Business Technology Workshops

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.

Ms. Smith is an experienced business leader and information technology (IT) expert. She has senior executive experience as a CEO and CIO, and has worked in the energy, health care, telecommunications, manufacturing, and consulting industries, and with federal agencies.

Career Summary:

Cheryl Smith is a principal at an expert 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.

Prior to her work in IT crisis management, Ms. Smith was the CEO of a technology startup company, utility.net. utility.net offered Broadband over Power Line (BPL) networks to the major US electric companies for commercial sale of broadband to customers in their rural territories, and SmartGrid applications for utility use. She was the global CIO for McKesson Corp—a Fortune 15 health care company; the CIO for KeySpan (now National Grid)—one of the largest energy companies in the US; the VP for Strategic Systems at Verizon; and the MIS Director for Honeywell Federal Systems. She was a Principal at Ernst & Young, one of the “Big 6” consulting firms, for 7 years, successfully managing major IT efforts for a number of Fortune 100 companies in the US and around the world. Her initial years in the industry were spent building 3 core systems that remain in use on Capitol Hill (the electronic voting system on the House floor, the House publication system, the cable communication system used by both the House and the Senate) at the U.S. House of Representatives.

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.

Dr. Rob Rennie has been the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Vice President, Technology for Florida State College at Jacksonville, Florida since 1997. Prior to taking his current position, he was the CIO for Mt. San Antonio College in Los Angeles, is a former principal of the technology strategy practice of Xentrek Systems, Inc. and held a visiting scholar faculty appointment in Information Systems at the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA. Rob has been a CIO for over twenty years and is known for building the reputations of organizations on a foundation of innovation, value creation, excellence and technology leadership. Dr. Rennie serves on Software AG's International Executive Committee, is a member of Apple's University Executive Forum and is a board member of Curriki. Florida State College has won numerous awards for its highly innovative and successful technology environment having been ranked first in the Nation three of four years by the Center for Digital Education, rated 'Most Wired' by Yahoo, and having been featured by several major technology firms for best practices and successful innovations. In 2004, Dr. Rennie was honored as one of Computerworld's Premier 100 IT leaders. Rob received his Bachelors degree from Rollins College, Masters from The University of Oklahoma, and Ph.D. from the University of Florida.

Allan Frank most recently brought 35 years of knowledge in technology and business leadership to his position as Chief Technology Officer for the City of Philadelphia, which he held until Feb 1, 2011. His background includes co-founder of a publicly-traded Consulting and Research company, Senior Partner in a Global Professional Services Firm, and extensive experience in setting strategy, implementing and operating core business processes, product development, marketing, internal IT management, software development and all facets of building a world-class technology/services organization. He is also recognized as an expert in the areas of information delivery, decision support and knowledge management. Mr. Frank holds a Bachelor of Science in Accounting, Master of Science in Computer Science and Master of Business Administration in Finance from Lehigh University and is also a non-practicing Certified Public Accountant.

Mr. Frank began his career with Arthur Young & Co. in the 1970s first as an auditor and later as a manager, where he provided strategic and operational consulting services in the financial systems and process areas across a variety of industries. He later worked for KPMG Peat Marwick, a major international accounting and consulting firm. In 1997, Mr. Frank co-founded Answerthink, Inc., a publicly-traded, global strategic advisory firm, and served as a member of the Board of Directors, as well as the President and Chief Technology. Mr. Frank also was the Senior IT Research Fellow for the Hackett Group, a division of Answerthink and the world’s leading benchmarking and best-practicing advisory firm. Most recently, he founded and served as President of the AKA Group, a strategic consulting firm providing strategic IT transformation services in areas such as IT Business Governance, IT Competency and Resource Management and Technology Architecture.

Allan Frank has been recognized for his contributions to the IT Industry by several technology publications including Philadelphia Tech, where he was selected as one of the top 10 Technology Leaders in the region and InformationWeek, where he was selected as one of the top 10 Technology Innovators in the United States. He received the 2001 Computerworld Premier 100 Award which identified him as one of the top 100 people in the U.S. having an exceptional ability to lead their organizations through the effective use of technology.

Patrick joined The Washington Post in 1996, and currently is Director of Enterprise IT reporting to the CIO. Previously, Patrick held positions within The Post as Program Manager, Manager of Advertising Systems, and Project Manager. Patrick spent the first 10 years of his career in the U.S. Army, beginning as a Linguist in the Military Intelligence, and ultimately rising to the rank of Captain in the Field Artillery at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina in the 18th Airborne Corps.

Patrick’s expertise is in Systems Engineering and IT Operations combined with Program Management. In his career Patrick has been responsible for leading enterprise-level teams to implement dozens of systems in virtually every area of The Post’s business including advertising, finance & accounting, production, marketing, editorial, and circulation.

Most recently, Patrick graduated as co-valedictorian of his EMBA class at The Ohio State University. He also has a Masters of Engineering degree from the University of Maryland, and he was an Honor Graduate at the United States Military Academy at West Point with a BS in Systems Engineering.

Peter Laird is the Platform Architect for Tendril. Tendril offers a hosted platform to manage connected devices for residential applications, often referred to as "The Internet of Things". The Tendril Connect platform communicates with each home to enable device provisioning, remote device operations, and remote device data capture. Currently, this platform is the leading solution for energy utilities deploying in-home devices in support of Smart Grid initiatives. Beyond the utility market, the Tendril Connect platform has been adopted by vendors such as Whirlpool, which selected Tendril Connect for its smart appliance initiative.

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 served as senior vice president of marketing at Sun Microsystems, where he managed the Solaris OS 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. Ulander has also held a number of management positions at software companies such as MontaVista Software and Cobalt Networks. He studied economics at Santa Clara University.

Manavinder Bains serves as Chief Counsel for Technology for NYSE Euronext, which is comprised of leading equities and derivatives exchanges across the United States and Europe. Manavinder manages a wide array of intellectual property and technology driven matters pertaining to the clearing and settlement of cash equities, futures, options, fixed-income and exchange-traded products as well as regulatory and commercial matters pertaining to global exchange driven solutions, market data, and clearance and settlement models. Manavinder also supports strategic initiatives respecting the cultivation, acquisition and leveraging of intellectual property assets as well as transactional, operational and regulatory matters pertaining to mergers and acquisitions.

Prior to joining NYSE Euronext, Manavinder served as a Vice President with Merrill Lynch handling a wide range of technology driven legal and business matters, including investments in technology companies. Manavinder has also served as in-house Corporate Counsel to a technology and telecommunications company and worked in private practice as an associate at a prominent New York City law firm.

Manavinder speaks frequently on issues pertaining to intellectual property. He has appeared on CNBC to discuss copyright litigation between Viacom and Google, and often presents at Continuing Legal Education conferences.

Manavinder has authored widely cited articles on the convergence of intellectual property law and technology published in the COLUMBIA SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY LAW REVIEW (4 COLUM SCI & TECH L. REV. 4) as well as the STANFORD TECHNOLOGY LAW REVIEW (2006 STAN. TECH. L. REV. 6). In addition to citations in legal scholarship, other citations include mention in a written judicial opinion issued by a court in the 9th Circuit and an amici curiae brief filed with the Supreme Court of the United Sates.

B.A. University of California Berkeley, 1991

J.D. Emory University School of Law, 2001

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/

William Hayes, PhD Molecular Biology and Bachelors in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech, is Director of Decision Support R&D IT at Biogen Idec. His group focuses on extracting, integrating and delivering information for more efficient analysis and decision making. He has extensive experience with text mining, data mining, bioinformatics, and grid computing in meeting the challenges of informatics-driven drug discovery.

Mason Katz is the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Clustercorp. Prior to joining Clustercorp, he co-founded the open-source Rocks Clusters Group at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) located on the campus of the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). He has 20 years of experience in distributed and networked systems. His first job was as an 8-bit embedded software engineer, where he integrated first generation GPS units into a national grid of weather sensors. It was here that he discovered his passion for creating highly automated, maintainable, and supportable systems. He then took his embedded experience into the OS kernel arena and spent several years developing research-oriented network protocol stacks (x-kernel and IPSec) for Linux. For the last half of his career his primary focus has been on the design of software to manage commodity Linux clusters. As a co-founder of the Rocks Cluster Group, he helped position Rocks as the de facto standard in Linux cluster management.

Mr. Leif Maiorini is the Senior Managing Director of IT Strategy & Planning of Cushman & Wakefield, a global commercial real estate services provider with operations in 61 countries. As SMD of IT Strategy & Planning, Mr. Maiorini is responsible for global IT strategy development & planning, enterprise applications and enterprise architecture. Mr. Maiorini is based in Cushman & Wakefield’s world headquarters in New York, New York.

Prior to joining Cushman & Wakefield, Mr. Maiorini has served in various IT executive leadership capacities for more than 20 years; the previous 10 years as the CIO for CDG Management.

Leif holds and MSE in Technology Management from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and Graduate School of Engineering and a BA from LaSalle University in Computer and Information Sciences. Leif frequently serves as a speaker and panelist for a number of professional conferences and currently is a member of the executive leadership board of the Society for Information Management’s New Jersey Chapter.

Leif resides in Marlton, NJ with his wife and three children.

George Reese is the author of several books on cloud computing and enterprise technologies. His most recent book is O’Reilly’s Cloud Application Architectures. Professionally, he is the founder and CTO of enStratus, the only infrastructure management solution supporting enterprise security and governance for the hybrid cloud. George has also led a number of Open Source projects, including several MUD libraries and the mSQL-JDBC JDBC driver. He is the primary maintainer of Dasein Cloud, a cloud abstraction API for Java.

George holds a BA from Bates College in Maine and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Bret Piatt is Director of Corporate Development where he is responsible for identifying and pursuing new growth opportunities for Rackspace’s core business through M&A, strategic partnerships, or incubation efforts. He played a crucial role in the formation of OpenStack, the open source cloud software community, as well as building the Cloud Tools ecosystem for the Rackspace Cloud. Previously, Bret was on the Product Management teams for both Rackspace and AT&T, where he was responsible for security and compliance product lines. His technical experience comes from his time at AT&T/SBC, where he designed carrier scale monitoring and management systems, optimized networks for enterprise customers, and performed lab testing on new products from potential suppliers and partners. Bret has more than 12 years experience working for service providers on leading edge projects and technologies from the beginning of VPN services to the currently emerging public cloud computing market. He is a also frequent speaker on cloud computing and big data technology at major industry events.

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.

Ellen Rubin is an experienced entrepreneur with a proven track record in founding innovative technology companies and leading strategy, market positioning and go-to-market. Prior to founding CloudSwitch, Ellen was Vice President of Marketing at Netezza (NYSE: NZ), the pioneer and global leader in data warehouse appliances that power business intelligence and analytics at over 200 enterprises worldwide. As a member of the early management team at Netezza, Ellen helped grow the company to over $125 million in revenues and a successful IPO in 2007. Ellen defined and created broad market acceptance of a new category, "data warehouse appliances," and led market strategy, product marketing, complementary technology relationships and marketing communications.

Prior to Netezza, Ellen founded Manna, an Israeli and Boston-based developer of real-time personalization software. Ellen played a key role in raising over $18 million in venture financing from leading US and Israeli venture capital firms, recruiting the US-based management team and defining product and market strategy. Ellen began her career as a marketing strategy consultant at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Harvard College.

As Chief Technology Officer, Justin Sheehy directs Basho's technical strategy, roadmap, and new research into storage and distributed systems. Justin came to Basho from the MITRE Corporation, where as a principal scientist he managed large research projects for the U.S. Intelligence Community including such efforts as high assurance platforms, automated defensive cyber response, and cryptographic protocol analysis. He was central to MITRE’s development of research for mission assurance against sophisticated threats, the flagship program of which successfully proposed and created methods for building resilient networks of web services.

Before working for MITRE, Justin worked at a series of technology companies including five years at Akamai Technologies, where he was a senior architect for systems infrastructure giving Justin a broad as well as deep background in distributed systems. Justin was a key contributor to the technology that enabled fast growth of Akamai’s networks and services while allowing support costs to stay low. Justin performed both undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Computer Science at Northeastern University.

Kent has more than 19 years of engineering experience. As Senior Vice President of Engineering, Kent leads the product architecture, development, quality and on-demand infrastructure efforts for Tendril. Most recently Kent was Vice President of Engineering at BEA Systems Inc., where he held a number of roles managing Engineering and Product Management functions for some of BEA’s key product platforms. Kent holds a BS in Aerospace Engineering and an MBA in Organizational Management from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Patrick Chanezon joined VMware in 2011 in San Francisco, to create the developer relations team, and make VMware and Cloud Foundry the first choice of developers moving their apps to the cloud. Previously, he worked at Google from 2005 to 2011, where he managed the Cloud and Tools Developer Relations team. Previously he has been a Developer Advocate, building and growing developer ecosystems for HTML5, OpenSocial, Google Checkout and the AdWords API. Previously he spent 5 years at Sun Microsystems as a software architect working on Sun Portal Server, blogs and syndication feeds, and received the CEO award for helping launch blogs.sun.com. Previously he spent 5 years at AOL and Netscape where he managed the MyNetscape Portal, and 2 years at Accenture as a Lotus Notes guru. He co-created the ROME open source project, and the OSSGTP group in France.

Apart from programming and reading books, his main interest in life is spending time with his wife and 3 kids.

Patrick received a M.S. in computer science from Ecole Centrale de Lyon where he graduated in 1993.

Dr. Craig A. Cuyar is the Global Chief Information Officer of Cushman& Wakefield, a global commercial real estate services provider with operations in 58 countries. He is based in New York, New York.

Prior to joining Cushman & Wakefield, Dr. Cuyar has served as a CIO for sixteen years in a variety of professional services industries, including healthcare, advertising, and residential and commercial real estate. He was most recently the CIO for the Realogy Franchise Group, a global franchisor of some of the most recognized brands in the real estate industry including Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate®, CENTURY 21®, Coldwell Banker®, Coldwell Banker Commercial®, ERA®, and Sotheby’s International Realty®.

Dr. Cuyar has served as an adjunct faculty member and designed curricular materials for various academic institutions and is currently an adjunct faculty member teaching Supply Chain Management at Columbia University. He also mentors IT professionals for the CIO Executive Council and students enrolled in the Masters of Technology Management program at Columbia University

Dr. Cuyar holds Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral degrees from The Pennsylvania State University and an MBA in Finance from the Rutgers Business School. He speaks regularly at professional conferences and serves on Executive Advisory Boards for Avaya, Savvis and Zillow. Dr. Cuyar is also the Immediate Past President of the New Jersey Chapter of the Society for Information Management and a current Board member for OSCRE.

Dr. Cuyar lives in Randolph, NJ with his wife and three daughters. In his spare time he enjoys travel, wine and fly-fishing.

Gordon Haff is Red Hat's Cloud Evangelist. Prior to Red Hat, Gordon wrote hundreds of research notes, was frequently quoted in publications like The New York Times on a wide range of IT topics, and advised clients on product and marketing strategies. Earlier in his career, he was responsible for bringing a wide range of computer systems, from minicomputers to large UNIX servers, to market while at Data General. Gordon has engineering degrees from MIT and Dartmouth and an MBA from Cornell’s Johnson School.