Target’s Cloud Independent Choices – Keynote Presentation by Target
Target is a massive American multinational corporation that delivered $106 billion in total revenue in 2021, having grown nearly $28 billion, or more than 35 percent, since 2019. Within that two-year progress has been digital sales growth of nearly $13 billion. Target’s digital infrastructure teams not only avoid lock-in via open solutions but also offer their developers options to build value that delivers excellent experiences for Target’s guests, helping to propel the company’s impressive growth.
In this fireside keynote session, Cathy Horst Forsyth, Founder & CEO of Strongbow Consulting Group, will guide a discussion with Pablo Espinosa, Target’s Vice President of Infrastructure and Founding ONUG Board Member; Ernest Lefner, ONUG Co-chair; and George Tchaparian, OCP’s Chief Executive Officer on Target’s hybrid-multi-cloud strategy and the company’s role in bringing together the ONUG and OCP communities to facilitate greater choices in open building blocks and solutions.
Infrastructure Technologist with 20+ years of combined experience in eCommerce, Enterprise and CDN environments across a variety of business verticals. Organizational leader with a proven track record of building and retaining high performance organizations with a focus on designing, delivering and operating infrastructure at scale.
Specialities:
Software Defined Architectures (Network and Data Center)
Cloud Based Architectures
Data Center (Hosting and Co-Location)
Global Operations and Management
Innovation Management
Strategic Agility
Business Operations
Vendor and Service Management (Sourcing, Supplier Management and Negotiation)
Budgetary Management (Forecasting, Cost Analysis, Cost Containment and Cost Savings)
Mergers & Acquisitions
George Tchaparian is a seasoned technology executive with more than 30 years of industry experience in all corporate levels and functions. George was the longstanding President and CEO of Edgecore Networks Corporation. Most recently, George was a corporate executive focusing on transformative next generation strategies for the Accton Group (Accton Technologies and Edgecore Networks Corporation), and previously a senior vice president of worldwide research & development (R&D). George was also the General Manager for Accton Group’s Open Disaggregated Networking Business. George also held senior management positions at Hewlett–Packard Corporation (HP) for more than 25 years, and has served as the Co-Chair of Open Compute Project (OCP) Taiwan regional community for many years and a member of the Open Network Foundation (ONF) board of directors. In 2018, George was recognized as one of “The World’s First Top 50 Edge Computing Influencers” (#EDGE50) and in 2019, one of “The World’s Most Influential Data Economy Leaders” (#POWER200).
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.
