Johannes Ernst

Johannes is founder/CEO of NetMesh, and a recognized leader in the user-centric identity management market.

Before starting NetMesh, Johannes was founder, CEO, and Chief Architect of Aviatis Corp., a venture-backed Silicon Valley startup that provided distributed engineering tools. At Aviatis, he oversaw the successful development and market introduction of a novel collaboration and integration product for technical users in the automotive industry.

A native of Germany, he came to California in 1995 to work for Integrated Systems, an embedded software vendor since merged with Wind River Systems. Previously, he had been with BMW Engineering in Munich, Germany, and FZI, from where he consulted for a large German automotive consortium on distributed product development processes.

Johannes has always been active in industry groups: In the Object Management Group, he started the group that defined object-oriented modeling for real-time systems (UML for real-time). He participated in the definition of the UML object modeling language. He also was an officer of CDIF, an early industry group defining semantic meta-models and interchange facilities. Most recently, he co-initiated the Yadis project, which defines the emerging interoperability layer for internet-wide, decentralized digital identity technologies. He serves on the board of the OpenID Foundation. He also co-initiated, with Microsoft and VeriSign, the OSIS project, which brings together most identity management software companies to deliver working, interoperable identity management products.

In 2001, Johannes became a member of a select group of "Technology Pioneers" recognized by the World Economic Forum in its annual Davos meeting, Switzerland.

Johannes is generally credited as the inventor of the concept of URL-based identity in the LID project. He has a doctorate and a master's degree in electrical engineering from the universities of Karlsruhe and Erlangen, Germany, respectively.

His blog is at netmesh.info.jernst, which also serves as his OpenID.