Keynote Speakers

Carole Post is the Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) for the City of New York. She is the first female DoITT Commissioner and has served in that role since January, 2010, following appointment by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Commissioner Post has been involved in municipal and government operations since 1996.  Before coming to DoITT, she served as Director of Agency Services at the New York City Mayor's Office of Operations.  There, Ms. Post led a team of technical and policy advisors who oversaw City agency performance and coordinated strategic initiatives vital to the Mayor's vision for New York City. Chief among these was the development and implementation of the Mayor’s Citywide Performance Reporting (CPR) system, modernizing the Mayor’s Management Report and the award-winning NYC Stimulus Tracker tool, all of which have been instrumental in improving transparency and accountability throughout City operations.

Prior to joining the Mayor's Office, Ms. Post was Executive Director of Strategic Planning for the New York City Department of Buildings, where she was instrumental in re-engineering and modernizing agency operations.

Before her service with the City of New York, Ms. Post was legal counsel to several public entities in Florida, and was responsible for the operations of the City of Palm Beach Gardens while serving as Acting City Manager.

Commissioner Post holds a Bachelor's Degree in Journalism and a Juris Doctor, and is licensed to practice law in New York and Florida.

Robert Wahbe is corporate vice president of the Server and Tools Marketing Group at Microsoft. He manages a software portfolio that helps IT professionals and developers deliver a dynamic computing platform to run their businesses, including Microsoft Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, and Forefront. Wahbe is responsible for worldwide product and business management including product planning, pricing, packaging, branding and advertising, as well as developing sales integration and working with the partner ecosystem.

Since joining Microsoft in 1996, Wahbe has served in a number of product development roles. In 2000 he co-founded the team chartered to deliver Web services and the Windows Communication Foundation which now provides the foundation for Web services for both Windows Server and Microsoft's Azure Services Platform.

Most recently, Wahbe led the Connected Systems Division (CSD) which delivered the industry-leading platform & tools for distributed applications. Wahbe's product responsibilities in CSD included Windows Application Server, BizTalk Server, .NET Framework technologies including Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation, .NET Services as part of the Azure Services Platform and Microsoft's new modeling platform.

Before joining Microsoft, Wahbe was co-founder of Colusa Software Inc., a privately held software company acquired by Microsoft in 1996. Wahbe is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.

Sujai Hajela is Vice President and General Manager of the Wireless Networking Business Unit, one of the business units within the Cisco Network Services Group. He is responsible for the vision, roadmap, technology, and product development of Cisco’s WLAN portfolio including wireless LAN access points, controllers, network management, and mobile services solutions.

Previously at Cisco, Hajela was Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise & Commercial Management Business Unit, where he was responsible for Cisco Prime for Enterprise, an innovative network management strategy that has been recognized as a differentiator for Cisco.

Before joining Cisco, Hajela was the Vice President and General Manager at Motorola (now Motorola Solutions) where he was responsible for the wireless network solutions business, including wireless LAN, wireless security (air defense) and management (wireless valley), wireless broadband, private broadband and voice over WLAN. In that role, he established Motorola's vision for the wireless enterprise and led the development of new products such as Wi-NG, which grew the company's market share. Prior to Motorola, Sujai held domestic and international positions at Nortel, Hewlett-Packard, Siemens, and at C-DOT where he was involved in developing high-performance security, L4-7 switching, and network management solutions. Hajela holds a bachelor of engineering degree in computer science and technology from Bangalore University and master of business administration degree from Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Werner Vogels is Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company's technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon's customers at a global scale.

Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a research scientist at Cornell University where he was a principal investigator in several research projects that target the scalability and robustness of mission-critical enterprise computing systems. He has held positions of VP of Technology and CTO in companies that handled the transition of academic technology into industry.

John Engates is the Chief Technology Officer at Rackspace Hosting, the world’s leading specialist in hosting and cloud computing.

John joined Rackspace in August 2000, just a year after the company was founded, as Vice President of Operations, managing the datacenter operations and customer-service teams. Two years later, when Rackspace decided to add new services for larger enterprise customers, John created and helped develop the Intensive Hosting business unit.

Most recently, John has played an active role in the evolution and evangelism of Rackspace’s cloud-computing strategy and cloud products. John meets frequently with customers to hear about their needs and concerns, and to discuss Rackspace’s vision for the future of cloud computing.

Prior to joining Rackspace, John was a founder and General Manager at Internet Direct, one of the original Internet service providers in Texas.  John is a graduate of the University of Texas at San Antonio and holds a B.B.A. in Accounting.

Jeff Deacon is currently Terremarks Chief Cloud Strategist.  In this capacity, he is instrumental is shaping Terremarks strategy related to virtualization and cloud computing, and is playing a key role in the development of new on-demand IT services.

Previously, Deacon served as manager of IT solutions product marketing for Verizon Business with responsibility for the company’s software-as-a-service and cloud computing services.

With over 15 years of managed hosting industry experience, Deacon has broad expertise helping enterprise customers develop and implement effective data strategies.  Over the span of his career, he has held positions in engineering, consulting, and product marketing.  Prior to joining Verizon in 2007, Deacon held positions with Opsware, Savvis, LoudCloud and Digex.

Deacon regularly presents at cloud computing conferences, venture capital events and vendor seminars. He also actively consults with senior-level executives across a wide range of industries, including retail, finance, health care and software development, offering guidance and best practices on how to implement highly available IT architectures that scale up and down as demand for network and computing resources change over time.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Maryland and a master’s degree in information systems from Loyola University of Maryland.

Mike is Editor of Network Computing. He has been with TechWeb for over 11 years and has extensive experience evaluating enterprise remote access, security, and network infrastructure products. He previously was Lead Analyst with InformationWeek Analytics, Senior Technology Editor with Network Computing and Executive Editor for Secure Enterprise. He has spoken at several conferences including Interop, MISTI, the Internet Security Conference, as well as to local groups. He also teaches a network security graduate course at Syracuse University. Prior to Network Computing, Mike was an independent consultant.

John is an industry recognized Chief Technology Officer and ICT visionary. Currently John is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Huawei Enterprise. Huawei is the world’s second largest telecom solution provider serving over 2 billion people in more than 140 countries. Futurewei provides technical expertise across all Huawei products including wireless, wire line, core networking, silicon development, terminals, software and solutions. John is also the executive leader of Huawei’s Enterprise Global Competency Center, which provides Enterprise technology innovation and incubation as well as sales, marketing and operations support for Huawei’s Enterprise field sales and marketing teams worldwide.

Prior to Huawei, John was CTO of Nortel, the senior technology and R&D executive globally for the corporation, with functional responsibility for 12,000 R&D staff and $1.7B annual budget. Prior to Nortel John was CTO for networking technologies at Broadcom Corporation. Prior to Broadcom, John was CTO, CMO and CIO of Enterasys Networks. John started his career at Cabletron Systems where he grew within the company ultimately becoming the global CTO.