IT Workshops

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.

Shashi Kiran is the Senior Director, Market Management for Data Center and Switching technologies. In this position, he is responsible for marketing Cisco's $14B+ switching portfolio across Nexus and Catalyst platforms in addition to several other areas.

Previously, Shashi led the marketing efforts of the multi-billion dollar Enterprise Routing team at Cisco as well Cisco's WAAS portfolio marketing. He also was involved in Cisco's SmartGrid strategy at a conceptual stage.

In his 16-year career, Shashi has held leadership roles in the areas of Product Line Management, Marketing and Sales engineering focusing on Security, Routing, Metro Ethernet, and hi-touch services for Enterprise, SP and Public Sector initiatives. Prior to Cisco he worked with Nortel, venture funded start-up Euclid Inc. and the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (Dept. of IT, Govt. of India). He was also an editorial consultant and columnist for the Network Magazine (Indian edn.) from 1997-2001.

Brandon Hoff is the director of product management at Emulex, where he is focused on developing the company’s cloud solution strategy to enable customized solutions for cloud provider, enterprise users of cloud technologies, and seamless connectivity to cloud services for end users. Hoff has focused his career on designing, developing, and applying industry-shifting technologies to solving customer problems with the right security technology, the right storage architecture, and scalable robust networking solutions. With more than 20 years of executive leadership, product management, engineering design and development, as well as strategic and channel marketing experience at innovative companies including Emulex, San Juan Technologies, CipherOptics, and McDATA obtained a keen understanding of the data protection challenges enterprises face today.

A graduate of Colorado State University with a BS in electrical engineering, Hoff holds an MBA in marketing and finance from University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a former co-Chair of the Storage Security Industry Forum and is a frequent and highly regarded speaker at industry leading events.

Andre serves IT Infrastructure & Operations Professionals. He is a leading expert on network operations and architecture. His research focuses on networking technology and strategy, mobile network infrastructure, application delivery networking, data center

convergence, and network infrastructure security.

He helps Forrester clients develop and improve their strategy around infrastructure investment and optimization. His analysis balances technology with business strategy to ensure IT maximizes operational and financial efficiency.

Mr. Bruce Barnes has over thirty-six years of experience as a senior level officer in the technology arena, including very influential roles in Fortune 100 companies. He has received numerous industry accolades, including having been recognized by the industry press as one of this country's most noted CIOs. He is a recognized voice at national industry events and in major industry publications. He is an ongoing advisor and retained coach for a number of successful senior level corporate leaders.

Currently, Mr. Barnes is the founder and CEO of BOLD VISION®, a senior management consulting consortium comprised of "C Level" executives, which operates as a trusted advisor and consultant to a number of noted CIOs and other I/T leaders, as well as to several large I/T product providers.

Prior to this current role, Mr. Barnes served as the Vice President of I/T Strategy and Planning for the Nationwide Enterprise, a $200B international insurance and financial services company. There, he was responsible for the overall technology strategy, I/T architecture, information security, and I/T governance processes for the global enterprise.

Prior to that, Mr. Barnes served as VP and Chief Information Officer for Nationwide Financial Services, a $100B international financial services company, where he oversaw all facets of technology services and operations within that publicly-held organization.

Prior to that, he served as Chief Information Officer for Ohio's largest privately owned HMO, and he also held various management positions with an international library/information services company, the Washington (DC) office of a major technology vendor, and as an officer in the United States Army.

He is a co-founder for the nationally acclaimed "CIO Solutions Gallery" at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business.

He is a graduate in five sciences from The Ohio State University.

Cheryl Smith became executive vice-president and chief information officer in April 2011. As WestJet's first CIO, she is responsible for the strategic direction of IT as it continues to be a key differentiator in delivering our exceptional guest experience. She also oversees the daily IT operations that support every WestJetter. Her mission is to ensure WestJet’s IT process and team achieves operational excellence that supports WestJet's rapid growth.

Cheryl is also a principal at an IT consulting firm that offers services in IT Crisis Management. The firm specializes in providing support to companies facing an IT crisis or major "one-time" IT-related event (www.smithandassociates.us.com). She has been responsible for the successful turnaround and completion of critical IT projects and ventures throughout the world.

She brings more than 30 years of experience in IT design, development, implementation and operations to her leadership role at WestJet. She has been the CIO for McKesson, the largest health-care company in the world, as well as the CIO for KeySpan Energy, a major gas and electric energy company in the eastern U.S. She has held executive positions in IT at Verizon and Honeywell Federal Systems and was a principal in the technology consulting division at Ernst & Young. Just prior to joining WestJet, Cheryl was the CEO of a technology-based venture startup utility.net, a company that offered high-speed low-cost Internet access to rural areas.

She is the co-founder of the CIO Institute, a certificate program for IT leaders at UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business. In addition to teaching and international speaking engagements, her articles on IT problems, issues and challenges—with 'insider information' on how to resolve—have been published worldwide. Smith holds both Bachelor and Master degrees from Penn State.

Daniel Martinez is VP, Technology at the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association [PRCA]. He is responsible for all technology initiatives and the IT department at the PRCA. Dan is leading the development and implementation of a new core rodeo system, replacing a system that has been in place for well over 30 years.

Prior to arriving at the PRCA, Dan worked for Borders Group Inc. [Borders Books and Music], Intellidata, Owens-Illinois and the U.S. Air Force. He is a ten year veteran of the Air Force, where he flew helicopters.

Dan graduated from the United States Air Force Academy. He earned a Master of Science degree from George Washington University in Management Information Systems.

Frank Trogus is currently Assistant Treasurer and Caseworker for a local non-profit in the Texas Hill Country. He also serves as the co-chair of the Information Management Advisory Council at McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas.

Prior to this he worked 33 years for various Shell Companies in a variety of positions. Most recently he was Vice President Global Supply Excellence. His responsibilities included: supply business processes and enabling systems, global hydrocarbon supply chain excellence, decision tools development, e2e margin assessment, enterprise teams, and benchmarking the supply chain.

He has also served as the CIO and General Manager Information Technology at Shell Downstream Inc. and Motiva Enterprises LLC. His responsibilities included business IT strategy, infrastructure, outsourcing and offshoring of IT and business processes, applications development and support, and business information processes.

Other assignments were as Vice President Technology at the Westhollow Technology Center. He was responsible for managing research and development of refining processes, environmental services, fuels, lubricants, plant and equipment engineering. He has worked in management positions in refinery operations, merger and acquisitions, and corporate planning and economics. He served on several industry, university and community advisory boards.

He holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas and has B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering from the University of Dayton.

Steve Orrin is the Director of Security Solutions at the Intel Corporation and a regular speaker at nationally recognized conferences on Security, Privacy, and Web Services topics. Previously Orrin served as Chief Security Officer of Sarvega, Inc., (acquired by Intel, inc.) a computer and network security startup which deployed the world's first XML appliance in production in 2001. Prior to his work at Sarvega, Orrin was vice president of security and technology at Watchfire, Inc. responsible for the product development of Watchfire's web application security and privacy software product lines. He has also acted as CTO of Sanctum, a pioneer in Web application security testing and firewall software. Steve was also CTO and co-founder of LockStar Inc., a provider of end-to-end security and web services solutions designed to help organizations deploy web-enabled legacy applications for ebusiness. Steve co-founded LockStar after he left SynData Technologies, Inc. where he was CTO and chief architect of its desktop email and file security product. A recognized expert and frequent speaker on enterprise security, he has developed several patent-pending technologies covering user authentication, secure data access and steganography and has one issued patent in steganography. Steve is a member of several leading industry organizations and is published in several scientific and medical journals. Steve holds an honors degree in research biology from Kean University.

Jay Judkowitz runs product management at Nimbula, a leading cloud software startup. Before Nimbula, Jay was at VMware for over eight years where he drove products like Site Recovery Manager and Storage VMotion. Jay started his career as a hands on IT practitioner at Intel, where he personally experienced many of the pains that drive the need for cloud computing and where he implemented some of the early products that tried to solve those pains. From Intel's IT, to VMware, to Nimbula, Jay has been intimately involved in the growth of the technologies that will soon make ubiquitous cloud computing a reality.

Paul Weiss is a Senior Cloud Engineer at Eucalyptus Systems working with Enterprise customers across the globe. He worked at VMware for over 3 years and has worked with virtualization products for many years. He has also worked as a VMware Specialist at a Premier VMware Partner, a Senior Systems Architect with a primary focus on large Sun environments, and as a Sun Certified Instructor. Paul has over 16 years of Enterprise IT experience and is certified in many solutions like Solaris, Red Hat and VMware. Paul also served in the U.S. Army for 15 years and is a Gulf War veteran.

Peder Ulander is vice president of product marketing for the Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix, overseeing the company's marketing strategy for its cloud infrastructure and server virtualization products. Ulander joined Citrix in 2011 when the company acquired Cloud.com, where he was chief marketing officer. Ulander has more than 15 years of marketing and sales strategy experience and has been named "The Most Interesting Man in the Cloud" by Cloudcast.net. Prior to Cloud.com, he was head of strategy for Pure Networks and helped drive its acquisition by Cisco, where he then went on to oversee the Seattle-based Consumer Networking Software group. Ulander also served as senior vice president of marketing at Sun Microsystems, where he managed the entire software marketing team and was responsible for launching Java into the open source market by re-licensing, building a community and launching the open source Java platform.

Steven Shalita has more than 20 years of industry and technology experience across service provider and enterprise markets with a strong background in enterprise networking, MPLS, and IP transformation projects. His wide range of experience includes service management and assurance to service delivery architecture including data center, LAN/WAN, core, edge and metro technologies as well as leading initiatives targeting convergence, mobility, triple-play and business services carrier environments. Mr. Shalita has held senior marketing leadership positions at Alcatel-Lucent, Redback Networks, HP and Cisco. He returned to NetScout in July of 2008, and was previously Director, Product Marketing from 1997 through 1999.

Patrick Harr is Vice President of HP Americas Cloud Sales and Solutions. In this role he is responsible for driving HP’s cloud GTM, sales and solutions architecture with leading enterprises and service providers.

Prior to joining HP, Patrick was Vice President of End-User Computing Solutions at VMware where he was responsible for driving sales and marketing. He helped pioneer the emerging Cloud Storage market as founder and CEO of Nirvanix, a leading enterprise cloud storage company. He also served as entrepreneur-in-residence at Enterprise Partners Venture Capital where he focused on content, storage and media services investments.

Nicolas (Neela) Jacques is a Director, Product Marketing at VMware, the industry's leading virtualization platform provider. At VMware, he is focused VMware’s Private Cloud initiative. In 2009, Mr. Jacques launched VMware’s Application Performance Management product vCenter AppSpeed, and founded and launched VMware's first cloud computing initiative - the VMware Service Provider Program in 2007. Prior to VMware Mr. Jacques was a consultant with Bain & Company. Mr. Jacques has an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and BS in economics from Georgetown University.

Before joining EMC in 2004, Brian spent two years running his own consulting business. Prior to that, he spent 10 years at IT research firm Gartner, where he held numerous research and senior communications management positions. Previous to joining Gartner, Brian spent three years in various marketing roles with IBM. Brian has two bachelor’s degrees from Syracuse University, as well as an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Mark McKenzie is a Director of Advanced Services in Cisco’s Enterprise Data Center Practice. The practice is responsible for providing architectural guidance, best practices, and recommendations on how customers can leverage Cisco solutions to bring maximum value to their stakeholders. Cisco’s data center solutions can be leveraged as the strategic foundation for virtualization, unified I/O and data center consolidation and provide a converged infrastructure that enables business applications to run more effectively, efficiently, and with optimal return on investment.

The practice is also responsible for helping Enterprise, Commercial, and public sector customers assess where they are on the journey to Cloud computing and assist them in migrating their infrastructure and applications to take advantage of the benefits of a converged architecture and an automated operations.

Wayne Walls is an OpenStack Developer Advocate and Scrabble junkie working for the Rackspace Cloud. He works with cloud developers to lower the barriers of entry to OpenStack, evangelizes the OpenStack API and helps developers maximize their return on investment on cloud targeting applications. Having spent time in support, sales and product engineering roles at Rackspace, Wayne is always up for solving the business and technical challenges of customers and continues to work closely with product groups to build world class technologies that Rackspace customers have come to know and love. You can find Wayne talking cloud on his personal blog (www.dubsquared.com), at Geekdom or on Twitter (waynewalls). When not talking cloud, Wayne spends much of his time golfing, playing Words With Friends and reading.

Dave McCrory is a Senior Architect for Cloud Foundry at VMware. He is focused on educating businesses, developers, and IT operations on how to best leverage scale out architectures and cloud computing approaches.

McCrory founded and served CTO/Chief Scientist at four startup companies, ProTier, Surgient, Inovawave, and Hyper9. While at these companies, he was granted 7 Patents around Virtualization Management and Cloud Computing. He most recently worked as a Cloud Architect in Dell's Data Center Solutions Group, where he worked on several high-profile hyper-scale computing projects.

Dave is a published author having co-authored the book "Advanced Server Virtualization". He is very active on social media personally blogging and tweeting. He also operates the social media efforts for Cloud Foundry.

Alistair is the principal analyst at BitCurrent; an executive at CloudOps; an advisor to various technology venture firms; the founder of the Bitnorth conference; and the founder of the Human 2.0 blog on emerging technologies.

Prior to Bitcurrent, Alistair co-founded startup accelerator Rednod; web performance management firm Coradiant; and Networkshop, a research firm. He has also worked as a product manager for 3Com Corporation, Primary Access, and Eicon Technology. Alistair is the content chair for Cloud Connect, the industry's largest cloud computing event; the track chair for cloud computing and the Enterprise Cloud Summit at Interop; and the co-chair of O'Reilly Strata.

Alistair is a frequent contributor to a range of technology publications. He has taught at industry conferences such as Web2Expo, IGT, Interop, Structure, Enterprise 2.0, Velocity, Mesh, and eMetrics. He is also the co-author of Web Operations (2010, O'Reilly), Complete Web Monitoring (2009, O'Reilly) and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks (1999, Prentice-Hall).

Dave comes to SolidFire with ten years of experience in, and around the enterprise storage industry. Prior to SolidFire, Dave was the founder of Diligence Technology Advisors, a strategy consulting practice focused on emerging enterprise technologies. Starting his career at EMC, he was an early member of the Centera business unit. After EMC, Dave spent six years on Wall Street in analyst and investor capacities. While at RBC Capital Markets, he was a key contributor on one of Wall Street's top equity research teams in storage. At SolidFire, Dave is charged with heading up the company's strategic alliance efforts.

Jeromy helps lead X.commerce’s directive to enable a new generation of commerce ecosystem capabilities by developing an open commerce platform for merchants and developers. Jeromy has been in lead technical roles for virtually all of his recent career: at Yahoo!, in the Platform/Cloud group; at Vistaprint, a fast-growing marketing services company; at Fidelity Investments; Microsoft; Kinitos; America Online, Inc; and he was co-founder and Chief Architect of Quack.com. Previously, Jeromy worked at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University doing architecture research and analysis while flirting with Ph.D. studies there. Jeromy’s interests include cycling (road, of course), photography and raising chickens in his backyard in Palo Alto.

Nolan M. Goldberg is an IP & Technology Counsel in Proskauer's Litigation & Dispute Resolution Department and a member of the Patent Law Group, resident in the New York office. As an intellectual property litigator, his practice focuses on patent and trade secret litigation and counseling. As a founding member of the Litigation Department's Electronic Discovery Task Force, Mr. Goldberg is often called upon to develop e-discovery strategies to be used in all types of litigations, with a particular focus on managing the overall burden and cost of the electronic discovery process and obtaining often overlooked electronic evidence, including computer forensics. Mr. Goldberg's complete professional bio can be found at http://www.proskauer.com/professionals/nolan-goldberg/

Charles “Chip” Webb is a founder and the Chief Technology Officer for Anue Systems.
With more than 20 years of experience in the design and architecture of high-speed networking products, Chip presents regularly at industry leading conferences including the National Institute of Technology’s ATIS Workshop on Synchronization in Telecommunication Systems (WSTS) and the International Telecom Sync Forum (ITSF). In addition, he contributes to standards development at the Telecommunications Standardization Sector (ITU-T) and Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA).

Prior to founding Anue Systems, Chip was a distinguished member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories. His responsibilities included leading teams developing technologies for fiber optic networks, HDTV and wireless communications.

Chip holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree, with honors, from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is a member of the engineering honor societies Tau Beta Pi and Alpha Eta Mu Beta. He has co-authored five technical papers and has 17 patents granted, with eight pending.

With more than 15 years of data center experience, Gurpreet Singh drives Brocade’s data center product strategy and manages the award-winning Brocade VCS technology portfolio. He is also responsible for leading key data center product and technology initiatives, including Ethernet fabric architectures, software-defined networking and big data.

Bruce Davie has over 20 years of networking industry experience, and was a Cisco Fellow prior to joining Nicira. At Cisco, he led the team that developed the MPLS architecture and worked closely with leading service providers to enhance the capabilities of their networks. In addition to his work on MPLS, Bruce contributed to the standards on IP quality of service and has written over a dozen Internet RFCs. He currently chairs the ACM's Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM) and is an ACM Fellow. He is also the author of several networking texts and a visiting lecturer at MIT. Bruce received his Ph. D. in computer science from the University of Edinburgh in 1988.