As one of the first people hired by IBM to focus on selling Internet solutions(Advantis at that point, by Rich Wall in spring of 1995), I was privileged to learn from you in many settings, including customer opportunities, trade show speeches, and internal strategy sessions.

The most important lesson I learned was that it was possible to succeed in the most difficult tasks by tempering articulate enthusiasm with a realistic approach and lots of forceful negotiation to build internal and external coalitions.

The team you build went on to do many great things, in all parts of IBM.

In 1997, as we started the WebSphere brand, I had the difficult job of capturing early customer interest and sales, even as our product suffered from typical immaturity issues. Then I had to scale this mission by training and mentoring the hundreds of WebSphere sales people we would need to establish IBM in the Web Application Server business. I know that I would not have been able to succeed in this mission without the training I received as part of the Patrick organization.

Thanks for your leadership, and good luck with your future endeavors.