Keng-Siang Lim, founder, chairman and chief executive officer of NextLabs, will be the featured speaker for the Ohio Northern University College of Engineering’s Spotts Lecture in the Freed Center for the Performing Arts on Monday, Feb. 25, at 7:30 p.m.

His speech, “Globalize and Innovate: Making of the 2020 Era Engineer,” is free and open to the public.

As CEO of NextLabs, Lim is responsible for the company’s vision, leadership, strategic direction and successful growth.

NextLabs is the leading provider of policy-driven information, risk management (IRM) software for large enterprises.

The company’s software offers a cohesive solution for improving compliance and mitigating information risk by helping companies achieve safer and more secure internal and external collaboration, prevent data loss, and ensure proper authorization to applications and data.

IDG Demo recognized Lim at the DEMOfall 2009 with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his significant contributions to the advancement of technology. Lim is credited for his contributions to web and SOA technologies, ecommerce, SaaS, and information security software.

Lim also has been recognized by several key organizations as one of the industry’s “most influential people on the Internet.” ZDNet selected him as one of the “50 Smartest People” in 2000.

He is widely known to be able to spot new markets and emerging technologies and is often recognized as one who is capable of creating new category-defining products. Lim is recognized as one of the inventors of the Java application server through his founding of Kiva Software, an application server pioneer.

Kiva Software was the first to introduce an enterprise-class Java Application Server to market in 1996 and, in the process, coined the terms Java and Web Application Server and led to the emergence of the Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) and J2EE standards.

Through his works and vision on Internet and network security, Sygate Technologies – which he helped launch in 1998 – has successfully established itself as the market leader of the enterprise endpoint security enforcement software.

Lim earned a bachelor’s degree with high distinction, majoring in computer science and civil engineering, from Ohio Northern University in 1989 and a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He is a member of the engineering honor society, Tau Beta Pi. He is the holder of more than 30 approved and pending patents in the Internet and information security-related areas.

The Spotts Lecture series was established by the T.J. Smull College of Engineering in 1986 to bring distinguished speakers to the ONU campus on an annual basis to inform students of the probable professional conditions and challenges that engineers and computer scientists will face in the future.