Mark was the first employee of a small startup in Boulder, Colorado called Redcape Policy Software.
Sun Microsystems acquired the company and its technology in 1998 and subsequently promoted it as Jiro, a common management framework based on Java and Jini.
Carlson was best known for his work on the development of a storage management standard called SMI-S for the SNIA, serving as the chair of the group overseeing the specification for several years.
In addition to SMI-S, Mark also led the development of a reference implementation of the XAM standard, a next generation storage interface with support for metadata, query and compliance based data retention of fixed content.
He was a core contributor on the Apache incubator project called Imperius,[4] which is an implementation of the standard CIM-SPL policy language.