Mike Ekstrom

About Mike Ekstrom

Ekstrom’s extensive experience in building, maintaining, and expanding robust data centers and infrastructure for enterprise-class IT services exemplifies his passion for engagement, problem-solving, service, sharing, mentoring, and continuous learning. Beyond his extensive leadership and IT background, Ekstrom served as a former board member and president of the Westnet Education and Research Consortium (WERC).Ekstrom’s career commenced during his teenage years, where he collaborated with his older brother to develop run-length encoding compression algorithms and facilitate rapid data retrieval. Upon graduating with high honors from Brigham Young University, he had the opportunity to work with Dr. Helmuth Orthner, PhD, and Dr. Homer Warner, MD, PhD, driving leading edge innovation in healthcare technology at the University of Utah. Ekstrom established a reputation as an individual deeply committed to making complex IT solutions accessible and reliable, including the deployment and support of both the Cerner and EPIC electronic health records. After dedicating 20 years to the University of Utah Healthcare System, Ekstrom was appointed Director of Common Infrastructure Services, where he applied his customer-centric infrastructure and enterprise services mindset to the broader university IT vision. In this role, Ekstrom led the consolidation data center services (bringing disparate IT departments and data centers to the new consolidated University of Utah data center). This scope also included the network and communications infrastructure technologies. Notably, he also was instrumental in negotiating and moving forward the first major campus-wide cloud services contracts, including O365, Gmail, Box, and Teams.In 2022, Xenter, an innovative medtech company, recruited Ekstrom to join their executive leadership team as Vice President of IT. In 2024, Ekstrom reduced his involvement with Xenter to focus on the growing demand for data centers and IT infrastructure. Of particular interest were projects that assisted infrastructure-starved regions like Wyoming in envisioning a more robust IT-enabled future, particularly in the context of significant investments from companies like TerraPower. Most recently, I was approached by Scriptive to serve as their CIO/CTO a Wisconsin-based company focused on helping students develop and overcome writing challenges.

Experience

1. Information Technology Consultant

   Xenter

   May 2024 — Present · Draper, UT, US

Education

• University of Utah School of Medicine

  Medical Informatics Researcher

  1993 — 1996

• Brigham Young University

  Bachelor's degree (cum laude), Computer Science

• Hillcrest High School

  High School Diploma (High Honors)

  1984 — 1987