Michael McKenna has been actively involved in the field of globalization of client/server environments for over nine years. He is a licensed professional engineer and has a background in database internals, distributed architectures, bibliographic systems, test engineering, and ethnographic research.

At Sybase, where he currently holds a position of Globalization Strategist, he has been responsible for the development of European and Asian releases of the Sybase SQL Server and is currently architecting Unicode solutions and strategies for multiple products. His team, the Global Products Group, is responsible for the internationalization architecture of all enterprise information management software that Sybase markets.

Michael has been active in standards activities, spoken at several conferences, has produced curriculum and taught classes on globalization for the University of California Santa Cruz, and has been an invited speaker at Unicode Implementer's Workshops and a European Commission Character Set Technology Workshop.