Conference: Data Center Track

Brooks Esser is the Worldwide Lead for HP’s CIO Agenda program. He has over ten years of experience in services, industry and solutions marketing. Prior to joining his current position, he served as a finance manager at several HP divisions, and also managed HP’s syndicated market research activities for several years. Esser holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of the Pacific, and an MBA from Santa Clara University.

Shehzad Merchant serves as Senior Director for Strategy at Extreme Networks, where he drives the direction for data center networking. With over 17 years of industry experience, and an engineering track record highlighted by the achievement of several technology patents, Merchant is a veteran of wired and wireless Ethernet and communications. Prior to Extreme Networks, Merchant held various technology and executive management roles including CTO at Nevis Networks, a company specializing in network security. Prior to that Merchant was co-founder and VP of Engineering at Polytime Systems. Merchant earned an MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Tate Cantrell’s primary responsibilities include product design and development and data center operations. Mr. Cantrell has been in the mission-critical facilities business for more than 15 years and has overseen the build-out and operationalization of some the largest and most sophisticated data centers in the industry.Prior to Verne Global, Mr. Cantrell was Vice President, Data Center Technologies, at Dupont Fabros Technology, the second-largest pure-play data center REIT in the United States. He was responsible for development and execution of operational strategies critical to the start-up of the Dupont Fabros Development Wholesale Data Center business model, the first of its kind in the industry.

Robert Petrocelli founded GreenBytes® in 2007 and serves as chief executive officer. Prior to establishing GreenBytes, Petrocelli founded Heartlab, Inc. in 1994, a medical information technology company that was sold to Agfa in 2005. Petrocelli was awarded a patent on archival technology utilized for the long-term storage of patient data, including cardiology images, demographics and reports. Petrocelli received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2001 and has made the Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Private Companies in America list four times.

As Vice President of Marketing Douglas Gourlay is responsible for product and solutions marketing, communications, and the strategic alliances of Arista Networks. Prior to joining Arista, Doug was the VP of Data Center Marketing at Cisco Systems where he held key roles in sales, product development, and marketing. Doug has filed or holds more than twenty patents in networking technologies. Prior to his work in the technology sector Doug served as a US Army Infantry Officer.

Manish Muthal is director of marketing for Enterprise Networking Solutions, LSI Corporation. Muthal brings deep knowledge of the enterprise networking business with focus on switching and services architecture for the enterprise and data center. Most recently he was Founder, Vice President of Hardware at Nevis Networks, where he led the architecture development and technology marketing for service aware enterprise switches. Prior to Nevis, he led networking silicon development at Juniper Networks and Amber Networks (Nokia), and high end server platform architecture at Intel. Muthal has a master's degree in Computer Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Thomas Scheibe joined Cisco in 1998 and is currently Director for datacenter systems in Cisco’s System Architecture and Strategy Unit. During his time at Cisco he managed Cisco’s transceiver portfolio and worked with customers in the cable and Metro Ethernet service provider space. Thomas represents Cisco on the Board of Directors of the Ethernet Alliance. Prior to Cisco, Thomas worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. Thomas holds a MSEE from Technical University Chemnitz (Germany) and a M.B.A. from Haas School of Business, U.C. Berkeley.

Currently, Ken is VP of Marketing for Egenera Corp., a leading provider of Converged Infrastructure software. There he has helped remake the company’s image and visibility as a visionary multi-platform software vendor. Prior to Egenera, Ken led Product Marketing at Cassatt Corp., who defined the market for utility computing and internal cloud computing. Previously, he held a number of positions at Sun Microsystems, including business management for an incubator services unit, coordinating Java marketing strategy, driving Developer Marketing, and growing the SI/ISV partner marketing organization.

Paul Congdon is Chief Technology Officer for HP ProCurve and an HP Fellow, one of the elite HP employees recognized as pioneers in their fields. He is responsible for specifying, architecting and designing ProCurve network infrastructure and software products. In his 25 years in the networking industry, he has become widely esteemed as an inventor and leader in driving networking industry standards. Congdon is the Vice Chairman of the IEEE 802.1 committee and Technical Advisor for the IETF RADIUS Extensions Working Group, and his long-time activities with the IEEE 802 standards efforts involved him in the creation of the Ethernet LAN. He is co-inventor of the commonly used TCP checksum offloading, a program for accelerating the networking performance of TCP/IP within servers. He also architected the method of distributing ProCurve software onto multiple processors, enabling ProCurve switch software to scale between low-cost, single-chip solutions and high-end, multi-modular chassis systems. After completing internships with IBM, Congdon joined HP in 1985 as a Software Development Engineer responsible for the creation of networking protocols within HP-UX. He expanded his focus to infrastructure architecture issues and has been involved in the design of a wide range of network devices and technologies, including routers, Layer 2/3/4 switches, iSCSI storage devices, SNA, X.25, FDDI, Ethernet, wireless LANs, virtual LANs, link aggregation and access security protocols, including IEEE 802.1X. Congdon earned Bachelor of Science, magna cum laude, and Master of Science degrees in computer science from California State University, Chico. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis. He currently holds ten patents related to the networking industry and has several more in process.

Dhritiman Dasgupta (aka DD) is Senior Product Marketing Manager, Fabric and Switching Technologies at Juniper Networks. DD has more than 12 years of experience in the networking industry with roles in product management, corporate marketing, software engineering and customer support. Prior to joining Juniper, he was at Cisco as a Senior Product Line Manager for campus and data center switching. He started his career at Nortel Networks, Canada in the network management team. DD has a bachelor degree in Computer Architecture and an MBA in Marketing and International Business.

Stephen Elliot is vice president of strategy for CA’s Virtualization and Service Automation business unit. In this role, he focuses on business unit technology, strategy creation, analyst relations, market positioning, partner development, and customer deals. Prior to CA, Stephen was a noted software industry analyst at IDC, Hurwitz Group, Gartner, Instat, and Forrester. He also served Inteq, a venture-backed start-up, as product marketing manager. Stephen earned a B.A. from the University of Southern California. He also completed graduate work at American University and Harvard Business School's Executive Education course on Strategic Financial Analysis for Business Valuation.