Derek leads product marketing, partner marketing, and communications for Rightware, the leader in automotive UI software. Building on a career in product management and strategic planning in smartphone software and hardware platforms as well as telecoms, he most recently led cloud and data center community evangelism at Intel’s Open Source Technology Center. Derek’s degrees span technology and business, with an engineering master’s degree from the University of Michigan, business studies at Aalto University in Helsinki, and ongoing doctoral studies in technology-driven businesses and platform economies.

Rightware® is the leader in advanced user interface technology, serving automotive and other embedded industries with its Kanzi® software for rapid user interface design and deployment. Rightware is headquartered in Finland and has a presence in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, China, South Korea, and Japan. Rightware is a wholly owned subsidiary of Thunder Software Technology Ltd. Co. Our passion is to unleash creativity to enable fantastic user experiences. Using Kanzi, our customers drive innovation and create the industry’s most impressive user experiences for digital instrument clusters, infotainment (IVI) systems, HUDs, and more. Rightware has established a broad HMI ecosystem through the Kanzi Partner Program, which gives car manufacturers access to a wide range of Kanzi partners, including Tier 1 and Tier 2 companies, SoC and GPU vendors, operating system vendors, design studios, and other automotive technology companies.