2010 Archive: Keynote Speakers
Wednesday, October 20th, 9:00 am - 10:20 am
Jim Whitehurst
President & CEO,
Red Hat
A Toast to Innovation and the Future of Cloud Computing
Jim Whitehurst was named President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat in December 2007.
Whitehurst joined Delta Air Lines in 2002, serving in various roles, most recently as Chief Operating Officer, responsible for Operations, Sales and Customer Service, Network and Revenue Management, Marketing and Corporate Strategy. Prior to joining Delta, Whitehurst served as Vice President and Director of The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and held various leadership roles in their Chicago, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Atlanta offices.
A native of Columbus, Ga., Whitehurst graduated from Rice University in Houston, Texas, with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Economics. He also attended Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany, holds a general course degree from the London School of Economics and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Ben Gibson
Vice President
Data Center/Virtualization
Cisco
The Advantage of a World Without Walls
Time and again, we have shown that as we pull down walls, we increase the power of IT to benefit the enterprise. In the past, we have pulled down physical walls and today, we see organizational and functional walls begin to crumble. As VP of Cisco Data Center Solutions, Ben Gibson has been in an excellent position to witness to this progression and has, in fact, helped pull down a few of those walls. In this keynote, Ben will discuss the seeming contradiction of creating openness and choice with an ecosystem marketplace while actually reducing risk and complexity and increasing service velocity. Finally, Ben will explore what Cisco is doing to accelerate this trend and what he is hearing from our customers.
Bio:
Ben Gibson brings 18+ years of IT industry experience to Cisco Systems, where he currently leads the Cisco Data Center/Virtualization Marketing effort globally. Gibson has been instrumental in key areas of solutions marketing prior to his current role for Cisco inclusive of leading Cisco’s Enterprise Global Marketing Solutions and Program Development and leading Cisco’s Wireless and Mobility Solutions Marketing.
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Dirk I. Gates
Chief Executive Officer and Founder,
Xirrus
What’s Next for Enterprise Wi-Fi
Within the next 5 years, Wi-Fi will become the primary network connection within the enterprise, driven by an ever-increasing number of wireless devices and applications being brought into the workplace to enhance communications and productivity. With wireless security resolved and performance fast approaching wired-like speeds, IT managers must now move the intelligence to the edge and achieve 99.9999% reliability to achieve utility grade Wi-Fi. Come listen to Dirk Gates, founder and CEO of Xirrus, discuss the future of Wi-Fi as he explains what is necessary to wirelessly deliver a wired-like quality of experience to enterprise users.
Bio:
Dirk Gates brings more than 15 years of executive management experience to Xirrus as well as a track record of success evolving a high-tech startup into a world class, publicly traded company. Having founded Xircom, Inc. in 1988 on the premise of delivering Ethernet connectivity to mobile computers, he attracted venture funding from Greylock, grew the company to 2,000 employees, and achieved revenues of $500M and a market cap in excess of $2B. View more
Thursday, October 21st, 9:00 am - 10:20 am
Dario Zamarian
Networking Platform Vice President and General Manager
Dell Inc.
Virtual Era Datacenter Efficiency to Support the Future of Business
Following the Internet Era of the 90s and the benefits of virtualization to manage resources and workloads, a new Virtual Era is upon the industry, once again challenging businesses to adapt their infrastructure to service and support new demands. The traditional approaches to information management as well as a new wave of rich media and real-time information exchange across business’ datacenters and networks, are threats to business productivity, efficiency and budgets if businesses plan inadequately. Proper network and datacenter planning requires new approaches to support the Virtual Era, and a new Efficient Enterprise approach drives a new network paradigm for datacenters. Dario Zamarian, General Manager of Dell Networking platforms, will focus on what businesses should know about the Virtual Era, discuss the Efficient Enterprise approach to meet the demands of the Virtual Era, and highlight requirements to enable efficient datacenters and networks.
Bio:
Dario Zamarian serves as vice president and general manager, Networking Platform, for Dell. In this role, he is responsible for engineering, design, development and marketing of all networking products and solutions. View more
Dave Crespi
Chief Technology Officer
Emulex
Constructing the Cloud: One Lego® at a Time
In the new cloud infrastructure, whether you’re deploying it yourself or hosting it with someone else, it will be deployed one container Lego® at a time. The way we will deploy these new data centers to fully maximize green operations, while achieving massive scale out, is through virtualization and high speed, low latency, scalable interconnects. You’ll snap them together, just like when you were a kid, but instead of having connectors, we’ll have pipes with data, power and water coming out of them. Come see Emulex’s CTO, Dave Crespi, as he explains how these Legos will come together to make world-class data centers.
Bio:
Dave Crespi joined Emulex in June 1996 and serves as chief technology officer. In this role, Mr. Crespi interfaces directly with customers, end users and systems integrators in order to help lead the company’s research and development. Dave Crespi and has been instrumental in identifying and creating technology roadmaps that have yielded strategic opportunities and provided the company a competitive advantage. View more
Keynote Panel
Cloud Computing: The New Platform
Every decade or so, the platforms on which we build change dramatically. We saw this as mainframes gave way to client-server, or as enterprise computing moved to the web. This decade's shift is happening in clouds — from on-premise to on-demand platforms — but also in the network fabric, rich client interfaces, and virtualized infrastructure on which applications are built. This panel brings together the industry's biggest builders of new platforms for a look at how the very fabric of IT is changing beneath us.
Keynote Panelist:
Randy Rowland
Senior Vice President, Product Development
Terremark Worldwide, Inc.
Randy Rowland is the Senior Vice President of Product Development. As part of his role, Mr. Rowland oversees the operation of Terremark’s Infinistructure™ and The Enterprise Cloud utility computing product offerings. Mr. Rowland has more than 14 years of experience in the IT services industry, including eight years with Data Return, where he was most recently responsible for product development. Prior to that, Mr. Rowland previously held senior positions in sales engineering and IT consulting for Data Return and CompuCom. Born in Brawley, California, Mr. Rowland received his Bachelor of Science in Industrial Distribution from Texas A&M University. He lives in the Dallas area with his wife and children.
Keynote Panelist:
Andy Schroepfer
Vice President of Enterprise Strategy
Rackspace Hosting
As VP of Strategy at Rackspace, Andy Schroepfer’s goal is to quicken the pace that businesses see, and act on, the reality that the future of computing is not about servers, but about service. He calls this the Road to ACE (All Cloud Enterprise), where ACE is a business that operates powerfully without servers, by leveraging the most efficient hosting platform (dedicated or cloud) for their custom apps and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) applications for the rest.
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Keynote Panelist:
Harry Labana
Vice President & Chief Technology Officer
Desktop Division
Citrix Systems, Inc.
Harry Labana joined Citrix in July 2009 as Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for the Citrix Desktop Division. He is a member of the leadership team that charts the technological direction and product roadmap including Citrix’s $1 billion flagship product line. As CTO, he is also responsible for helping to communicate the strategic direction of the company’s desktop virtualization solutions to internal and external audiences. As part of the Citrix Office of the CTO, Harry collaborates with other Citrix CTOs to drive the company’s overall technology direction and product strategy and advises the executive management team.
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Moderator:
Alistair Croll
Founder
BitCurrent
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. View More
