AppFusions

Ashok Venkatraman is Vice President, Strategic Business Development at AppFusions, leading enterprise-scale digital transformation solutions, including ones that leverage blockchain for clients in financial services, logistics, distribution and other major industries. Ashok is a market-driven strategic leader with expertise in steering strategy for customer-centric, next-generation digital solutions. Previously, Ashok has served in multiple high growth business units as general manager and head of technology for Mastercard products, platforms and APIs. Mr. Venkatraman holds a M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Southern Illinois University.

Automation Anywhere

Max Mancini is Executive Vice President of the Digital Worker Ecosystem at Automation Anywhere, where he leads the company’s efforts to build a thriving ecosystem of developers, bots and digital workers. He believes that the bot platform, and the ecosystem that supports it, enable innovation and opportunity for Automation Anywhere’s entire community of developers, channel partners and customers. Prior to joining Automation Anywhere, Max ran the $500 million Ecosystem business at Atlassian and retail eCommerce engineering at Apple. He also helped scale the developers program and mobile commerce business at eBay. While at eBay, he also launched their classifieds business, Kijiji, as the head of product and engineering and built their Disruptive Innovation team. He has been in various product, engineering and executive management roles in startups including Aha Mobile (acquired by Harman/Samsung), ConsumerReview, and PointCast. Max is a combat veteran and served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army and Army Reserves.

Ayehu

Taly brings more than 20 years of experience leading business development, partnerships and sales organizations. A strong believer in growth through building trusted relationships with strategic partners, she has successfully led comprehensive go to market initiatives with both Fortune 500 companies and startups. Prior to joining Ayehu, Taly was Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Alliances at Uptima where she led the companys 100% year-over-year growth for 3 consecutive years. Taly was Israels Windsurfing Champion as well as a World Windsurfing Championship bronze medalist. She brings to her work the passion, energy and discipline of an accomplished athlete.

Citrix

Stan Black, CISSP, is the SVP and Chief Security and Information Officer at Citrix where he is in charge of the secure delivery of applications and data. Black has merged the role of CIO with CSO to create one larger global technology and security organization. By doing this, he is breaking down traditional IT silos, transforming his organization from a traditional IT shop into a more strategic technology and security team that proactively defends information and mitigates threats. Black and his team stop 54 billion attacks per quarter. His organization also monitors the global threat landscape and manages incident response and physical security to protect the safety of Citrix employees. Black is a seasoned security veteran with more than twenty years of experience in cyber security, reducing business risk, threat intelligence, corporate data protection, infrastructure simplification and crisis management. Past positions include Chief Security Officer at Nuance Communications, and Chief Risk and Security Architect at EMC and RSA. His experience has provided him the opportunity to deliver durable security and risk solutions to global 1000’s, countries and public agencies around the world. In 2018, he was named a Cyber Security Excellence Awards Gold Winner. Black holds a BS in Manufacturing Engineering from Wentworth Institute of Technology.

CoreDial

As chief revenue officer at CoreDial, Ken is responsible for leading channel recruitment initiatives as well as channel on-boarding, training, support, and success. With a deep background in marketing, sales, and service, Ken brings more than 20 years of experience to the position having previously worked for telecom and software companies ranging from start-ups and early stage IPOs to Fortune 500 enterprises. He has helped establish CoreDial as a leading provider of cloud communications services that drives channel success through a unique business model, empowering partners to deliver high-value, margin-rich communications solutions to more than 23,000 businesses with 320,000 seats nationwide. Prior to joining CoreDial, Ken served as Senior Vice President of Global Marketing at Tangoe, a $200M+ public SaaS company. There he built a global marketing organization including product marketing, demand generation and marketing communications teams. Before Tangoe, he was Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Service at Rivermine, a telecom expense management company that specializes in managing voice, data, and wireless telecom expenses. Ken holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering with Honors from West Virginia University.

Craxel

Dr. Donald Robinson serves as the CEO of Craxel Inc. which has created the highest performance and most secure distributed ledger technology. Based in Silicon Valley and Washington DC, Craxel is transforming business operations with usable and secure distributed ledgers. Previously, as the CTO for General Dynamics IT - Defense, he led the development of technical solutions that won over $4B of next generation IT programs in his last 2 years. Dr. Robinson focused on complex mission critical IT solutions in the national security, intelligence, and other government services. Dr. Robinson has worked on missile defense, cyber operations systems, radar and sensor systems, space systems, battle management command and control, and UAV systems. Each of these projects involved direct advocacy to the Pentagon, international governments, and Congressional stakeholders.Dr. Robinson holds (5) B.S. degrees in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Management Economics, and Applied Mathematics from Hampden-Sydney College, a M.S. degree in Statistics specializing in data mining and artificial intelligence systems. and a PhD in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia focused on large scale computational statistics. He also attended Oxford University and executive programs at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of business. Dr. Robinson is also an instructor at Caltech in cybersecurity. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and a Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP).

Dell Technologies

Erik Day has been at Dell (now Dell Technologies) for 18 years. During this tenure, Erik has held multiple sales, merchandising, operations and marketing leadership roles both domestically and internationally. As Vice President of Small Business, Erik’s goal is to advocate for small business across the US and Canada and ensure they are receiving the IT necessary to help their businesses grow and thrive. He believes that Small Business is the growth engine of the global economy and that technology will help them achieve their goals. Just this year, Erik developed and launched Dell’s new Small Business Advisor marketing campaign that focuses on how Dell can be a virtual IT advisor for your small business (https://youtu.be/Z16nZiVKd-c ). In May 2018, Erik graduated with his Masters of Business Administration from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX where he also received his Bachelors in 1994. Erik is an avid tennis player and a die-hard collegiate (SMU, UT Austin, Florida State, Michigan, Oregon, Northwestern) and Chicago Based (Blackhawks, Bears, Cubs) sports fan. He is heavily involved in advocating for workplace equality globally for Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual and Transgendered employees of all sized corporations. He is the Global Executive Chair of the PRIDE (LGBTAQ) Employee Resource Group at Dell Technologies and on the Board of Directors for Out & Equal Workplace Advocates this year. He has also served on the board of various other organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, AIDS Services of Austin, Nashville Cares and The Austin Tennis Club. He loves spending time at home in Austin or on Lake Michigan with his husband Craig and their 2 Samoyeds, Chester and Chase.

Dynatrace

Dr. Peter Putz is a management scientist and internationally experienced manager of R&D software projects. Born in Austria, he spent the last 15 years in California. He was a senior scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center where he managed 15+ software projects in the Collaborative and Assistent Systems Area. Before joining NASA, Peter was a member of research staff with the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). In 2015, Peter and his family moved to Austria and made their home in Linz.Dr. Putz is a certified project manager and experienced in leading international teams of scientists and engineers. He is accomplished in managing the full life-cycle of complex innovative IT solutions including operations and customer service. In his academic research Peter has focused on evaluation of management systems, knowledge management, organizational learning practices and human recources management. His recent interest is in data science. Peter is a seasoned teacher and trainer and has developed and published novel curricula and learning solutions.

FixStream

Bishnu has a flair for all things Cloud technology, Big Data and APIs. Bishnu is the CTO of FixStream, an emerging AIOps startup in Silicon Valley where he guides FixStream’s overall technology, product strategy and roadmap, R&D and engagement with technology partners, enterprise customers and service providers. Prior to FixStream, Bishnu spent thirteen years at AT&T in various executive architect and strategist positions. While in AT&T, he has led AT&T Big Data Platform strategy and delivered a Cloud Big Data PaaS using Openstack and Hadoop. Prior to that, Bishnu led the AT&T Cloud Computing Center of Excellence with a large team of cross-organization SMEs to develop the company handbook for “Applying Cloud Architecture and Principles” and a broad set of operating practice papers covering cloud fundamentals, practices, policies, governance, design patterns and guidelines for cloud applications and service delivery. Bishnu has also led AT&T Mobile Center of Excellence (MCoE) to deliver a PaaS for development and testing of mobile applications across platforms and devices using a common set of tools, standards and practices. Additionally, Bishnu successfully delivered solutions architecture for AT&T U-Verse mobile, AT&T Developer program, API monetization, M2M Billing, mHealth and LTE monetization etc. He was also heavily involved in AT&T Foundry innovation program and adoption of Agile methodology for software delivery in AT&T. Bishnu is very passionate about cutting-edge technologies and is very active in various industry recognized communities, blogs and forums. Due to his technology influence and presence in the industry, he was invited to become a member of the Forbes Technology Council (ForbesTechCouncil.com) where he has been actively participating and contributing since 2016.When Bishnu is not busy researching and experimenting the latest cool technologies, hes a gourmet cook in the kitchen and is an avid St louis Cardinals baseball fan.

FixStream

Sameer is Founder and CEO of FixStream, Inc. Prior to FixStream he served in a variety of senior management roles at Cisco Systems Inc. for twenty years. Most recently he was Senior Vice President of Worldwide Service Provider Line of Business at Cisco. He also chaired the company’s strategy board in this area. Earlier he worked as Vice President of Service Provider Marketing, and was responsible for marketing Cisco Systems® products, services, and solutions to a worldwide base of service provider customers. At different points he was responsible for enterprise and service provider sales in different theaters including Vice President of Sales in the Cisco Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), Japan and AsiaPac region. Currently he is based in Cupertino, California, where he is responsible for FixStream Inc.’s global operations. Sameer is an avid badminton player and early in his career worked as a commercial airline pilot.

FogLogic

Ashok is FogLogic’s co-founder and CEO. A seasoned entrepreneur and enterprise software executive, Ashok was most recently CEO of Bristlecone, which he transformed into a leading global systems integrator in supply chain management solutions. Prior to Bristlecone, Ashok was Senior VP, Worldwide Field Operations at Epiphany, a leader in marketing analytics software. Earlier, he founded and was CEO and Chairman of Inventa Technologies, a pioneering leader in B2B e-commerce solutions. Ashok has a BS from IIT Madras and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

GAVS Technologies

Will Houston is a 20+ year veteran of the IT world, having served at a number of companies after beginning his career at IBM. He has held senior positions as both the seller and acquirer of technology solutions, as well as in business analysis, project management and finance. He leverages these skills to understand nascent technologies, determine how they can provide value, and develop the business cases that drive adoption. He holds a dozen US patents and has published numerous works, principally focused on streamlining IT operations. He holds undergraduate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from Duke University, and an MBA in Management of Technology from RPI. A member of the Union League of Philadelphia, Will lives in New Jersey with his family and is an avid basketball player.

Google Cloud

Diane is the G Suite Lead for Office of the CTO at Google Cloud, focusing on building strategic relationships with the world’s top Enterprises to foster collaboration at work.Diane comes from the Google Drive team, where she led the development of Team Drives, a complete rewrite of Drive including the back-end API, and front-end to scale Drive for the needs of our largest customers. She also led the acquisition of Synergyse (now branded as G Suite Training) to provide contextual product support. Previously, Diane worked for AppNexus and Applied Predictive Technologies.Diane attended Lehigh University where she earned degrees in Information Systems & Engineering and Business. Outside of work, she volunteers with Minds Matter to help low income students prepare for the SAT (college entrance exam), and enjoys running, climbing, and skiing.

HPE

Katie Fritsch is the Marketing Manager for InfoSight at HPE. Katie most recently led the marketing for the deep learning startup, Nervana Systems, up until their acquisition by Intel in 2016. Previously, she was the Global Leverage partner for Palantir Technologies, and the first user experience data analyst for the autonomous vehicle project at Google X. Katie is a consummate and dedicated lifetime athlete. An avid swimmer, she set 5 NCAA Division 1 school records and secured qualification to the US Olympic Trials. In 2016, she qualified for World Championships in Ironman, and recently, she started competing in ultra-marathons.

IBM

Dr. Ben Amaba holds a PhD. degree in Industrial & Systems Engineering, a M.B.A./M.S. degree in Engineering and Operations, and a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering. Dr. Amaba is a registered and licensed Professional Engineer in several states with International Registry; certified in Production, Operations, and Inventory Management by APICS ®; LEED® Accredited Professional (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design); and certified in Corporate Strategy by Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is responsible for industrial manufacturing, infrastructure and logistics solutions. Dr. Amaba is the Chief Innovation Officer for the Industrial Sector – North America for the IBM Watson and Cloud Division. Dr. Amaba’s focus and interest is in artificial intelligence, blockchain, robotic process automation (RPA), software engineering, data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud technology.Dr. Amaba holds a copyright for Process Activity Flow Framework®, the foundation for IBM’s Business Driven Development framework for requirements, design, architecture, simulation, and application development techniques. Dr. Amaba has been a keynote in major professional and industry conferences around the world for the past 30 years, is prominently featured in “Giving 2.0,” by Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen with Stanford Business School, which details contributions to bolster and promote STEM education and careers, and is an Alexis de Tocqueville Society/United Way Member, which recognizes local philanthropic leaders. Dr. Amaba holds positions as Industry Council Advisor to Project Production Institute, Board of Director of Whoop Wireless Corporation, UCX Corporation, and RANCS Group LLC, Executive Board Member of Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics (AHFE) and Editorial Board Member to IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) IT Professionals, Founding member to the Institute of Advanced Systems Engineering, Founding member to the Center of Advanced Supply Chain Management, Editorial Board of The Open Cybernetics and Systemics Journal, and Executive Advisory Board Member to the University of Miami, University of Houston, and University of Central Florida.

IBM

Doug leads the Security Architects for IBM North America, coaching that talented team as they mature and grow their skills in a evolving and dynamic field. As a practicing architect, he helps security and business executives across many industries manage risk and secure strategic initiatives.Dough earned a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Anthropology, and Psychology, and a Master’s degree in Engineering Management from the University of Colorado, where he served on the advisory board for the Engineering Management program. Doug has authored patents, papers and books on subjects ranging from photographic lighting and human factors to architecture governance and 3D painting for fine art. Doug is in demand as a speaker on cybersecurity for executive, business, security and end-user audiences.An avid out-doors-man and photographer, Doug lives in the Colorado forest with his wife and their four-footed and hoofed children. He spends as much of his time as he can not doing security work in the Rocky Mountains.

Juniper Networks

Nick Bilogorskiy leads cybersecurity strategy at Juniper Networks. As a founding member at Cyphort, which was recently acquired by Juniper Networks, Nick created and led the Cyphort Labs Threat Research team. He also played a critical role designing Cyphorts malware detection logic and product user experience. Prior to Cyphort, Nick was chief malware expert at Facebook and also held security research leadership positions at Fortinet and Sonicwall. Nick is fluent in reverse engineering, analysis, pattern writing and malware tracking. He has presented and published research papers at major security conferences including Virus Bulletin, ISACA and SecureWorld. Nick holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and philosophy from Simon Fraser University and a GIAC Reverse Engineering Malware (GREM) certification, as well as multiple patents in computer security.

KEMP Technologies

Frank Yue is a technology evangelist that translates products and technologies into business needs and values. Mr. Yue looks at the evolving technology landscape and how it impacts IT architectures and organizations. He writes blogs, produces white papers, and speaks at conferences and events related to application networking technologies. Mr. Yue has over 25 years of experience building large-scale networks and working with high performance application technologies focusing on optimizing end-to-end application access. Mr. Yue is currently a Solutions Architect for Kemp Technologies and has had various technical and marketing roles for application networking and security companies. Mr. Yue is a scuba diving instructor and background actor when he is not discussing technology.

KodaCloud

Marcel Chenier is CTO and Vice-President of Engineering for KodaCloud where he brings 35 years of technology experience in the field of public and enterprise wireline, wireless and cloud networking. In his role, he is responsible for technology direction, product implementation and customer support. Previous to KodaCloud, Marcel lead product architecture for the WLAN portfolio and Small Cell Plug&Play Solutions at Ericsson. Prior to Ericsson, Marcel was Vice -President of engineering at BelAir Networks, a WLAN carrier-class small-cell equipment provided which was acquired by Ericsson. Prior to BelAir, Marcel was head of engineering at Zhone Technologies Canada from early company stage to IPO responsible for voice and video packet products. As VP of R&D for Premisys, a smart DLC equipment provider, Marcel was part of the leadership team that lead the acquisition by Zhone. Marcel started his career with Nortel Networks working on silicon, hardware and software research and development and as an R&D Executive for the Signaling System Product Line. Marcel is a co-inventor on several patents in the area of wireless networking architecture.

LogicMonitor

In his role as Vice President of Product, Gadi is responsible for the companys strategic vision and product initiatives. Previously, Gadi was the CEO and Co-Founder of ITculate, where he was responsible for developing world-class technology and product that created contextual monitoring by discovering and leveraging application topology. With over 18 years of industry experience from IT operations management and monitoring to storage and cloud, Gadi previously served as the CTO and Co-founder of Cloudoscope. Prior to Cloudoscope, Gadi was head of Product Management for analytics and manageability BU at NetApp. He served in leadership roles for some of the fastest growing and industry-transforming companies. Gadi has a management degree from Sloan MIT and B.Sc. Eng. in computer science and electrical engineering from the Technion in Israel.

Metaswitch

Paul has over 30 years’ experience in data and telecommunications protocols, products and network design – spanning arcane details of SDLC links right up to multi-national IMS and architectures.As VP Product Strategy, Paul co-ordinates roadmap and strategy across the entire portfolio of Metaswitch products, with particular emphasis on Cloud and Automation. Having previously managed our global SE team, working closely with carriers of all sizes, and in all markets and geographies, he has the in-depth real-world knowledge and experience necessary help operators to fully exploit the ever-accelerating pace of change in technology and end-user expectations.Paul joined Metaswitch in 1986 after studying Mathematics at Cambridge University. He is the author of, or major contributor to, several IETF RFCs, multiple white papers, and patents covering everything from protocols deep in the network to innovative user experiences for multi-modal communications. When not at work, he can most often be found sailing around the Scottish islands.

Netrolix

Mr. Jensen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Netrolix. He is a forward thinking evangelist of artificial intelligence, data science and machine learning. Mr. Jensen has over 20 years of experience leading technology, network engineering and service organizations responsible for designing, installing, and maintaining compute, IT, security and connectivity infrastructures for Fortune 500 enterprises and service providers. He has had held technical leadership positions at CenturyLink/Level 3, Global Cloud Xchange, XO/Verizon, and more. Prior to entering private enterprise Mr. Jensen served in Special Operations in the U.S. Army.

Nyansa

Anand Srinivas is the Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Nyansa, a user performance management and network analytics company in Palo Alto, Calif. Prior to starting Nyansa in 2013, Anand was an SDN/NFV Consultant for Overture Networks, and prior to that, he was the Lead Algorithms Architect at Plexxi Inc., responsible for core contributions to SDN system architecture, algorithmic architecture and protocol/API design. Earlier in his career, Anand worked as a Senior Systems Engineer and Principal Engineer for Airvana, where he was responsible for detailed algorithm specifications for LTE product differentiators. Anand holds a B.A.Sc in Computer Engineering from University of Toronto. He also holds an S.M., Dual in EECS and Aero-Astro and a PhD in Wireless Networking and Algorithms from MIT.

OpsRamp

An industry veteran with deep background in software for IT Operations, Bhanu comes to OpsRamp from BMC Software where he managed the R&D and Customer Engineering organization for the entire Digital Service Management business (Remedy product line, Atrium CMDB, Remedyforce, and BAO) for 6 years, a $500M+ business unit with $50M+ R&D budget. He was responsible for covering all aspects of software development, delivery and maintenance. Bhanu was instrumental in hyper growth of the DSM business and was instrumental in pivoting the product and business into cloud. During this time he was key initiator in many acquisitions and integration of technology and business units on the Remedy ITSM solution and DSM organization. Most recently, he was the brain and driver behind transforming BMC Remedy AR System platform and BMC Atrium CMDB from a C/C++ client/server architecture to Open Source Web 2.0 SOA architecture using Java/OSGi/Spring technology stack – The platform was released in 2015 as Remedy 9. The platform transformation laid the foundation for the future of multi-cloud, multi-channel and multi-device innovation in the BMC’s DSM strategy by bringing open-source microservices architecture and an integrated technology stack together.Bhanu holds a Master in Software Engineering and Bachelor in Computer Science & Engineering. He holds executive management degrees in business administration and certification in project management, Agile Scrum, Six Sigma green belt and ITIL.

Pax8

Ryan Walsh oversees the buildout of the Pax8 product portfolio and drives the market requirements and development of the Pax8 Command Console.Ryan served as vice president of product management for MX Logic, a cloud-based email and web security company that was acquired by McAfee in 2009. Following the acquisition, Ryan directed the product teams responsible for McAfees portfolio of cloud-based email and web solutions for the Content and Cloud Security division, and later led the product unification and hybrid cloud development effort for the companys web security product lines.Ryan has dedicated his career to enabling business improvements with Internet or IT-based solutions and startups. He started his career building a reengineering practice at Deloitte & Touche in the Consulting division.Ryan holds a BA in Business Economics from Colorado College and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

RiskSense

Srinivas Mukkamala is one of the Co-founders and CEO of RiskSense a cyber security Spinoff of New Mexico Tech. Srinivas has been researching and developing security technologies for over 15 years, working on of malware analytics (focuses on medical control systems and nontraditional computing devices), breach exposure management, Web application security, and enterprise risk reduction. Srinivas was one of the lead researchers for CACTUS (Computational Analysis of Cyber Terrorism against the US). Dr. Mukkamala has over 120 peer-reviewed publications in the areas of information assurance, malware analytics, digital forensics, data mining, and bioinformatics. He has a patent on Intelligent Agents for Distributed Intrusion Detection System and Method of Practicing.

SRI International

John Byrnes, Ph.D., is a principal computer scientist in the Advanced Analytics group of the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International. His research focuses primarily on statistical pattern detection as a technique for the discovery of hidden structure in large amounts of data. He applies these techniques to the self-organization of collections of natural language text in support of machine understanding of language. He has also applied pattern recognition techniques to formalized knowledge and is interested in automated machine reasoning.Byrnes is currently a principal investigator on multiple projects involving the analysis of scientific and technical publications and patents in order to track and forecast the emergence of technical capabilities and to carry out retrospective analyses of technical achievement.Prior to joining SRI in 2009, Byrnes carried out research at Fair Isaac Corporation including the application of natural language clustering techniques to automate the generation of proof plans for automated reasoning and novel language compression techniques to develop content-based routing at fiber-optic data rates. He researched novel signal processing representations and algorithms at Kromos Technology from 2000 to 2002.Byrnes holds a BS in mathematics and a Ph.D. in pure and applied logic from Carnegie Mellon University.

Swimlane

Uber

Manages tech deals @ Uber. Board advisor, global keynote speaker and mentor. His team helps make outside technologies a competitive advantage to Uber. Heading global mobility, IoT, wireless, messaging, voice, network, telecom, data center, cloud, contact center & connectivity strategic sourcing, relationships and spend at worlds most valuable private company.

Virtual Instruments

Bringing over 30 years of experience in senior roles at leading IT infrastructure companies, CMO Len Rosenthal has been an executive at Virtual Instruments since 2008. He has been working to understand the management needs of IT infrastructure and Operations leaders at Global 2000 and government entities to ensure the Virtual Instruments VirtualWisdom infrastructure monitoring and AIOps platform meets emerging requirements. Prior to joining the company, he held executive marketing positions at Panasas, PathScale (acquired by QLogic), Silicon Graphics and HP. Len earned an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas Business School, a BSEE from the University of Pennsylvania.

IP Carrier

Gary Kim is a communications industry analyst of 35 years, ranked second globally among power influencers in mobile and among the top 10 telecom thought leaders. He currently works as a telecom/Internet conference content developer, author and speaker. He recently founded the Spectrum Futures conference for the Pacific Telecommunications, acts as a conference advisor for PTC and has organized, chaired or keynoted at scores of industry conferences. He is a member of Mensa, the international organization for people with IQs in the top 2 percent.