Carl Kraenzel is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Vice President, serving as the Chief Information Security Officer for Watson Health. He’s also led cloud & SaaS operations, IT security, and client support for Watson Health in 2016, and for all of Watson from 2011-2015. Carl was one of the first executives IBM originally assigned to commercialize Watson in 2011. He has since overseen global deployments of IBM Watson for hundreds of clients and partners such as MD Anderson, SoftBank Japan, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centers, Cognit in UAE, Manipal in India and more. 

Prior to Watson, Carl was part of launching IBM’s Cloud business, after various activities as CTO for End User Services in IBM GTS and a Distinguished Engineer for IBM Lotus. He joined IBM when a startup he co-founded in 1993 in New Hampshire, Edge Research, was acquired by Lotus in 1994, in turn acquired by IBM in 1995.

Carl holds a B.S. in superconductive quantum physics from MIT, has championed LGBT workplace diversity, and has been both a professional actor and vocalist.