Mark Burgess (ref: 1, 2) is the founder, CTO and principal author of CfEngine. He is Professor of Network and System Administration at Oslo University College and has led the way in theory and practice of automation and policy based IT management for 20 years. In the 1990s he underlined the importance of idempotent, autonomous desired state management (“convergence”) and formalized cooperative systems in the 2000s (“promise theory”). He is the author of numerous books and papers on Network and System Administration and has won several prizes for his work.He is a frequent speaker on worldwide conferences, including recent keynote presentations at Velocity 2011 and Lisa 2011.