At ONUG Spring 2021, we will reflect on the lessons learned during the tumultuous past year. We will digest the changes we experienced together and discuss the technologies and strategies critical to our digital transformation business models in 2021 and beyond.
Brands in all industry sectors need to become digital to survive and thrive
Join us as we explore the software building blocks required to create flexible, transformative IT business platforms
Join the ONUG Community of Global 2000 companies, enterprise architects, cloud providers and thought leaders on May 5th-6th.
Register Today
“Join the ONUG Community for two days of education, networking and thought leadership surrounding the the critical software building blocks required to create flexible IT business platforms”
ONUG Spring 2021 is where enterprise architects, cloud providers and thought leaders engage in important discussions and build the relationships necessary to navigate their digital transformation journeys. Join us for the 100% digital live event.
Be prepared for 2021 and beyond with the tools need to operationalize flexible IT business platforms at scale
View the event agenda and be sure to register.
Register Today
Nick Lippis is an authority on corporate computer networking. He has designed some for the largest computer networks in the world. He has advised many Global 2000 firms on network strategy, architecture, equipment, services and implementation including Hughes Aerospace, Barclays Bank, Kaiser Permanente, Eastman Kodak Company, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Liberty Mutual, Schering-Plough, Sprint, WorldCom, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks and a wide range of other equipment suppliers and service providers.
Mr. Lippis is uniquely positioned to comment, analyze and observe computer networking industry trends and developments.
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.
Ben is an award-winning entrepreneur whose insights have made an immeasurable impact on the emerging smart textiles market. Prior to Flex, Ben founded IoClothes, the first B2B industry platform providing tools, resources and key insights for the emerging area of smart textiles, apparel and footwear. Before that, Ben was a founding member of VF Corporation’s Global Innovation Center where he led research and testing initiatives for the North Face, Timberland and Vans.
Earlier in his career, Ben co-founded the “smart” infant monitoring start-up, Sensible Baby, which gained international recognition for its innovative approach to disrupting the juvenile product space. Prior to that, he was the Lead Footwear Project Engineer for the US Army and successfully led many fast-paced multi-million-dollar development efforts for the United States Department of Defense.
Ben received a B.S. in Biomedical Physics from Northeastern University and M.S. in Biomechanics with high distinction from Boise State University.
Suzan Mahboob enjoys everything Infrastructure Innovation. She is an active member of the technology community, speaking regularly at conferences, covering topics that are pushing boundaries and helping us transform the way we do things. She knows the challenges we face when working within monolithic, matrixed, large enterprises and hopes to bring her experiences detangling and decommissioning brownfield technologies while advancing greenfield initiatives. When she isn’t putting out production fires, she’s busy writing her blog, partnering and advocating for diversity in technology and exploring the great city of Toronto.
I’m the Co-Founder and Co-Host of The Tech Fugitives Show. The show covers IT news with a dash of science. Mix in some humor and it becomes… “Tech Talk that doesn’t Suck!”
Nick Lippis is an authority on corporate computer networking. He has designed some for the largest computer networks in the world. He has advised many Global 2000 firms on network strategy, architecture, equipment, services and implementation including Hughes Aerospace, Barclays Bank, Kaiser Permanente, Eastman Kodak Company, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Liberty Mutual, Schering-Plough, Sprint, WorldCom, Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks and a wide range of other equipment suppliers and service providers.
Mr. Lippis is uniquely positioned to comment, analyze and observe computer networking industry trends and developments.
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.
Don is an accomplished leader in successfully developing and executing business and technology strategy.
Don is co-founder and CEO of Concourse, an emerging leader in public cloud management and governance services, as well as a Senior Advisor at McKinsey Corporation.
Don spent 28 years at Goldman Sachs, during which time he held senior leadership roles in Technology in New York, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Don led the global technology division for Goldman from 2012 to 2016 and was named a partner of the firm in 2006 and Managing Director in 2000. Don was the CIO for Asia Pacific from 2001 to 2006 and served on the Asia management committee. Since relocating to the US in 2006, Don co-chaired the IBD Technology Investment Committee and was a member of the firm’s Firmwide Risk, Market Risk and Business Standards committee.
Don played an integral role in creating Goldman’s business systems architecture, algorithmic trading and risk management platform as well as leading strategic firm wide investments in VDI, Data architecture, AI and Cloud / Software Defined Infrastructure. He also created and led the teams responsible for the development of Symphony and Orbit which were subsequently spun out of the firm as broader industry platforms.
Within the technology industry, Don has been an active and vocal proponent of Open Source and Open Standards communities including acting as a founding board member of the Open Compute Project.
Don and his family reside in New York City where he is actively engaged in education and arts, serving on the board of the New York Foundation for the Arts, Columbia University School of Professional Studies, Marist College board of trustees and Teaching Matters.
Ann Johnson is Corporate Vice President of SCI Business Development at Microsoft. She oversees the investment and strategic partner strategy roadmap for security, compliance, and identity for one of the largest tech companies on our planet to help organizations become operationally resilient on their digital transformation journey and unlock capabilities of Microsoft’s intelligent cloud and next generation AI. She is a member of the board of advisors for FS-ISAC (The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center), an advisory board member for EWF (Executive Women’s Forum on Information Security, Risk Management & Privacy), and an advisory board member for HYPR Corp. Ann recently joined the board of advisors for Cybersecurity Ventures. For more about Microsoft’s Cybersecurity Solutions, visit the Microsoft Security Site, or follow Microsoft Security on Twitter at Msft Security Twitter or Msft WDSecurity Twitter. You can also hear her talk with some of the biggest influencers in cybersecurity each week on Afternoon Cyber Tea with Ann Johnson.
Chief Technology Officer at Raytheon Technologies (RTX), responsible for the technical interests of the company’s Enterprise Services including the implementation of RTX’s technology strategy and vision, and the integrity of the company’s infrastructure and resources.
Previously responsible for ensuring the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of the company’s assets and its customers’ assets globally.
Experienced keynote / public speaker at Information Security events, and contributor to Information Security publications, such as:
I am an experienced IT leader who is passionate about information security. My experience and work involve developing innovative programs to cost effectively address IT security risk for enterprises.
I am also the founder and co-host of the Defensive Security Podcast, intended to help information security professionals grow and learn from publicly disclosed security breaches in order to better defend their own organizations.
Sigal Zarmi is a Managing Director, International CIO* and the global Head of Transformation at Morgan Stanley. In this dual capacity, she is driving the firm’s innovation agenda through emerging technologies, unlocking technology-fueled sources of value across the business and modernizing the digital experience for our clients and employees.
As International CIO, she manages our diverse global Technology footprint including the Technology teams in the Global In-house Centers (GICs) leveraging her transformational capacity to optimize our organization, functions and platform to thrive in a continually evolving economic and market climate.
Sigal is a member of the Technology Operating Committee and the EMEA Operating Committee.
Sigal joined Morgan Stanley in 2018 from PwC where she led a global network transformation as Vice Chairman and CIO. Before that, Sigal was the CIO of GE Capital Americas, where she spent 18 years in various technology and operations leadership positions. She began her career as a developer at Motorola.
She holds an MBA from Columbia University in New York City and a B.S. in Engineering from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel.
Sigal is a senior advisor to multiple technology and cyber companies, start-ups and VCs. She is a passionate advocate for women in technology providing mentorship to aspiring entrepreneurs and technologists, among other community commitments.
Tsvi has over 25 years of technology and operations experience mostly in financial services, media and telecom and is known across the industry for his technology leadership, innovation and business acumen.
As CTO of Morgan Stanley’s shared services (infrastructure & data) since early 2012, Tsvi has been responsible for transforming the bank into a modern, efficient and effective organization.
He is leading the divisional Agile & DevOps transformation and the changes to the ways of work in technology, workforce strategy and front-to-back initiative.
He also completed a hundreds of million net cost reduction initiative while productivity and satisfaction improved.
Working collaboratively with the leaders of business technology, Tsvi led the creation and implementation of Morgan Stanley’s multi-year strategy and target state architecture along with the standards, guidelines, blueprints and use patterns that made it actionable to the engineering and development communities, broke the silo mentality and aggressively reduced technology debt.
Tsvi’s work helped position the bank as a leader in algorithmic trading/ ultra-low latency, migration to public cloud and containers, AI & machine learning, cyber security, mainframe optimization, data center consolidation, modern client experience, global network and near-fault tolerant operations.
Tsvi also oversaw the governance and regulatory compliance work with internal and external auditors and examiners.
Tsvi is the winner of the Einstein Award for technology excellence and known as a provider of strategic thought leadership and excellence in execution and transformation.
His experience ranges from traditional (server, storage, networks, operations, mainframes) to modern (public and private cloud, containers, cyber security) infrastructure as well as application development and Agile/DevOps transformation, with the focus on creating business value.
Greatest achievements are rooted from understanding and enabling the business to deliver both existing and new offerings in a combination of efficiency (cost), delivery focus (execution) and future-proofing (innovation).
As a Managing Director in Accenture’s Boston Office, Theo helps to lead its Technology Strategy & Advisory Services across North America. Theo’s client work focuses on partnering with C-level executives on their digital transformation strategies including digital technology roadmaps for cloud migrations, re-imagining user experiences for the digital economy, architecting enterprise scale deployments of automation and machine learning solutions to drive operational excellence, and helping to lead disruptive management for blue chip companies. Theo works closely with clients to realize their bottom and topline goals through the strategic deployment of technology to drive new forms of economic and customer value.
Linda Tai reports to the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. In this role, Tai leads the development and execution of the Fannie Mae business architecture strategy and production processes that aligns with our enterprise mission and overall corporate strategy. Her work will ensure that our digital transformation plans, processes, and systems deliver the insights we need to be a more innovative organization, support our customers and partners, and drive digital transformation throughout housing finance.
Accomplished IT executive building/leading high-performance teams with a reputation of broad industry influence. Track record of leading cloud transformation, modernizing data analytics, implementing machine learning, tireless prompter of open source and executing scaled agile with significant P&L responsibility.
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.
Preetha Vijayakumar is Vice President of Data Center, Network and Collaboration Services in FedEx Services. She joined FedEx in 2001 as a Technical Analyst, focusing on the management of all Internet facing systems. In 2013, she entered into management and assumed leadership roles including Manager and Managing Director responsible for the creation and management of platform architecture solutions for providing platform automation across the FedEx enterprise and spearheading FedEx’s cloud native migration journey.
Michael Parks is the Vice President for Distributed Infrastructure
Services and the Regional Vice President for all Dallas Campuses at
USAA. He is responsible for Data Center Management, Data Networks,
Servers, Storage, and Public Cloud infrastructure COE. Michael joined
USAA in 2019 and has over 25 years of experience in IT Enterprise
Infrastructure.
Currently he is leading the efforts to modernize USAA datacenters into a private cloud
capability, refresh campus-based infrastructure with automated controls for compliancy,
and to launch the infrastructure center of excellence for public cloud readiness through
automated safe landed coded services. He also spearheaded the expansion of the Velo
cloud platform, and associated internet circuit infrastructure that enabled the rapid
expansion of all USAA employees to WFH format.
Prior to USAA Michael led the AIG Fort Worth site campus of 750+ employees. Michael’s
specific role was VP of Data Network, Network Security, Collaboration, Call Center
Services, Data Center Services, and Workplace Services. Under his leadership at AIG, a
global enterprise wide re-architecture and re-platform of all the data network, security,
voice, and video platforms was completed. Prior to AIG, Michael lead similar large global
infrastructure transformations at General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell.
In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his wife Jamye, his three daughters, and
two grandsons. Michael is an avid competitor in Ironman competitions. He has completed
five of the six events he has participated in!
Amir Khan is a computer networking visionary who founded and led Viptela’s market-leading, cloud-first, Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) business before the acquisition by Cisco. As prescient as he was in identifying the $8B opportunity for SD-WAN, Amir recognized that network hampered the cloud journey and founded Alkira in 2018 with Atif Khan to reinvent networking for the cloud era. Amir’s vision is to deliver the cloud network as a utility. As CEO/Founder, he has led Alkira’s delivery of the industry’s first on-demand, as-a-service, point and click, unified multi-cloud networking service that enables cloud architects to design, build, and deploy a global multi-cloud network in minutes. Alkira enables enterprises to implement 50% less firewall capacity, and reduce TCO by up to 40%. Before Viptela, Amir held leadership roles at Cisco, Juniper, and Nortel. He holds 4 patents. Amir earned an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Mississippi.
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.
According to the business press and industry industry buzz, advanced cloud services that use AI and ML have engendered a digital transformation that is elevating IT from a service organization into a central part of all business activity. It seems that every corporation is moving business processes to the cloud en masse. Business continuity planning forms a key use case. But is it really true? Detractors claim that many large corporations still only have 10-15% of their workloads in the public cloud, and argue that corporations do not have the controls in place needed to govern and secure workloads in the cloud they way they can in their private data centers. Which view is correct? In this great debate Johna Till Johnson will argue that migration to the public cloud is both rapid and inevitable, while Greg Ferro will argue that corporations should be cautious and move slowly. Dr. Douglas Comer, Distinguished Professor at Purdue University will moderate and help us navigate this industry debate.
Johna Till Johnson is CEO and Founder of Nemertes Research, where she sets research direction and works with strategic clients. Under her leadership, Nemertes has emerged as a leading trusted advisor to Fortune-50 and other world-class organizations. A widely regarded expert, Ms. Johnson currently serves as the content committee chair at the Wall St. Technology Association (WSTA), which provides technology guidance to some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated financial services firms. She regularly speaks at industry trade shows, conferences, and seminars, including Nemertes Navigator360, IDG’s FutureIT, ISC, and (WSTA). She writes regular columns on cybersecurity and IoT for TechTarget. Prior to founding Nemertes in 2002, Ms. Johnson served as chief technology officer (CTO) at Greenwich Technology Partners, a global consulting and engineering firm. Prior to that, she led the Global Networking Strategies Service business unit of META Group. Prior to that, as Senior Technology Editor she oversaw the lab-testing program at Data Communications magazine, providing testing and assessment of up to 16 emerging technologies per year. She also has designed and developed security, speech-synthesis, and free-space laser products at companies including Mosler Security Systems and Digitus Corp. Ms. Johnson holds a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering/computer science (BSEE/CS) from The Johns Hopkins University, has conducted graduate work in nuclear and particle physics at the University of Rochester, speaks three languages, and has published a science fiction novel. She is an avid urban kayaker and novice woodworker and candymaker.
Dr. Douglas E. Comer is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. Formerly, he served as VP of Research at Cisco Systems. As a member of the original IAB, he participated in early work on the Internet, and is internationally recognized as an authority on TCP/IP protocols and Internet technologies.
Dr. Comer has written a series of best-selling technical books on Computer Networks, Internets, Operating Systems, and Computer Architecture. His 3-volume Internetworking series is cited as an authoritative work on Internet protocols and technologies. Dr. Comer’s books have been translated into 16 languages, and are used in industry and academia in many countries.
Dr. Comer consults for industry, and has lectured to thousands of professional engineers and students around the world. For twenty years he was editor-in-chief of the journal Software – Practice and Experience. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the recipient of numerous teaching awards.
I’m the Co-Founder and Co-Host of The Tech Fugitives Show. The show covers IT news with a dash of science. Mix in some humor and it becomes… “Tech Talk that doesn’t Suck!”
I’m the Co-Founder and Co-Host of The Tech Fugitives Show. The show covers IT news with a dash of science. Mix in some humor and it becomes… “Tech Talk that doesn’t Suck!”
I’m the Co-Founder and Co-Host of The Tech Fugitives Show. The show covers IT news with a dash of science. Mix in some humor and it becomes… “Tech Talk that doesn’t Suck!”
Brian is a Network and Cloud Architect at McKesson, one of the oldest and largest healthcare companies in the US and currently operating in 16 countries. He is responsible for linking the needs of their businesses with infrastructure technology so they may serve their customers. This includes architecting and designing networks for McKesson’s global backbone, regional WAN’s, distribution centers, offices, clinics, and pharmacies, in addition to our private and public cloud environments. Areas of recent focus include SD-WAN, multi-cloud public cloud enablement, security for McKesson’s Operational Technology environments, and planning and implementation of our global network organization.
Mick Currey is an Enterprise Cloud Architect championing resilient “anti-fragile” applications, cloud topologies, observability, automated governance, and automated security controls. When he learned the cloud was becoming an option for use at Fidelity, he worked with his CTO to create a new role to start working on the cloud. He has been working as an Enterprise Cloud Architect since then.
Mick’s career started as an Industrial Engineer doing computer simulations and programming robots. Programming robots was fun. However, he felt he was too technical, so he wanted to blend technical knowledge with more business and management concepts. He went back to school for an MBA in Information System. After grad school, his initial roles were in software development, AI development, and R&D architecture. Leading projects from a technical perspective led to project management and then development management. A few management roles mixed several different categories: ALM, Infrastructure (Servers, Storage and Network), Architecture, Governance, and Regulatory Compliance. Later roles included a product line manager with team members on several continents enabling development progress round the clock.
His experiences leading two drastically different hyper performing teams shaped his thinking regarding opportunities for teams to excel. (One team was a performance testing team with detailed root cause results for each two-week cycle. The second was an agile development team doing weekly iterations, 4-6 week releases to production while enjoying a less than 0.001% production bug rate per release.)
He works with several consortiums to understand, share cloud technical information and document the best practices available in the cloud.
I’m the Co-Founder and Co-Host of The Tech Fugitives Show. The show covers IT news with a dash of science. Mix in some humor and it becomes… “Tech Talk that doesn’t Suck!”
Michael Clark has worked in large enterprise computing for over 25 years, first in operations and engineering, and for the past decade in architecture and strategy. He began his career in network and server platform engineering at Bausch & Lomb, where he was instrumental in developing B&L’s global network infrastructure and in launching their first website.
Mike then moved on to Fidelity Investments, where he ultimately took on management of desktop and server operations for Fidelity’s Retail Operations group, merged 19 technology support organizations across the U.S. into 1, and ran network and telecom operations for the Boston region. He spent his final 5 years at Fidelity in the Enterprise Architecture group focused on various platform infrastructure initiatives, including leading the effort to develop a unified server strategy for the firm.
Mike has spent the last 5 years engaged in global professional services activities. He recently became a Partner at Exceptional Leaders International, where his focus is on working with mid-market companies, many of them private-equity owned, to synchronize their business imperatives and technology strategies. He has deep experience in global networking and cloud implementations.
Mike is currently the Technology Industry and IT Consulting Executive at Renaissance Tech & Media. He has been with the company since 2010.
Now Boston-based, Mike hails from Canada, where he received his undergraduate education at The University of Western Ontario. He has since done graduate work at both Brandeis and Harvard.
In his spare time Mike enjoys photography, traveling, and digital audio recording.
