues.

Ms. Gareiss also taught ethics at the Poynter Institute for Advanced Media Studies. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and American Medical News. Ms. Gareiss has a BS in journalism and a minor in education, with honors, from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She lives in Illinois with her husband and four daughters.