Ernest co-founded ONUG with Nick Lippis after realizing that the user community needed to take control of their own destiny and expedite the network transformation. At the time he was VP of the Internetwork Engineering organization at Fidelity Investments and under his leadership Fidelity hosted the first ONUG in Boston in February 2013.

A 12-year veteran of Fidelity, Ernest was responsible for leading the team that engineered world class network, security, and application delivery services driving value to the customer beyond infrastructure management. Ernest also managed the Network and Voice service portfolio as well as Global Network Operations LAN/WAN teams and has held various technical and leadership roles.

Mark has over 30 years of technical sales and account management experience in the software and semiconductor industries. For the past decade, his entire focus has been on bringing the benefits of cloud computing to the enterprise. Most recently his cloud vision has expanded to include microservices and DevOps. He passionately believes that the current wave of technology innovation can significantly improve the state of the art in enterprise software application delivery.

Prior to turning to the dark side Mark had 10 years of experience as an embedded software developer. He prides himself on having kept current on the technology front while still being able to find his way around a debugger.

Mark holds a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from George Washington University.

Aakash is the CTO of Oak9.  He is focused on building foundational security capabilities to help customers transform their security practice and deliver dynamic, comprehensive & risk-appropriate security that enables the velocity of modern software development.

Aakash is a proven leader in cybersecurity. Over his 17 years in the industry, he has held a wide range of roles.   He has successfully built & evolved security practices at large organizations to enable new business models and support their digital transformation. He has defined security strategies to enable the adoption of Cloud, AI and IoT.  As a security architect, he has architected and implemented security for core products across market verticals, including Healthcare and Defense. Prior to these roles, Aakash conducted cutting-edge security research in trusted computing, tamper resistant systems and critical infrastructure at organizations like MIT Lincoln Labs and Carnegie Mellon.  Aakash has contributed to industry standards and taught information security courses.

Aakash holds a M.S. in Information Security from Carnegie Mellon and a B.S. in computer engineering from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Alex Brown is a Partner at Epilogue Ventures, focused on mentoring, advising, and investing in early stage technology companies. Alex is also a member of Hyde Park Angels, the Midwest’s largest angel investment group, where he is a deal lead on enterprise technology investments. Previously Alex was the Founder and CEO of 10^th Magnitude, the leading Microsoft Azure digital transformation consultancy in the US and a 4-time Global Partner of the Year award winner.  10^th Magnitude was sold to Cognizant in 2020.  Prior to this Alex was a Managing Director at Plural, a leading software consultancy which was sold to Dell in 2002. Alex spent 6 years at Dell during which time he led Dell’s Asia-Pacific professional services business (based in Singapore) and led the global solution development organization.  He is a regular speaker at technology industry events where he focuses on channel and partnering strategy and the economics of cloud businesses.  Alex holds a BA in Economics with honors from Oberlin College, and an MBA from Yale University’s School of Management. He lives outside Chicago with his family.