Remembering Ramon Barquin
By: Frank Reeder, Co-founder and Founding Chair of the Center for Internet Security
About three decades ago Alan Paller introduced me to his friend and colleague, Ramon Barquin — another wonderful gift from Alan. When we decided to expand the Board of the Center for Internet Security in the late 2000s, Ramon was an obvious choice, so I got to know Ramon first in a work setting as a colleague and trusted advisor. On the CIS Board, all of us came to see and value Ramon’s wisdom and ethical grounding. Perhaps more importantly for me, over the year we fell into a pattern of getting together periodically. We took in a few Nationals games (a shared passion) but more recently it was lunch often at Taberna del Alabardero, Ramon’s favorite haunt. What a treat for me to hear Ramon’s stories while experiencing Spanish cuisine under the tutelage of a true expert. Our lunches invariably extended to two hours or more during which I came to learn a lot about Ramon that left me in awe. I am grateful that the alignment of the stars gave me the opportunity to share a little time and space with this remarkable man. This remembrance is based almost entirely on those conversations with a little help from the internet to verify facts. Any errors are entirely attributable to my faulty memory.
To understand Ramon, it is helpful to know a bit about his father, Ramon M. Barquin, a senior Cuban military officer who served as military attaché in the Cuban Embassy in Washington in the early 1950s. Thus, his son, Ramon C, came to spend his tweens and early teens in Washington. When the elder Ramon became disaffected with the Batista regime, he led an unsuccessful coup, was jailed, and became an early supporter of Fidel Castro. He soon became disillusioned with Castro recognizing that Cuba had traded one form of oppression for another and, after a brief stay in Miami, relocated the family to Puerto Rico. As Ramon recounted it, his father wanted his family to live in a Spanish-speaking community under an American flag. A well-annotated Wikipedia article provides an excellent summary of Ramon M. Barquin’s life and career.
The Ramon most of us came to know was an extraordinary combination of technical know-how, a deep grounding in professional ethics, and a calm, empathetic wisdom. In large group sessions, he spoke only selectively but when he did, we listened. Academically, he was educated as an engineer, culminating in a PhD. from MIT. He was also a successful entrepreneur. After two decades at IBM, he ventured out on his own, creating Barquin Solutions “…with the goal of delivering leading data services and solutions to public, private, and non-profit organizations internationally, with a focus on excellent execution.” In 1995, he and Alan Paller founded the Data Warehousing Institute “…for the express purpose of sharing those lessons learned…[by] featuring data warehousing users sharing their stories.” That commitment to sharing knowledge of best practices and, as Jane Lute later so brilliantly articulated, “making best practices common practice,” was something Ramon and Alan shared and was core to the creation of the Center for Internet Security (CIS). The secret sauce was not in inventing solutions, but rather in identifying and publicizing those doing great work. In the summer of 2000, Ramon hosted a dinner of public and private sector leaders in cybersecurity at the Cosmos Club in Washington, convened by Alan, at which the concept of CIS was formed.
The foregoing is what most who worked with Ramon saw, but there was a lot more to him that I came to appreciate over our occasional lunches. He was not secretive, but he never boasted about his other sides. Ramon was:
- An athlete. Ramon competed in judo and then, combining his quantitative skills with his judo interest, developed a scoring system credited with making judging of judo matches more objective. From 1969 to 1992, he served as director of statistics of the International Judo Federation. Colleagues tell me that he was also a mean tennis player and, to top it off, he realized a life-long dream of playing squash on all seven continents.
- A humanitarian. Ramon shared both his fortune and his wisdom with Atlantic University, the school founded by his father. He served as Chair of the Board of Trustees, a position now held by his son, Ramon III. All I knew was that, whenever there was a weather emergency in Puerto Rico, Ramon was on a plane to San Juan to bring whatever support he could to what he referred to as “the family’s school.”
- An ethicist. Ramon held a strong belief that, if information technology had a claim to be a profession like the law or medicine, it needed to develop a shared set of ethical principles. To that end, Ramon helped create the Computer Ethics Institute and drafted what became the “Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics.”
There are some who spend their lives despairing about the challenges we face, what Alan Paller described as “admiring the problem.” In every other aspect of his life, when Ramon saw a need, he acted.
It is not hyperbole to say we have lost a great man. How fortunate are we to have spent time with him.