ONUG Spring 2022 brought together the Enterprise Cloud Community to address the challenges and
develop solutions to the most pressing issues faced by today’s hybrid multi-cloud enterprise consumer.
Over the course of two days, the ONUG Community of Enterprise IT Professionals, Multi-Cloud Solutions Providers, Cloud Service Providers and DevSecOps professionals explored, discussed and found common ground on the best ways to build cost effective, networked, secure and observable multi-cloud architectures
If you missed ONUG Spring, be sure to join us for ONUG Fall when we are back in New York City, October 19-20 at Center415 on Fifth Ave.
As an ONUG Community member, you can access some of the materials presented at the event by logging into your ONUG.net account.
WATCH ON DEMAND
WATCH ON DEMANDHeld in concert with ONUG Spring ’22, the first ever DevSecOps@ONUG conference will address the challenges to operationalizing DevSecOps in the enterprise.
Agenda topics will focus on integrating security into your DevOps processes and playbooks, chaos security engineering, secure development, automated testing, cultures of learning, the paved path to DevOps success and more.
Join industry stalwarts John Willis from Red Hat, Aaron Rinehart, CTO of Verica and Chaos Security Engineering expert, and the Founder of Prowler Open Source, Toni de la Fuente, as they provide their perspectives on the benefits of embracing DevSecOps practices.
Ernest Lefner
Peter Campbell
Tsvi Gal
Michael Wheeler
Preeti Krishna
Janet Van
Don Duet
Michael Thomas Clark
James Wickett
Forrest Bennett
Can’t join us LIVE? Register here to view the event on our Digital Platform
Be prepared for 2022 and beyond with the tools need to operationalize flexible IT business platforms at scale
WATCH ON DEMAND
As the Chief Technical Evangelist for NetOps by Broadcom, Jeremy is passionate about meeting with customers to identify their IT operational challenges and produce solutions that fit their business and network transformation goals. Prior to joining Broadcom, he spent over 15+ years working in IT, across both public and private sectors, managing data centers for startups, healthcare, financial and federal system integrators. His previous roles as a data center administrator, engineer, architect and manager provided him invaluable insights into the challenges and goals of IT consumers.
Experienced Engineer with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology, Software development, and services
industry. Skilled in Wide Area (WAN) Networks SD-WAN, Public Cloud(Azure/AWS), Wireless Technologies, Voice over IP (VolP), Switches, and Unified Communications. Strong sales engineering professional with a Bachelor of Computer Science and 8+ years of highly accomplished experience.
With over two decades of professional experience in Network Engineering, Product Management, and Solutions Engineering, Kunal Thakkar is a seasoned expert with a track record of success in high-level consulting and professional services roles, as well as in managed services. In these roles, he has played a pivotal part in the architecture, rollout, and oversight of sophisticated network and security infrastructures for industry-leading Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies.
Kunal possesses diverse and in-depth technical proficiency that spans several disciplines, including Computer Networks, Cloud, Security, and Application Delivery Architectures.
Kunal holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science with a concentration in Computer Networks and Security from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from M.S. University in India.
Ted is an industry veteran with over 30 years’ experience in building, operating and scaling production environments. Using DevOps principles he is helping to change monolithic code into smaller manageable components while migrating services out into the Cloud. Making systems observable throughout the microservice creation and cloud migration.
Rick Hamilton is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Blue Planet Software, a division
of Ciena. Mr. Hamilton is responsible for Ciena’s Blue Planet software platform and global services
organization, including consulting and support services for designing, deploying, managing, and
maintaining communications networks.
Hamilton has led Blue Planet Software since its incorporation as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ciena in
2019. Ciena created this separate division to drive added focus on a key element of its Adaptive Network
strategy, and to enable greater business independence, including with respect to Blue Planet’s practices,
go-to-market strategy, customer engagement and commercial model.
Before joining Cisco, Hamilton was Senior Vice President and CIO of The DFS Group (a division of LVMH
Group), a luxury retailer catering to the traveling audience. Previously, he led the Applications and
Technology Services team that serviced 135 stores throughout the United States for Cost Plus World
Market, and he led the applications development team for Discovery Channel’s consumer division.
Hamilton holds a bachelor’s degree in information systems from the University of Phoenix and a master’s
degree in software engineering from Golden Gate University. A licensed commercial pilot and flight
instructor, he also holds an undergraduate degree in aeronautics.
Paul McCluskey is Vice President of Global Enterprise GTM for Blue Planet. His primary focus is building strategic partnerships and new routes to market that create broad value propositions for our joint customers. Paul also owns the Blue Orbit Partner Program which is critical to enabling our ecosystem.
With over 30 years of experience in networking and operations, Paul has an established grasp of the ongoing operational challenges facing service providers and large enterprises.
Prior to joining Blue Planet, Paul served as Vice President of Business Development at Ericsson managing global market development for its OSS solution. He also served as Vice President of Business Development and Marketing at CENX where he ran partner channels and managed the marketing organization.
Paul studied at the Royal Signals Army Apprentice College in Harrogate, United Kingdom where he received a BTEC diploma in Electronics and Communications. He jointly developed the patent for a Method and System for Specifying Planned Changes to a Communications Network.
Sachin has more than 20 years of product management experience managing network and services lifecycle management products. Before Ciena, he was the CEO and Co-founder of IndusIntel, Inc., a silicon valley based startup offering industry 4.0 industrial IoT solutions. Before that, Sachin’s longest career was with Cisco, where he managed Unified Communications services lifecycle management products targeted at enterprises and service provider customers.
Kelly Baig has worked in information technology and networking for over 30 years. Her past experience includes HPE and Aruba, where Kelly helped to introduce the GreenLake for Aruba NaaS solution to the market. Kelly is excited to be part of the Blue Planet Enterprise Automation Suite program at Ciena, working with partners and customers to identify key problems to solve in network lifecycle management.
Steve is responsible for securing customer adoption and growth for a new set of Blue Planet offering, targeting multiple Enterprise verticals. This role will focus on Blue Planet development of Global Distribution, Value Added Resellers (VARs) and Managed Service Provider (MSP) partners operating in all regions. Steve leads a team of director level partner engagement leads and provides direction and support for their in-country channel engagements.
Steve’s background spans 4 decades working with Product vendors & Service firms dealing with large networks in both Service Provider and Enterprise markets. Companies include Nortel, IBM, JDSU, Viavi Solutions, Hitachi and Blue Planet a Ciena Company.
Experienced Engineer with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology, Software development, and services
industry. Skilled in Wide Area (WAN) Networks SD-WAN, Public Cloud(Azure/AWS), Wireless Technologies, Voice over IP (VolP), Switches, and Unified Communications. Strong sales engineering professional with a Bachelor of Computer Science and 8+ years of highly accomplished experience.
Josh Hammer is a Field CISO with Oracle. In this role, he works with customers to help them build innovative cloud security architectures and strategies that standardize and accelerate the secure adoption of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Before returning to Oracle, he was a Security Partner Solutions Architect with Amazon Web Services. In this role, he works closely with various strategic security partners to build cloud-optimized architecture and develop strategies with business development teams. Before this, he was a Security Architect in the AWS Professional Services organization, where he helped large enterprises adopt AWS.
Digital technology is transforming the world around us at an ever-increasing pace, changing every aspect of business and consumer experience. Discover how the power of one can help propel that digital transformation seamlessly. One simple network, one scalable architecture, and one seamless experience connecting any service, anytime, anywhere.
Michael Haugh brings over twenty-five years of experience and leads Product Marketing at Gluware. Prior to Gluware, Michael was VP of Product Management at ClearPath Networks. He has previously held roles in System Engineering, Product Management, and Marketing at Ixia and Spirent. Michael also worked at IBM Global Services and AT&T in Network Operations, Network Engineering and as a Design Engineer. Michael, Cisco CCIE #4334, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and holds a B.S. in Engineering from Southern Illinois University.
David Bainbridge is a Senior Director of Software Engineering with a focus on open-source software working as part of Ciena’s office of the CTO. In this role, David participates in developing prototypes, demonstrations, and product integrations that leverage the best practices and trends of the open-source community. Further, David and his team work to understand how these practices and trends can be applied to existing Ciena products as well as help influence product direction to better address the needs of Ciena’s customers.
David’s software architecture and development practice has spanned more than 40 years and covered diverse domains including human-machine interaction, security, distributed systems, AR/VR, simulation, IT operations, network management, and education. David continues to contribute to open-source projects and occasionally presents at industry conferences around the globe.
Koroush Saraf leads product positioning and marketing initiatives for ZPE Systems and brings 20 years of networking and security experience to the team. Koroush served as VP of Product management at Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet bringing to market leading products in SASE, SD-WAN, LTE/5G, SD-Branch and IAM. And now at ZPE we are bringing the same security reliability and simplicity of public cloud to private cloud infrastructure from Datacenter to the edge. Koroush holds a Masters of Electrical Engineering from Stanford & USC.
As part of the Solution Engineering group is Rene Neumann working closely with customers and helps delivering the right solutions to ZPE customers.
His IT & data center expertise spans over 20 years, covering a broad range of technologies from Data Center and Infrastructure Management implementations and solutions to Network Management and Automation technologies. Using ZPE’s powerful platform of consolidated devices and intuitive software, Rene continues to improve network architecture for companies across the globe.
Toni de la Fuente is the founder of Prowler Open Source, the tool for enabling AWS security best practices. He has also worked for AWS as a security engineer and consultant. He’s passionate about FLOSS – Free Libre Open Source Software – in general and Information Security, Incident Response, and Digital Forensics in particular. He enjoys everything related to cloud computing and automation. Toni has contributed to several security and Open Source community projects such as Prowler, phpRADmin, the Nagios plugin for Alfresco, and Alfresco BART (backup tool). He’s also contributed to books and courses related to Linux, Monitoring, and AWS Security for PacktPublishing.
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.
Michael Haugh brings over twenty-five years of experience and leads Product Marketing at Gluware. Prior to Gluware, Michael was VP of Product Management at ClearPath Networks. He has previously held roles in System Engineering, Product Management, and Marketing at Ixia and Spirent. Michael also worked at IBM Global Services and AT&T in Network Operations, Network Engineering and as a Design Engineer. Michael, Cisco CCIE #4334, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and holds a B.S. in Engineering from Southern Illinois University.
Deba Mohanty is VP of Product Management at Selector. He is responsible for product management and marketing at Selector. Deba has over fifteen years of experience in the design, development, and product management of Computer Networking products and data analytics solutions. His experiences include product development and management roles at Intel and Juniper Networks and data-analytics product management roles at AWS (Amazon Web Services).Deba graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Electrical Engineering. He also has a master’s degree in Computer Engineering from Texas A & M University and an MBA from Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley.
Jason Gmitter has over 20 years of experience building and deploying enterprise class data center architectures. Prior to Pensando he has held senior systems engineering and customer-focused roles at Microsoft, Cisco, and ADP.
Toni de la Fuente is the founder of Prowler Open Source, the tool for enabling AWS security best practices. He has also worked for AWS as a security engineer and consultant. He’s passionate about FLOSS – Free Libre Open Source Software – in general and Information Security, Incident Response, and Digital Forensics in particular. He enjoys everything related to cloud computing and automation. Toni has contributed to several security and Open Source community projects such as Prowler, phpRADmin, the Nagios plugin for Alfresco, and Alfresco BART (backup tool). He’s also contributed to books and courses related to Linux, Monitoring, and AWS Security for PacktPublishing.
Larry Peterson is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at Princeton University, where he served as Chair from 2003-2009. He is a co-author of the best selling networking textbook Computer Networks: A Systems Approach (6e), which is now available as open source on GitHub. His research focuses on the design, implementation, and operation of Internet-scale distributed systems, including the widely used PlanetLab and MeasurementLab platforms. He is currently working on a pilot 5G-enabled edge cloud, called Aether, an open source project of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), where he serves CTO.
Professor Peterson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, the 2010 recipient of the IEEE Kobayashi Computer and Communication Award, and the 2013 recipient of the ACM SIGCOMM Award. He received his Ph.D. degree from Purdue University in 1985.
Dr. Benson is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. His group focuses on developing models and designing algorithms and frameworks to improve the performance and availability of computer networks. In particular, his group explores the critical role that network state plays in determining network performance and availability with the state’s inherent semantics and emergent state management techniques by investigating designs and algorithms to more holistically understand and manage this state. More recently, this approach has been applied to addressing the digital divide, improving microservices/clouds, managing software defined networks, and rethinking CDN designs. These designs and systems have been deployed at web scale companies, adopted by opensource systems, and acquired by a large hardware manufacturer.
Larry Peterson is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science, Emeritus at Princeton University, where he served as Chair from 2003-2009. He is a co-author of the best selling networking textbook Computer Networks: A Systems Approach (6e), which is now available as open source on GitHub. His research focuses on the design, implementation, and operation of Internet-scale distributed systems, including the widely used PlanetLab and MeasurementLab platforms. He is currently working on a pilot 5G-enabled edge cloud, called Aether, an open source project of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), where he serves CTO.
Professor Peterson is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, the 2010 recipient of the IEEE Kobayashi Computer and Communication Award, and the 2013 recipient of the ACM SIGCOMM Award. He received his Ph.D. degree from Purdue University in 1985.
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.
Aaron Rinehart has spent his career solving challenging engineering problems for organizations such as the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Department of Defense (DoD). Rinehart has been a featured speaker at several media outlets and conferences, most notably the National Press Club, RSA, Velocity, and ABC News. Rinehart has been interviewed and quoted in various publications including the Huffington Post, DarkReading, SecurityWeekly, ISMG and MarketWatch.
Aaron has been expanding the possibilities of chaos engineering in its application to other safety-critical portions of the IT domain notably cybersecurity. He began pioneering the application of security in chaos engineering during his tenure as the Chief Security Architect at the largest private healthcare company in the world, UnitedHealth Group (UHG). While at UHG Rinehart released ChaoSlingr, one of the first open source software releases focused on using chaos engineering in cybersecurity to build more resilient systems. Rinehart recently founded a chaos engineering startup called Verica with Casey Rosenthal from Netflix and is the O’Reilly author on the topic as well as a frequent speaker in the space.
Cody is a DevOps-Engineer-recently-turned-IT-Project-Manager, nonbinary activist, compulsive event planner, and Organizational Development nerd. Xe is working on a grant-funded project to implement optional pronoun entry into IAM systems at Harvard. Xe weaves accessibility and inclusion into all of xyr work, technical or otherwise.
Roopa has over 25 years of experience in Information Technology; the most recent 12+ years have been in Security, Access and Risk Management. Roopa has a breadth of experience in Media, Federal, Higher Ed, Financial, and supply chain industries, solving business problems with technology solutions. She has architected solutions and implemented Enterprise applications for HR, Supply Chain, Finance, Risk & Compliance and Information Security.
Roopa has initiated and managed Global IAM programs with a high rate of success at multiple organizations, starting from assessment, roadmap planning, vendor selection, project planning and implementation. She has extensive experience in performing IAM assessments and providing recommendations for securing access and increasing efficiency in employee on-boarding. She has helped organizations save money and increase productivity by implementing global Identity and Access Management programs from scratch within a few months, leading M&A integrations and enabling Compliance/ Attestation campaigns. Organizations have benefitted from Roopa’s effective leadership in establishing robust Identity Governance programs. Roopa has hands on experience with IAM applications from leading vendors such as Fischer Identity, Oracle, SailPoint, Okta, Microsoft. She has designed and implemented Risk management programs following established models and frameworks (NIST, COBIT, A-123).
Roopa has an MBA in Global Management from the Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has managed global IAM programs at Discovery Communications and at the George Washington University. Prior to this, she has been a Consulting Manager at Deloitte Consulting and has several years of experience in architecting solutions for financial services, Retail and supply-chain sectors. She is ITIL, CISM and CDPSE certified and is a member of ISACA (Information Systems Audit and Control Association).
Anna likes connecting the dots between people, process, and technology to solve complex problems and meet practical daily work needs. On an average day, you’ll find Anna advising folks on service and asset awareness so that service owners and technologists deliver efficient service across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Anna is collaborating with peers to leverage a grant-funded project to build consensus among policy and enterprise technologists to deliver pronoun data at Harvard.
Don Luchini is a Boston-based DevOps engineer specializing in infrastructure management and deployment automation pipelines. Over the past ten years, he has acted in the corporate IT, quality assurance, software development, and release engineering spaces, encompassing a number of roles that now fall under the term DevOps. He currently works at SimpliSafe, a Boston-based manufacturer of connected home security systems. In his spare time, he is a martial artist, radio enthusiast, and hobby photographer.
Toni de la Fuente is the founder of Prowler Open Source, the tool for enabling AWS security best practices. He has also worked for AWS as a security engineer and consultant. He’s passionate about FLOSS – Free Libre Open Source Software – in general and Information Security, Incident Response, and Digital Forensics in particular. He enjoys everything related to cloud computing and automation. Toni has contributed to several security and Open Source community projects such as Prowler, phpRADmin, the Nagios plugin for Alfresco, and Alfresco BART (backup tool). He’s also contributed to books and courses related to Linux, Monitoring, and AWS Security for PacktPublishing.
Matthew Titmus is an academic refugee and veteran of the software development industry who can currently be found serving as an engineering team lead at Yext. He’s an organizer for the DevOpsDays NYC Conference, is the founder of NYC CoffeeOps, and the author of Cloud Native Go (O’Reilly Media).
Dan Capetta is an engineering leader who has worked across higher education, health services and e-commerce. Dan has spent the last decade working to improve the engineering experience and improving the flow of value to customer while maintaining quality and security. He currently works at Grainger leading Enablement and Platform Engineering.
Don Luchini is a Boston-based DevOps engineer specializing in infrastructure management and deployment automation pipelines. Over the past ten years, he has acted in the corporate IT, quality assurance, software development, and release engineering spaces, encompassing a number of roles that now fall under the term DevOps. He currently works at SimpliSafe, a Boston-based manufacturer of connected home security systems. In his spare time, he is a martial artist, radio enthusiast, and hobby photographer.
Matthew Titmus is an academic refugee and veteran of the software development industry who can currently be found serving as an engineering team lead at Yext. He’s an organizer for the DevOpsDays NYC Conference, is the founder of NYC CoffeeOps, and the author of Cloud Native Go (O’Reilly Media).
Aaron Rinehart has spent his career solving challenging engineering problems for organizations such as the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Department of Defense (DoD). Rinehart has been a featured speaker at several media outlets and conferences, most notably the National Press Club, RSA, Velocity, and ABC News. Rinehart has been interviewed and quoted in various publications including the Huffington Post, DarkReading, SecurityWeekly, ISMG and MarketWatch.
Aaron has been expanding the possibilities of chaos engineering in its application to other safety-critical portions of the IT domain notably cybersecurity. He began pioneering the application of security in chaos engineering during his tenure as the Chief Security Architect at the largest private healthcare company in the world, UnitedHealth Group (UHG). While at UHG Rinehart released ChaoSlingr, one of the first open source software releases focused on using chaos engineering in cybersecurity to build more resilient systems. Rinehart recently founded a chaos engineering startup called Verica with Casey Rosenthal from Netflix and is the O’Reilly author on the topic as well as a frequent speaker in the space.
Toni de la Fuente is the founder of Prowler Open Source, the tool for enabling AWS security best practices. He has also worked for AWS as a security engineer and consultant. He’s passionate about FLOSS – Free Libre Open Source Software – in general and Information Security, Incident Response, and Digital Forensics in particular. He enjoys everything related to cloud computing and automation. Toni has contributed to several security and Open Source community projects such as Prowler, phpRADmin, the Nagios plugin for Alfresco, and Alfresco BART (backup tool). He’s also contributed to books and courses related to Linux, Monitoring, and AWS Security for PacktPublishing.
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.
The most memorable accomplishments experienced are seeing how the technology weaves into the business processes to deliver outstanding customer experiences. Joe’s journey brought him thru most functional IT roles always balancing business, technical and people management practices. An evangelist for DevOps and Agile practices, he helps organizations transform the way they work. Curiosity is his driver for learning, mostly by reading or listening to others more experienced and then ‘test and learn’ with real life experiences. He has also completed certifications as a Scrum Master, COMPTIA Security, ITIL v3, Pragmatic Product Marketing, and Six Sigma Yellow Belt.
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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!”
Karl Miller is a US Navy veteran and works as Director of Product Management for OCI Security Products covering internal and external security. He has more than 20 years of experience in multiple areas of cyber security including cryptography, identity & access management, and Operations. For the past 6 years, he has concentrated on securing cloud services and customer workloads. He holds patents in federated authentication and currently resides near Atlanta, GA, USA.
Kyle Rose is a Senior Manager and Capability Architect of the Adversary Management function at Intuit. Kyle leads a team of Principal Software Engineers solving complex cloud security problems. He has 14 years of experience in cybersecurity and specializes in: DevSecOps, Security Architect, & Cloud Security. Kyle has an MS in Computer Science in Cybersecurity from The George Washington University. He is currently based in Jacksonville, FL. Kyle is a contributor to the ONUG automated cloud governance working group.
Steve has 17 years of Fidelity experience leading, design, development, and delivery of security tools and technology solutions. He is skilled in building a great team, which strives to advance the goals of the firm, and strong skills in AWS Cloud Security, Information Security, Identity Management, and Software Development, policy creation, and business process development.
Janet Van is a Product Manager at IBM Cloud and owns the IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center product. The Security and Compliance Center focuses on providing unified visibility across IBM Cloud and its partners as a cloud security posture management tool for central security and compliance management. Her role as the product focal is to own the product life cycle management across teams (development, design, research, tech sales, support, marketing, etc) and to set the long-term vision, priorities and strategic roadmap for the offering. Alongside, she is also driving overall user experience and quality in the offering and managing the go-to-market activities. Previously, she started her technology career as a software developer within CIO at IBM. During her time within the CIO, she deepened her roles in technical delivery in product offerings supporting IAM and MFA security infrastructure at an enterprise level, globally within IBM. With each new role, she has always strived to explore and broaden her passion working across business and organizations to deliver and improve product and customer experience. Outside of work, Janet is a dog-mom who who enjoys spending time with her heeler pups and hiking state parks across North America.
Preeti is a Principal Product Manager for Microsoft’s Cloud and AI Security group. With over 12 years of experience with Microsoft, Preeti has delivered multiple Bing and .NET products. In her current role, Preeti is responsible for Azure Sentinel ecosystem and community charter. She’s passionate about delivering great customer and developer experiences. Preeti is an active contributor to the ONUG Automated Cloud Governance working group, driving the Cloud Security Notification (CSNF) initiative.
As Group Vice President, Cloud Engineering, Johnnie leads a team of cloud security experts and advisors who help customers securely deploy and operate on Oracle Cloud. She has spent more than 20 years bringing security technologies to market, most recently for Microsoft’s Enterprise Cybersecurity Group. She has, in prior roles, led product, business development and marketing for industry leaders Gigamon, Juniper Networks, Varonis and Check Point software. In earlier years, she designed cellular infrastructure networks for Motorola Inc. Johnnie’s work has been featured in trade, business press as well as security conferences.
Konstantas holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland College Park.
Dynamic and innovative technology leader with a proven track record in building and leading high-performance engineering teams. Passionate about driving digital transformation, enhancing cybersecurity, and optimizing cloud infrastructure for businesses. Extensive experience in driving strategic initiatives and delivering cutting-edge solutions that enable organizations to thrive in today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape. My expertise spans AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI and a wide range of security tools and practices. I’m dedicated to achieving operational excellence, cost optimization, and security posture enhancement through innovative solutions.
Don is an accomplished leader in successfully developing and executing business and technology strategy.
Don is CEO and Co-Founder 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.
As Group Vice President, Cloud Engineering, Johnnie leads a team of cloud security experts and advisors who help customers securely deploy and operate on Oracle Cloud. She has spent more than 20 years bringing security technologies to market, most recently for Microsoft’s Enterprise Cybersecurity Group. She has, in prior roles, led product, business development and marketing for industry leaders Gigamon, Juniper Networks, Varonis and Check Point software. In earlier years, she designed cellular infrastructure networks for Motorola Inc. Johnnie’s work has been featured in trade, business press as well as security conferences.
Konstantas holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland College Park.
Umesh Shankar is the Chief Technologist for Google Cloud Security. In his 16 years at Google, Umesh has led a number of foundational security and privacy initiatives including the creation of the Data Protection effort at Google, building global infrastructure for key management, authentication, authorization, insider risk, software supply chain security, data governance, and Access Transparency, to keep users’ data safe across all Google’s products and Google Cloud Platform. He also previously led the Google Assistant Ecosystem team including its developer platform, identity, monetization, and discovery services.
Umesh has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an AB from Harvard University. He is an avid soccer player, mixologist, clarinetist, husband, and dad to three boys.
Dr. Malgorzata (Gosia) Steinder is a scientist in IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. She is an IBM Fellow and a CTO of Hybrid Cloud Research. Through her career she worked on resource management, distributed systems, containers, and infrastructure management. Currently, she focuses on cloud security and compliance and platform evolution to distributed cloud. She is an author of numerous research papers, an inventor of over 40 patents, and an experienced speaker.
Dynamic and innovative technology leader with a proven track record in building and leading high-performance engineering teams. Passionate about driving digital transformation, enhancing cybersecurity, and optimizing cloud infrastructure for businesses. Extensive experience in driving strategic initiatives and delivering cutting-edge solutions that enable organizations to thrive in today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape. My expertise spans AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI and a wide range of security tools and practices. I’m dedicated to achieving operational excellence, cost optimization, and security posture enhancement through innovative solutions.
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.
Steve Mullaney brings 30 years of marketing, product management, and engineering experience in network infrastructure and security to Aviatrix. Most recently, Steve was the CEO of Nicira Inc., a network virtualization and software-defined networking company, from 2009 until it was acquired in 2012 by VMware for $1.26 billion. Nicira invented the concept of offering software-based services running on top of networking hardware. Mullaney became the senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s Networking and Security business unit following Nicira’s acquisition.
Prior to Nicira, he served as vice president, marketing, and interim CEO for Palo Alto Networks. During his tenure, Mullaney oversaw the company’s invention of the next-generation firewall market category, which helped cement Palo Alto Networks’ reputation as a thought leader and cybersecurity innovator.
Steve also held executive positions at Blue Coat, Force10, Cisco, Growth Networks, ShoreTel, Bay Networks and SynOptics, and began his career as a design engineer at GTE Government Systems. Steve holds a BSEE from the University of Rhode Island.
Daniele Loffreda is Marketing Lead for Ciena’s Virtualized Edge Solution. In this role he leads Ciena’s initiatives applying technologies that converge network, security and compute to help service provider and enterprise customers improve the efficiency of remote branch locations, reduce operational expense, evolve towards a multi-cloud edge, and deliver a higher quality experience to their customers.
Daniele has more than 25 years of experience helping customers leverage Information, Communications and Technology solutions provide greater value, streamline their operations and generate higher returns on network investments. In addition to his current role at Ciena, Daniele has worked in pioneering sales roles at AT&T, Sprint and Fujitsu. He has presented at numerous industry conferences, and published articles and posts on next generation network connectivity as a critical foundation of enterprise transformation.
Jeremiah Ginn is a Husband, Father, Teacher, and lives a life focused on investing in those that cross his path. Today he has 3 bio and 6 adopted children, 3 grandchildren, and lives in Northwest Arkansas. A Service-Disabled Veteran, he proudly served in the US Army. He serves today as a Military Veteran Advocate, President of the Arkansas Chapter of the AT&T Veterans and a Champion for Children’s Adoptive and Foster Care Programs across multiple non-profit organizations.
Jeremiah leads Software Defined Networking Evangelism Efforts at AT&T, supporting global customers in their efforts to automate network infrastructure and reduce business impacting conditions. He leads with roles as an SD-WAN, SASE, NFV, and Multi-Tenant Cloud Edge Compute Subject Matter Expert, as well as Executive Consultant, SCRUM Master, Developer, Author, Public Speaker, Educator, and Technology Evangelist.
Mark has over 30 years’ experience working with Optical and Ethernet Network Technology, including 16 years of experience at Ciena. He has held positions in Sale and Sales Leadership focusing on Enterprise Companies where he has been an innovator in helping Enterprises deploy emerging
technologies, including the world’s first Enterprise deployed 100G Network at a Global Stock Exchange, and the deployment of Optical Level Encryption for Large Financials, Utility and Health Care customers.
Todd Poston heads Ciena Services’s systems integration practice that is focused on applications of Ciena technology and multivendor elements for virtualized edge, edge cloud, and 5G solutions. He has held product management, consulting, service management, and presales leadership roles in the industry. These roles have been in telecom cloud, metro transport, and wireline access technologies. Todd holds BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University and a MBA from Duke University.
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.
Jeff Gray is the CEO and co-founder of Gluware, the leading provider of Intelligent Network Automation for the Cloud Era. As CEO, he oversees business operations and strategy, as well as the development of enterprise-leading intent-based network automation technologies adopted by the largest and most complex Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises from Pharma to Finance. Gray is credited with bringing the industry’s first SDN orchestration platform to market and achieving significant blue-chip enterprise adoption. He has been a networking industry leader for two decades, starting with the commercial development of innovative high-bandwidth networking solutions as a student at California Polytechnic State University.
Shane is a recognized business transformation executive within the financial services, and cloud and network infrastructure industries. He utilizes technology and insights to improve processes and identify and create new business growth opportunities.
At First Republic Bank, Shane assisted in defining the cloud, cloud networking, and compute/virtualization standards, as well as modernizing voice and video collaboration services, evolving data center services, and driving multiple simultaneous large transformation projects to optimize the critical customer-facing banking services. Additionally, Shane established an infrastructure automation program to create the foundational framework for the automated ecosystem, as well as develop a software-defined network strategy, — paving the way for standardization, performance, resiliency, and improved operational efficiency and costs.
Application security is increasingly seen as a board-level issue for many businesses today and while north-south security is a well understood problem, many IT departments are struggling to implement East-West security in a simple, efficient manner. In this keynote Scott Stevens will discuss common security issues with todays network architectures, in addition to some new approaches to simplify segmentation of the data center network architecture to provide hyper-scale class technology and performance that is unparalleled.
The flexibility of this approach enables you to determine how and when you execute on a macro- or micro-segmentation strategy without requiring 3rd party firewalls or tromboning flows across the data center fabric. Delivering micro-segmentation between all workloads in the data center regardless of IP/VLAN mapping means that you can seamlessly migrate to a full Zero Trust security posture based on your timing and needs, not those of your vendor.
Scott has spent the last 7 years at Palo Alto Networks leading the Global SE’s where he grew the team from 117 to 1300. This included developing processes to scale the adoption of Palo’s technology to meet customer’s business outcomes.
Previous to that, Scott spent 14 years at Juniper Networks leading various teams, and left there leading the Global SE team. He also served as a US Air Force officer, where he had extensive hands-on and leadership roles in building wide area networks.
Dynamic and innovative technology leader with a proven track record in building and leading high-performance engineering teams. Passionate about driving digital transformation, enhancing cybersecurity, and optimizing cloud infrastructure for businesses. Extensive experience in driving strategic initiatives and delivering cutting-edge solutions that enable organizations to thrive in today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape. My expertise spans AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI and a wide range of security tools and practices. I’m dedicated to achieving operational excellence, cost optimization, and security posture enhancement through innovative solutions.
Kyle Rose is a Senior Manager and Capability Architect of the Adversary Management function at Intuit. Kyle leads a team of Principal Software Engineers solving complex cloud security problems. He has 14 years of experience in cybersecurity and specializes in: DevSecOps, Security Architect, & Cloud Security. Kyle has an MS in Computer Science in Cybersecurity from The George Washington University. He is currently based in Jacksonville, FL. Kyle is a contributor to the ONUG automated cloud governance working group.
Scott Kennedy is the Security Architect for Adversary Management for the Security Team at Intuit. Certifications: CISSP-ISSAP, CISA, GCIH, and GIAC. He has 30+ years of experience as a Unix system administrator, including 20 years of dedicated security experience within commercial enterprises. Kennedy is an SME in fields including cloud security, virtualization, IT security, document retention, disaster recovery, IACNA/CND and forensics. As part of the Cloud Security Team, he is responsible for bringing scientific rigor and analysis to the decisions for cloud security. He is an active member of the Southern California IT Security scene and manages Intuit R3DC0N security conference villages experience.
As Technical Director, Aryo Kresnadi is responsible for setting network architecture strategies, futures and solutions for FedEx Global Enterprise Network supporting all FedEx information movement to ensure on-time delivery for all FedEx packages.
Current responsibility includes research and development of architecture, design and implementation of the next-generation network for FedEx data center, multi-cloud, and edge network for the FedEx field locations to support next-generation sensors, robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.
Aryo holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering (BSEE) from Ohio State University and a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering (MSEE) from University of Pittsburgh. Aryo is currently based in Collierville, TN, the home of FedEx World Technology Center.
Nabil is the CTO – Head of Network Architecture at Bloomberg LP.
Vesko led the Solution Architecture & Strategy Division at Sterling National Bank. In this role, Vesko was responsible for providing technical solutions designed to offer effectiveness, efficiency, evolvability, reliability, security, scalability, and resiliency across all security and infrastructure services.
Prior to Sterling, Vesko worked at Credit Suisse for 10 years in various leadership roles in Infrastructure Architecture and Cyber Security across a global footprint of production, non-production and test environments. In his time at CS he introduced emerging technologies and innovative products in software defined networking, network virtualization, data center and cloud networking and security, threat management and incident response, security automation and orchestration, and others. In addition to working closely with Credit Suisse’s engineering and operations teams, Vesko also served as technical advisor to the Technology Investment Banking, Equity Research, and Prime Investments business units.
Vesko has an MS in Computer Science from Columbia University with concentration in Network Systems and Network Security. He is currently based in New York City.
Peter Fetterolf, Ph. D. is an expert in network technology, architecture and economic analysis. He is responsible for financial modeling and whitepapers as well as software development of the ACG Research Business Analytics Engine. Dr. Fetterolf has a multidisciplinary background in the networking industry with over thirty years of experience as a management consultant, entrepreneur, executive manager, and academic. He is experienced in economic modeling, business case analysis, engineering management, product definition, market validation, network design, and enterprise, and service provider network strategy.
Vishal recently joined Gap in late 2015 after stints at Restoration Hardware and Xerox. In his current role, he’s shepherding Gap’s Network Infrastructure as it relates to WAN, supply chain, and data centers. Dedicated to helping Gap achieve its digital transformation and to lay the foundation for the next set of technology services, he is responsible for global architecture, roadmap, strategy and building an engineering team that will be deliver enhanced network/infrastructure services.
Vishal’s current focus is on building the next generation of data centers and WAN, including network automation and Orchestration. This also includes hybrid, private and public clouds, OpenStack running our production environment and continuation of our SD WAN deployment and execution of our roadmap in addition to partnering with our cloud automation team to identify our PaaS and IaaS strategy.
Prior to Gap, Vishal managed Network Engineering, Architecture and Strategy at Restoration Hardware with ownership of service delivery of RH’s Network and Telecom services for all of their retail, supply chain, corporate and data center locations.
Prior to moving to San Francisco Bay Area, he spent more than a decade at Xerox in multiple engineering and management positons with the most recent managing the corporate network infrastructure supporting global data centers, 400+ branch offices and campuses supporting > 130,000 users in addition to program management of a managed service provider and developing technology strategies/roadmaps to meet it’s strategic near and long-term business objectives.
Vishal holds both an MBA in Finance and Economics from Simon Business school (university of Rochester) and MS in Information Technology from Rochester Institute of Technology.
Yesim Akdeniz is a senior Managing Director in Citi technology organization and has been responsible to driving significant transformation across the technology infrastructure landscape over the last 5 years. She has been part of the core leadership team that has driven 30%+ savings across the operating expense, while significantly modernizing Citigroup’s technology capabilities, enhancing customer experience, business agility and managing risk.
Citi technology organization supports business operations in 100+ countries that Citi operates in, across multiple lines of business spanning both Institutional and Retail businesses. The technology engineering organization is designing and deploying industry leading solutions across the Citi footprint as the bank continues to leverage product and business model innovation to maintain and increase Citi’s competitive edge in the market place. Yesim is at the forefront of the innovative thinking that CATE (Citigroup Architecture and Technology Engineering) is delivering.
She has held several senior management positions across Citigroup technology, Yesim has a Masters in Business Administration, Wilmington College and a Bachelors of Art in Computer Science, East Carolina University. As one of the senior most women in technology and co-chair of Enterprise O&T Women Leadership Council at Citigroup, Yesim is actively involved with various ‘Women in Technology’ initiatives, including the Women’s Bond Club and Citigroup sponsorship programs. Additionally, Yesim was awarded the top 100 CIOs award by the CIO magazine in 2010, http://www.citigroup.com/citi/press/2010/100603e.htm, and she was inducted into the 42nd Annual YWCA Academy of Women Leaders on in 2016.
James Walker, is an ONUG Board Member, VP of Strategy & Transformation at IBM Cloud, and has previously held senior executive roles in technology at Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse.
Xiaobo leads a team to deliver leading edge technology solutions in support of Citi IT strategy. She drives critical solutions to secure Citi’s hybrid cloud environments to enable Citi to reduce risks and stay compliant while allowing Citi’s businesses to benefit from the opportunities that cloud services provide. Xiaobo started her career as a Network Engineer at Goldman Sachs in 2009 after she got her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She has been selected for “Rising Star Award” to represent Citi at the Women’s Bond Club in the financial industry in 2017. She is also on Palo Alto Network Vendor’s Cloud Customer Advisory Board.
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.
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).
Christopher Moretti has been an executive leader with Cigna since October, 2015 and is currently responsible for all infrastructure engineering Leading the Global Engineering & Infrastructure Services. In this role, Chris provides executive leadership over the teams that deliver Cigna’s voice & data networks, security engineering, contact center, database, compute, storage, information management, mainframe, cloud & devops.
Previous to Cigna, Chris spent 14 years at General Electric and its subsidiaries in various executive leadership roles supporting its insurance, consumer and commercial banking businesses. While at GE, Chris attended and graduated many of their prestigious management training classes including AIMC and EIMP. Most recently, Christopher was Managing Director of Global Networks for J.P. Morgan Chase & Company based in midtown Manhattan.
Chris started his career in IT performing many different hands on technical roles in client/server, network and security for various sized firms in the greater New York market including a period where he consulted for Greenwich Technology Partners.
Chris earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Connecticut and currently resides in Shelton, CT with his wife and 3 sons.
Yesim Akdeniz is a senior Managing Director in Citi technology organization and has been responsible to driving significant transformation across the technology infrastructure landscape over the last 5 years. She has been part of the core leadership team that has driven 30%+ savings across the operating expense, while significantly modernizing Citigroup’s technology capabilities, enhancing customer experience, business agility and managing risk.
Citi technology organization supports business operations in 100+ countries that Citi operates in, across multiple lines of business spanning both Institutional and Retail businesses. The technology engineering organization is designing and deploying industry leading solutions across the Citi footprint as the bank continues to leverage product and business model innovation to maintain and increase Citi’s competitive edge in the market place. Yesim is at the forefront of the innovative thinking that CATE (Citigroup Architecture and Technology Engineering) is delivering.
She has held several senior management positions across Citigroup technology, Yesim has a Masters in Business Administration, Wilmington College and a Bachelors of Art in Computer Science, East Carolina University. As one of the senior most women in technology and co-chair of Enterprise O&T Women Leadership Council at Citigroup, Yesim is actively involved with various ‘Women in Technology’ initiatives, including the Women’s Bond Club and Citigroup sponsorship programs. Additionally, Yesim was awarded the top 100 CIOs award by the CIO magazine in 2010, http://www.citigroup.com/citi/press/2010/100603e.htm, and she was inducted into the 42nd Annual YWCA Academy of Women Leaders on in 2016.
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.
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!”
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.
Swamy Kocherlakota is the Chief Information Officer for S&P
Global and is responsible for driving the digital transformation and
delivering productivity improvements for our customers and
employees.
Prior to S&P Global, Mr. Kocherlakota was SVP, Global Head of
Technology Operations & Infrastructure at Visa, Inc. where he
oversaw global infrastructure and applications that processed over
130 billion transactions annually. Before VISA, he was at BNY
Mellon as the head of Global Infrastructure Engineering and
Architecture and led their infrastructure transformation. Mr.
Kocherlakota holds the recognition of being a distinguished
engineer at Lucent Bell Labs where he managed technology for
Lucent and its ventures.
Mr. Kocherlakota is a NASD registered representative and has a
PhD in Computer Science from Michigan State University.
Eric Hanselman is the Principal Research Analyst at 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. He has an extensive, hands-on understanding of a broad range of IT subject areas, having direct experience in the areas of security, networks, IT transformation and semiconductors. He coordinates industry analysis across the broad portfolio of 451 Research disciplines, contributes to the Information Security and Cloud Native channels, and is a member of the Center of Excellence for Quantum Technologies. Eric helps 451 Research’s clients navigate technologies including 5G, SDN/NFV, edge computing and DevSecOps and determine their impacts and how they can best capitalize on them. He holds a patent in image compression systems, is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), a VMware Certified Professional (VCP), and is a frequent speaker at leading industry conferences.
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).
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.
Mike is a seasoned leader approaching 20 years with the Cigna Group. In his
tenure, he has served in a variety of roles across infrastructure, application
delivery, security, and technology strategy. He is currently the Managing
Director of Cigna's US Commercial Business where he is responsible for all
strategy, delivery, and operations across Sales, Underwriting, Pricing, Plan
Implementation, and the Cigna Pharmacy.
Prior to his current role, Mike led Cigna’s Center of Cloud Enablement
including the Public Cloud CoE, the Enterprise DevOps CoE, PaaS platform
engineering, and data center strategy & operations. In this role he:
established Cigna’s Public Cloud Center of Enablement which enabled wide
use of public cloud services across all business lines; consolidated Cigna's
enterprise data center footprint; and led the consolidation of PaaS platforms.
Mike holds a Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems and
an MBA from the University of Connecticut. He lives in Connecticut with his
wife and two children.
Shafeeq Shaikh has over 23 years of experience in the IT industry with a focus on Network & Network Security Strategy, Roadmaps, Architecture and designs with Fortune 50 companies including Enterprises and Service Providers. He’s a passionate Enterprise Network & Security Executive, leading Global Digital Transformation, driving teams to leverage technology to create pragmatic solutions that would enrich customer and business experience. Currently, at Johnson&Johnson, the world’s largest Healthcare company, Shafeeq is driving NextGen Network – Internet First Strategy, enabling digital transformation through SDN, Automation, adoption/integration of Cloud Networks (AWS, Azure, GCP) and Zero Trust Cloud Security Architecture via Secure Access Service Edge framework.
Neal Secher is a Vice President and Head of Networks at TD Bank. He has spent his career working at leading firms within the Financial Services industry in both technical and leadership roles. Neal has extensive experience with designing, building, and operating infrastructure for cloud architectures, large-scale data centers, latency-optimized network fabrics, software defined networks, secure business-to-business and Internet perimeters, and collaboration technologies.
Neal is a member of the board of directors at the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) and the New York Network Operators Group (NYNOG). Additionally, Neal sits on multiple vendor technical advisory boards and is a frequent speaker at industry events. He holds a BA from New York University.
Prior to joining TD, Neal served as SVP and Head of Networks at State Street Corporation. He has also past roles as the Managing Director and Head of Network Infrastructure Architecture at BNY Mellon, Executive Director and Head of Network Architecture at Morgan Stanley and Senior Vice President and Head of Network Architecture and Engineering for the Systematic Trading Infrastructure group at Citi.
Arun is a software engineer with over 25 years of experience in IP routing, distributed systems, virtualization, datacenter & cloud networking, SDN and automation. At Juniper, he is focused on multi cloud and hybrid cloud networking. Prior to Juniper, Arun co-founded and was the CTO of an edge computing startup building a platform for managing applications spanning public clouds and edge sites.
He has spent a good part of his life implementing routing and signaling protocols, MPLS and GMPLS control planes with emphasis on fault tolerance, scale and performance at service provider scale.
In his last stint at Cisco, Arun led network telemetry at scale from routing platforms, which was pivotal in building a closed loop network automation platform for the service provider segment.
Woo Jin Ho is the senior networking and semiconductor analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence. His research has focused on enabling technologies next generation networks, such as software defined networking (SDN), high speed optics and 5G, and the direction of smartphone and data center chips in the semiconductor sectors. Prior to joining Bloomberg Intelligence in 2015, he was a sell-side equity analyst for Nomura Securities, Merrill Lynch and CIBC Oppenheimer over a 15-year span. He covered the networking, enterprise software and imaging sectors during his tenure on Wall Street.
As Technical Director, Aryo Kresnadi is responsible for setting network architecture strategies, futures and solutions for FedEx Global Enterprise Network supporting all FedEx information movement to ensure on-time delivery for all FedEx packages.
Current responsibility includes research and development of architecture, design and implementation of the next-generation network for FedEx data center, multi-cloud, and edge network for the FedEx field locations to support next-generation sensors, robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.
Aryo holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering (BSEE) from Ohio State University and a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering (MSEE) from University of Pittsburgh. Aryo is currently based in Collierville, TN, the home of FedEx World Technology Center.
Donna specializes in helping startup and early-stage companies bring new, innovative products
to market, and is currently focused on driving technology adoption in the areas of 5G, IoT, and
SD-WAN. Prior to Cradlepoint, Donna held product management and product marketing
positions at Talari, an early pioneer in SD-WAN technology, and Citrix. Donna holds an
Electrical Engineering degree from Texas A&M University.
Gilles Deworm is a Principal Network Architect at Johnson & Johnson.
Currently, Gilles is looking into transforming Johnson & Johnson network for Industry 4.0 to a cloud and Internet first, software defined architecture integrated into a secure access service edge with Zero Trust and 5G access.
In his past roles since 2002 at Johnson & Johnson, Gilles has engineered advanced wireless capabilities, deployed large scale data centers, secured connectivity for warehouses, manufacturing and business partners, introduced WAN Optimization and QoS services and architected the WAN transition to an Hybrid Internet/MPLS network.
Prior to joining Johnson & Johnson in 2002, Gilles architected EBONE/KPNQwest pan-european Internet backbone and Internet peering strategy. For WIN S.A he implemented innovative VPN solutions on the first MPLS network in Belgium. For Igretec S.A he designed and implemented a high-speed ATM metro network with cable modems access on Brutele network.
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.
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.
Greg is the Co-Founder, Co-Host and Analyst at Packet Pushers Interactive LLC. Packet Pushers is the largest podcast globally on technology infrastructure delivering ~400K downloads per month to over 200,000 subscribers.
I survived 25 years of Corporate IT in many verticals and wide range of technology and experienced poor IT managers, low quality products, badly designed and deployed solution for the entire period. Yes, I’m bitter but generally got results.
You can find our podcasts and virtual events at PacketPushers.net
Jason has spent over twenty years in networking in various network positions. His work has led to multiple patents and has a proven track record building and deploying open networking at scale and in the enterprise.
Jeff Strande is a Director of Engineer for Open Switching Fabrics at Target. He has worked in IT for over 20 years. He lead an effort to evolve Target’s Stores toward Opensource Network technologies. Most recently he is leading a team deploying Opensource Network Operating Systems for the LAN switching fabric across all Target locations.
Yesim Akdeniz is a senior Managing Director in Citi technology organization and has been responsible to driving significant transformation across the technology infrastructure landscape over the last 5 years. She has been part of the core leadership team that has driven 30%+ savings across the operating expense, while significantly modernizing Citigroup’s technology capabilities, enhancing customer experience, business agility and managing risk.
Citi technology organization supports business operations in 100+ countries that Citi operates in, across multiple lines of business spanning both Institutional and Retail businesses. The technology engineering organization is designing and deploying industry leading solutions across the Citi footprint as the bank continues to leverage product and business model innovation to maintain and increase Citi’s competitive edge in the market place. Yesim is at the forefront of the innovative thinking that CATE (Citigroup Architecture and Technology Engineering) is delivering.
She has held several senior management positions across Citigroup technology, Yesim has a Masters in Business Administration, Wilmington College and a Bachelors of Art in Computer Science, East Carolina University. As one of the senior most women in technology and co-chair of Enterprise O&T Women Leadership Council at Citigroup, Yesim is actively involved with various ‘Women in Technology’ initiatives, including the Women’s Bond Club and Citigroup sponsorship programs. Additionally, Yesim was awarded the top 100 CIOs award by the CIO magazine in 2010, http://www.citigroup.com/citi/press/2010/100603e.htm, and she was inducted into the 42nd Annual YWCA Academy of Women Leaders on in 2016.
Christopher Moretti has been an executive leader with Cigna since October, 2015 and is currently responsible for all infrastructure engineering Leading the Global Engineering & Infrastructure Services. In this role, Chris provides executive leadership over the teams that deliver Cigna’s voice & data networks, security engineering, contact center, database, compute, storage, information management, mainframe, cloud & devops.
Previous to Cigna, Chris spent 14 years at General Electric and its subsidiaries in various executive leadership roles supporting its insurance, consumer and commercial banking businesses. While at GE, Chris attended and graduated many of their prestigious management training classes including AIMC and EIMP. Most recently, Christopher was Managing Director of Global Networks for J.P. Morgan Chase & Company based in midtown Manhattan.
Chris started his career in IT performing many different hands on technical roles in client/server, network and security for various sized firms in the greater New York market including a period where he consulted for Greenwich Technology Partners.
Chris earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Connecticut and currently resides in Shelton, CT with his wife and 3 sons.
Xiaobo leads a team to deliver leading edge technology solutions in support of Citi IT strategy. She drives critical solutions to secure Citi’s hybrid cloud environments to enable Citi to reduce risks and stay compliant while allowing Citi’s businesses to benefit from the opportunities that cloud services provide. Xiaobo started her career as a Network Engineer at Goldman Sachs in 2009 after she got her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She has been selected for “Rising Star Award” to represent Citi at the Women’s Bond Club in the financial industry in 2017. She is also on Palo Alto Network Vendor’s Cloud Customer Advisory Board.
Ted is an industry veteran with over 30 years’ experience in building, operating and scaling production environments. Using DevOps principles he is helping to change monolithic code into smaller manageable components while migrating services out into the Cloud. Making systems observable throughout the microservice creation and cloud migration.
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.
Alec Peterson is the Vice President of AWS Network Platform, and has responsibility for Direct Connect, Route 53, AWS Availability, Infrastructure Security, and the services used to manage the AWS Network. He has prior leadership roles at Sparkpost, Catbird Networks, UltraDNS & RCN. He also served on the board for ARIN advisory council for over 11 years.
Jon Pruskowski is the Product Owner and Engineering Lead of Capital One’s Core Network with responsibilities for cloud connectivity, data center interconnect backbone, and software defined networking. He has over 15 years of experience in technology leadership, solution architecture, and network engineering.
Joshua Matheus, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, oversees Network Engineering. Previously, he managed Data Center Networking and Network Security. Prior to that, he managed Network Architecture from 2010 to 2012. Earlier in his career, Josh held roles specializing in electronic trading network systems and market data. Josh joined Goldman Sachs in 2000 as an associate in Network Engineering in Investment Banking Division Technology. He was named managing director in 2017.
Josh earned a BS in Computer Science from Marist College in 1999.
Steve Wood is a Distinguished Engineer and Product Architect providing strategic direction for SD-WAN, Cloud, Network-as-a-Service and Enterprise Networking products in Cisco’s Enterprise Network Group. A 20-year veteran of Cisco, his expertise spans ASIC design, Routing, 3G/4G and Wifi Mobility as well as Cloud and Enterprise Architecture. He is a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 companies worldwide deploying networks to solve business problems, through deep knowledge of platform technology and network design. He is chair of the ONUG Network Cloud working group.
William Collins is a strategic thinker and catalyst for innovation. Over his career, he has helped enterprises build large-scale networks, driven modernization through cloud adoption, and excels at optimizing complex environments through good design practices and automation. Today, William works as a Principal Cloud Architect for Alkira, where he focuses on evangelizing Alkira, fostering strong relationships with customers to fully realize their goals, and thought leadership surrounding the future of network, security, and automation in the cloud.
Prior to founding MarketWord in 2006, Mark Fishburn held roles as Managing Director, VP marketing, VP sales, VP market development, technical strategy, and business unit manager with Xerox, Retix, Netcom Systems, Spirent. He has been a board member and chairman of several industry associations and frequent speaker at industry conferences worldwide.
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.
Dave Hegenbarth is Vice President of System Engineering at Pliant.io. In this role, Dave is responsible for driving innovation and ensuring the successful execution of the company’s technical vision of low-code/no-code automation. Dave brings over 25 years of experience working in the computer software industry. Previously, Dave held leadership roles at Cisco Systems, Riverbed Technologies, and SevOne.
Dave’s passion for new technologies and the people who embrace them has driven his career in IT Infrastructure Automation & Orchestration, Professional Services, Network Performance Management, Data Center, Software as a Service (SaaS), and Pre-Sales Engineering.
Michael Haugh brings over twenty-five years of experience and leads Product Marketing at Gluware. Prior to Gluware, Michael was VP of Product Management at ClearPath Networks. He has previously held roles in System Engineering, Product Management, and Marketing at Ixia and Spirent. Michael also worked at IBM Global Services and AT&T in Network Operations, Network Engineering and as a Design Engineer. Michael, Cisco CCIE #4334, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and holds a B.S. in Engineering from Southern Illinois University.
Koroush Saraf leads product positioning and marketing initiatives for ZPE Systems and brings 20 years of networking and security experience to the team. Koroush served as VP of Product management at Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet bringing to market leading products in SASE, SD-WAN, LTE/5G, SD-Branch and IAM. And now at ZPE we are bringing the same security reliability and simplicity of public cloud to private cloud infrastructure from Datacenter to the edge. Koroush holds a Masters of Electrical Engineering from Stanford & USC.
Dale Smith heads Orchestral’s revenue operations team. He is responsible for ensuring Orchestral delivers extraordinary customer experiences throughout the lifecycle of customer engagement.
Cyber Security Advisor with FedEx Services, Inc. My current focus is on securing SDN and hybrid-cloud workloads as FedEx moves towards digital transformation and away from traditional L3 networks and data centers. In my role as Cyber Security Advisor I am called on to consult on many IT projects across the various operating companies that comprise FedEx. I am the team leader for the Network Security team that is responsible for implementing micro-segmentation, security analytics, identity services, and Wifi intrusion prevention among other security platforms and initiatives. I currently hold active ISC2 CISSP and GIAC GSEC certifications and have been a guest speaker on network and cloud security at various conferences including Proofpoint Connect, VMworld, and Future:NET.
My background is 30+ years of experience as a Network Security Engineer / Network Manager / Network Engineer working in the IS/IT division of various companies which span half a dozen industries and government agencies.
Ramani is VP of Engineering and Chief Architect at SecureX.AI. She is responsible for innovating, designing and creating a unified security platform over the last 18 months. Her focus has been on building an integrated visibility and attack surface management solution to handle the modern hybrid enterprise architecture.
She has over 18 years of experience in Cyber Security having started her career at McAfee. She was a very early employee of Palo Alto Networks, being part of the team that built the first Next Generation Firewall and disrupting the Cyber Security market. She was also Director of Security and Threat Research at ShieldX, creating the next generation security suite of products for the cloud.
Ted is an industry veteran with over 30 years’ experience in building, operating and scaling production environments. Using DevOps principles he is helping to change monolithic code into smaller manageable components while migrating services out into the Cloud. Making systems observable throughout the microservice creation and cloud migration.
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.
The most memorable accomplishments experienced are seeing how the technology weaves into the business processes to deliver outstanding customer experiences. Joe’s journey brought him thru most functional IT roles always balancing business, technical and people management practices. An evangelist for DevOps and Agile practices, he helps organizations transform the way they work. Curiosity is his driver for learning, mostly by reading or listening to others more experienced and then ‘test and learn’ with real life experiences. He has also completed certifications as a Scrum Master, COMPTIA Security, ITIL v3, Pragmatic Product Marketing, and Six Sigma Yellow Belt.
