Building Connectivity for an App-Centric Future – Sponsored by NS1, an IBM company

Spring 2023

The future of application delivery is infrastructure neutral. Application workloads are already scattered across multiple clouds, CDNs, edge locations, and data centers. Network operations teams face the challenge of delivering the high-performing applications that end users expect from this spaghetti of back-end resources. The panelists will discuss how network teams should be prepared for the new frontier of application connectivity and what challenges and opportunities come with it.

Speakers:

Roy Chua is founder and principal at AvidThink, an independent research and advisory service formed in 2018 out of SDxCentral’s research arm. Roy was previously co-founder at SDxCentral where he ran both the research and product teams. Roy was formerly a management consultant working with both Fortune 500 and startup technology companies on go-to-market and product consulting. As an early proponent of the software-defined infrastructure movement, Roy is a frequent speaker at events in the telco and cloud space and a regular contributor to leading technology publications. A graduate of UC Berkeley’s electrical engineering and computer science program and MIT’s Sloan School of Business, Roy has 20+ years of experience in telco and enterprise cloud computing, networking and security, including founding several Silicon Valley startups.

As the Chief Product Officer at NS1, David Coffey focuses on developing product strategy and at-scale execution. He is a technological innovator, team builder, and transformational leader who brings more than two decades of experience in software engineering, product management, security operations, and applied data science to the company.

Prior to joining NS1, Coffey served as senior vice president of Global Engineering for Forcepoint, where he led research and development, spearheading the release of new products and revenue streams. Coffey also planned and executed cloud transformations and revolutionized product capabilities of global tech firms such as McAfee and Intel. At Intel, he served as Head of Cloud Platform Engineering and Operations where he led teams responsible for building massively scalable cloud security services, including cloud-to-cloud integrations, supporting hundreds of millions of devices.

Murali Gandluru is the Vice President of Strategy (Product & GTM) for Software
Networking Business Unit in the IBM Software group, where he is presently
responsible for delivering innovative application-centric, hybrid/multi-cloud
networking products around automation, orchestration, observability, and
connectivity.

Murali is a product executive with over 22 years of experience in building multiple
billion-dollar product-line businesses in the infrastructure space spanning both public
companies and startups, including: Arrcus, DuploCloud, Cisco: Nexus/ACI, ASR, and
at Oracle. At Arrcus, he served as VP of Product Management/Marketing, a venture-
backed firm that he helped launch out of stealth through Series A/B/C with a
disruptive software-powered, open multi-domain networking solutions. He also
served as Sr. Director of Product Mgmt. at Cisco Systems following the acquisition of
the pioneering Software Defined Networking (SDN) startup Insieme Networks.

Murali has a MS in Computer Science from The Ohio State University and a B.Tech
in Chemical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Varanasi. He is an
alumnus of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Ignite! startup program. In his
spare time, Murali maintains a keen interest in soccer, music and theatre.

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