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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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FIR Interview - Jeremy Burton, CEO, Serena Software, on Facebook Fridays: November 16, 2007

While reports continue to flood out of the business world of companies blocking employee access to online venues—notably social media and especially social networks—Serena Software has taken the opposite approach, actively encouraging employees to network with each other on Facebook. Serena’s CEO, Jeremy Burton, has written about his philosophy for ZDNet Asia; the company even issued a press release about it.

In this exclusive FIR Interview, Shel Holtz talked with Burton about the “Facebook Fridays” program, his view of the value social networks bring to the organization, and his opinion about how other companies are handling employee time spent on social networks.

About our Conversation Partner

Jeremy BurtonJeremy Burton brings 20 years in the high technology industry to Serena as president and CEO. Prior to joining Serena, Mr. Burton was group president of the enterprise security and data management business unit at Symantec. Mr. Burton was responsible for engineering, product management, alliances, and business development for Symantec???s endpoint security, compliance, archiving, Windows backup, security response, and managed security service offerings.

Burton joined Symantec through the company???s merger with VERITAS Software in July 2005. At VERITAS, he was executive vice president of the data management group. Previously, he served as the company’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer.

Before joining VERITAS in April 2002, Burton served as senior vice president of product and services marketing at Oracle Corporation. He also founded Oracle’s developer program, Oracle Technology Network, which today has millions of members. Before working in marketing, Mr. Burton held positions in customer support, pre-sales, product management, and engineering.

Burton graduated from the University of Surrey in Guildford, England in June 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in information systems engineering. He and his wife, Ruth, have three children.

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