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Speakers

The GigaOM Network consistently brings you the brightest and most compelling speakers. We do not disappoint. Our speakers are briefed to focus on real world topics and useful information. We reject marketing-driven speaking proposals. We do provide a small tradeshow environment where vendors can interact with attendees during the day. This way attendees can see the latest technology offerings first hand.

The GigaOM Network also prides itself on editorial integrity and never “sells” speaking slots. Sponsorships and speaking engagements are two separate tracks. We take great care to ensure that one does not influence the other in any way. If you would like to submit a speaker proposal, please complete this application.

Jonathan Heiliger

VP, Technical Operations, Facebook

Jonathan Heiliger is the Vice President of Technical Operations at Facebook, where he oversees global infrastructure, site architecture and IT. Prior to Facebook, he was a technology advisor to several early-stage companies in connection with Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital. He formerly led the engineering team at Walmart.com, where he was responsible for infrastructure and building scalable systems. Jonathan also spent several years at Loudcloud (which became Opsware and was later acquired by HP) as the Chief Operating Officer. Earlier in his career, Jonathan was the CTO of Frontier GlobalCenter, and later founded Global Crossing's corporate venture capital group.

Najam Ahmad

General Manager, Global Networking Services, Microsoft

As General Manager of Global Networking Services, Najam Ahmad is responsible for the overall architecture, design, implementation and operations of Microsoft's global online network. Prior to joining Microsoft in September of 2004, Najam worked at MCI/UUNET as the Senior Manager of Global IP Network Engineering. In this role, he was responsible for the architecture and engineering of MCI’s global public IP backbone, it’s connectivity to the other IP networks (peering) and the design of IP access products. Prior to joining UUNET, Najam worked for Netrix Corporation, a developer of switching and routing equipment. Najam holds a Master of Science in Telecommunication Protocols and Computer Science from The George Washington University and a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical Engineering from NED University of Engineering and Technology.

Tasso Argyros

CTO and Co-Founder, Aster Data Systems

Tasso (or Tassos) took a leave of absence from the Ph.D. program at Stanford University to co-found Aster Data Systems. As a Ph.D. student, he was a member of the Distributed Systems Group and investigated extreme-scale cluster architectures for fast, parallel data processing across large farms of commodity servers. During his tenure at Stanford, Tasso was a SAP Graduate Fellow and earned a Master's degree in Computer Science. Before studying at Stanford, he conducted research in data mining for temporal and web databases at the Technical University of Athens. Tasso enjoys skydiving and many other adrenaline-enhancing activities.

Dave Asprey

VP, Technology and Corporate Development, Blue Coat Systems

Dave Asprey is Vice President of Technology and Corporate Development for Blue Coat Systems. He is responsible for ensuring the company leverages disruptive business and technology strategies through partnering, investment, or acquisition. He is a technology and marketing executive with experience in strategic planning, product management, and business development, from startup to F500, for service providers, telcos, networking, virtualization, CDN, cloud computing, and SaaS, at Citrix/NetScaler, Zeus, Speedera/Akamai, Exodus/Savvis, and 3Com. He ran the Internet Engineering Certification Program for UCSC and is a published author and accomplished public speaker. Dave sits on a variety of advisory boards for startups, public companies, and VC firms. He studied Computer Science at UCSB, Computer Information Systems at Cal State, and has an MBA from Wharton.

Kia Behnia

Chief Corporate Architect, CTO, BMC

As Chief Corporate Architect, Mr. Behnia is responsible for leading the design of BMC's industry-leading Business Service Management architecture and the critical enabling Atrium technologies. Mr. Behnia was previously Chief Technology Officer for the Change and Configuration products at BMC Software; Mr. Behnia is responsible for the direction of product development and product strategy for the Change and Configuration products at BMC including the BMC Atrium CMDB. Mr. Behnia was previously Chief Technology Officer for Marimba Inc. In that role, he led Marimba’s product strategy and technology partnerships. During his tenure at Marimba, Mr. Behnia was instrumental in the design and delivery of Marimba’s innovative configuration and patch management solutions across servers, client systems and mobile devices. Prior to joining Marimba, Mr. Behnia served as a senior member of the technical team for Tivoli Systems Inc., which was acquired by IBM. Mr. Behnia has over fourteen years’ experience in the management of distributed systems and databases. Mr. Behnia holds a B.A. degree in Computer Science from University of California at Davis.

Marc Benioff

Chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com

Marc Benioff founded salesforce.com in 1999 with a vision to create an on-demand information management service that would replace traditional enterprise technology. Under Benioff's direction, salesforce.com has grown from a groundbreaking idea into a publicly traded company that is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. Benioff is committed to using technology to produce positive social change. In 2000, he launched the Salesforce.com Foundation and established the “1/1/1 Model,” whereby 1% of the company’s profits, equity, and employee time are given back to the community. Benioff authored two books on the topic, The Business of Changing the World and Compassionate Capitalism. In 2007, the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy presented Benioff with the coveted Excellence in Corporate Philanthropy Award.

Richard Buckingham

VP of Technical Operations, MySpace

Richard is in charge of the MySpace datacenters, server farms, storage, and general technical operations at MySpace. Prior to MySpace, Richard worked at Stamps.com, leaving there six years later to join MySpace in August 2005. He also held a few short IT contracts around London at the BBC, GlaxoWellcome and BancBoston’s now defunct Robertson Stephens Investment Bank before settling in Los Angeles in 1999. Richard graduated from Leeds University, UK in 1995 with BSc Honors in Computer Science. He is also a former Glider pilot and RAF Reserve pilot, an aging PC gamer, avid Golfer, weekend car racer and an all-round technology geek

Navin Chaddha

Managing Director, Mayfield Fund

Navin Chaddha is a proven serial entrepreneur and venture investor. Navin was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2009, ranked on the Forbes Midas List of top 100 dealmakers as #11 in 2009, #10 in 2008 and #58 in 2007. He invests in the energytech, internet/digital media, enterprise, semiconductor, and service provider sectors and leads Mayfield's investments efforts in India. Navin has made over 25 investments, of which 9 have had IPOs and 6 have been acquired. His current investments include Consim Info, CPower, Gigya , Lattice Power, Mimosa Systems , Tejas Networks, WiChorus and WideOrbit. Navin holds an MS degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University and a B.Tech degree in electrical engineering from IIT Delhi.

Dr. Willy Chiu

Vice President, IBM Cloud Labs & HiPODS, IBM

Dr. Chiu has been leading the worldwide Cloud Labs, driving IBM's cloud computing initiative. He has worked with companies such as Google on major academic initiatives and technology collaboration, as well as implementing real cloud solutions for enterprise customers. In addition, his team launched nine new cloud labs around the world to help high profile customers design and implement cloud computing solutions. Previously, Dr. Chiu held numerous executive positions within IBM Software Group, from leading a team of experts in high volume web performance technologies and scalability, to creating IBM's first "digital library" content management project in the emerging area, digitizing the world's most treasured collections, including those at the Vatican Library.

Michael Crandell

CEO and Founder, RightScale

Michael Crandell is the CEO and a founder of RightScale, where he provides the vision and direction for the company as it pioneers innovative ways to bring the power of cloud computing to any organization. Crandell is a frequent speaker at cloud computing industry conferences, and he has played a major role in helping establish and promote openness and transparency in the cloud market. Prior to RightScale, he served as CEO at several Internet software-as-a-service (SAAS) companies and as executive vice president at eFax.com. Crandell received his B.A. from Stanford University and completed graduate studies at Harvard University.

Russ Daniels

VP and CTO, Cloud Services Strategy, HP

Russ Daniels is vice president and chief technology officer of Cloud Services Strategy at HP. In this role, he sets the overarching business and technology strategies for HP’s approach to the cloud. Daniels has more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry, specializing in software architecture, enterprise management, and software development methodologies. He has filled a wide range of staff and line management roles and run his own Internet Services business. In 2006, InfoWorld declared Daniels one of the industry’s top 25 chief technology officers. From 2002 to 2007 Daniels was the chief technology officer of HP Software. During his tenure, the business tripled in revenue and emerged as a significant player in the software industry. He joined HP in 1999. Prior, Daniels spent 15 years at Apple, where he held a variety of technical and management positions, culminating in his role as a senior software architect. Daniels holds a bachelor’s degree from Ohio University.

Bryan Doerr

CTO, Savvis

Bryan Doerr is Chief Technology Officer at SAVVIS. Bryan provides technology leadership for infrastructure and product development, M&A support, and next generation platform evaluation. Before joining SAVVIS, he held positions in management, software technology research, and software development at Bridge Information Systems, Boeing, and the Applied Physics Laboratory. Bryan holds a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland and a Masters Degree in Information Management from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Kenneth Duda

VP Software Engineering, Arista Networks

Ken is a proven pioneer in high-performance networking software. Ken's Ph.D. project at Stanford provided the software foundation for Granite Systems, acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996, where Ken led the productization of this software. From 1999 to 2004, Ken served as Chief Technology Officer of virtual worlds startup There.com, he played a leading role in designing and building a real-time 3-D distributed system that scaled to tens of thousands of simultaneous users. In 2004, Ken co-founded Arista Networks, where he serves as VP engineering, overseeing the design and development of Arista's Extensible Operating System (EOS). Ken studied Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at MIT, receiving three degrees in 1993, and holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Kevin Efrusy

Partner, Accel Partners

Kevin joined Accel in 2003. He served two stints as an EIR at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers where he started Corio, an ASP/SaaS pioneer which went public and was acquired by IBM in 2005. Later he served as the first CEO of IronPlanet, an online marketplace for heavy equipment with current annual gross sales over $350m. Kevin focuses primarily on consumer internet services and SaaS/open source software. Within consumer services, he sourced Accel’s investment in Facebook where he is a board observer, and led Accel's investments in Metacafe, Medio Systems, Mig33, Tumri, and EveryZing, Within SaaS/open source software, he led investments or serves on the boards of Xensource (acquired by Citrix), Genius, SpringSource, Northscale, Terracotta, and Aptana. He also currently serves on the board of BBN Technologies. Kevin has an MSEE, BSEE, and BA in Economics from Stanford University, and an MBA from the Stanford GSB.

Peter Fenton

General Partner, Benchmark Capital

Peter Fenton joined Benchmark Capital in 2006 after spending seven years as a partner with Accel Partners, where his investment interests included software, digital media, and technology enabled services. Prior to joining the venture capital community, he spent several years working with Silicon Valley software and high-technology companies as an entrepreneur and strategy consultant. He was an early employee at Virage, a multimedia information retrieval company that went public on the NASDAQ in 2000. Current Investments: EngineYard, FriendFeed, Hyperic, Lithium, New Relic, Pentaho, Polyvore, SpringSource, Terracotta, Twitter, Yelp, and Zuora. Education: MBA from Stanford Business School, Arjay Miller Scholar; BA from Stanford University, Phi Beta Kappa.

Tobias Ford

Assistant VP, IT, AT&T

As Assistant Vice President of Technology for AT&T Application Services business, Mr. Ford leads the technology efforts designed to enhance and streamline delivery of AT&T’s hosting, outsourced application management, security, unified communication, AT&T Telepresence, and intelligent content distribution service offerings. In this role, he is responsible for the development of the technology roadmap that directs future enhancements to reduce customer’s operating costs, increase application performance, and improve quality of service. His long-term leadership in programming methodology, system management and development and information technology research and development has led to several patents pending. Mr. Ford was Chief Technology Officer for USInternetworking when it was acquired by AT&T in 2006. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University.

George Gilbert

Co-Founder and Partner, TechAlpha

George Gilbert is Co-founder of TechAlpha, a consulting and research firm focused on IT infrastructure and applications. A recent report on virtualization's impact on the economics of the IT industry was cited in The Economist, BusinessWeek, and GigaOm. At TechAlpha, he has advised several top 10 software vendors on topics ranging from M&A due diligence to market requirements definition. Previously, George was the lead enterprise software analyst for Credit Suisse First Boston, where he was ranked among the top analysts in Institutional Investor, Reuters and Greenwich polls. Prior to being an analyst, George worked at Microsoft as a product manager on Windows Server. Before that, he spent 7 years at Lotus in strategic marketing as well as product management on the Notes team.

Vijay Gill

Senior Manager, Engineering and Architecture, Google

Vijay Gill is Senior Manager, Engineering and Architecture, at Google.He is responsible for all network design, expansion and datacenter infrastructure for Google's production network, as well as participating in various industry organizations and advancing the company's efforts in the standards arena. Vijay has co-authored a variety of RFCs on traffic engineering, multihoming, and routing. He has also given talks and presentations on network design, BGP scaling issues, and traffic engineering in forums such as NANOG and IETF. Vijay is also currently serving on the IETF Internet Architecture Board (IAB). Prior to joining Google, Vijay worked as Sr. Technical Manager for AOL Global Network Operations and was responsible for setting the technical direction and strategy for AOL production. Before AOL, Vijay worked as Manager of Architecture at MFN/Abovenet where he participated in revamping the global backbone, standardization of routing policy and product development. Earlier in his career, Vijay worked as a senior engineer at UUNET, participating in the MPLS and multicast engineering projects.

Jeff Hammerbacher

Chief Scientist, Cloudera

Jeff Hammerbacher was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners immediately prior to joining Cloudera. Before Accel, he conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook. The Data team was responsible for driving many of the applications of statistics and machine learning at Facebook, as well as building out the infrastructure to support these tasks for massive data sets. The team produced two open source projects: Hive, a system for offline analysis built above Hadoop, and Cassandra, a structured storage system on a P2P network. Before joining Facebook, Jeff was a quantitative analyst on Wall Street. Jeff earned his Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics from Harvard University.

Dr. Stephen Herrod

CTO and Sr. VP of R&D, VMware

Dr. Stephen Herrod is responsible for VMware’s new technologies such as mobile phone virtualization and technology collaborations with customers, partners and standards groups. Stephen joined VMware in 2001 and has led the VMware ESX group through numerous successful releases. Prior to joining VMware, he was Senior Director of Software at Transmeta Corporation co-leading development of their "Code Morphing" technology. Stephen holds a Ph.D. and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he worked with VMware's founders on the SimOS machine simulation project.

Jason Hoffman, PhD

CTO and Founder, Joyent

Jason A. Hoffman is a founder and the CTO of Joyent, an on-demand infrastructure and cloud computing company that serves billions of page views and traffics hundreds of millions of emails per month. Joyent is dedicated to the singular mission that developers should be able to start at a small scale and flex to a global scale with minimal friction. Joyent is among the world's largest OpenSolaris installations and while supporting all unix-based languages and datastores, Joyent's products have included the first production support of Ruby on Rails, inclusion of the ZFS file system, and Joyent's DTrace-enabled Ruby ships on MacOS X Leopard and soon on OpenSolaris. Jason is a systems scientist with BS and MS degrees from UCLA, and a PhD from UCSD, and is an expert in scalable architectures. He has applied his knowledge and experience from the Web to Games to Computational Chemistry, Proteomics and Cancer biology.

Chuck Hollis

VP, CTO of Global Marketing, EMC Corporation

A 14-year EMC veteran, Chuck is a key member of EMC’s management team, working on strategic aspects of marketing, business development and technology. He is a popular industry blogger (http://chucksblog.emc.com) and also is leading EMC’s social media proficiency initiative. Previously, Chuck ran EMC’s Technology Alliances organization, building strong partnerships that deliver customers superior multi-vendor solutions. Prior to that, he was VP of Strategic Marketing, where he helped map out key aspects of EMC’s transformation strategy, messaging and field execution. Prior to EMC, Chuck worked at several UNIX and database companies in Silicon Valley. Chuck has received degrees in Computer Science and Economics from University of California at Santa Cruz.

Doug Judd

Principal Search Architect, Zvents

Doug has over a decade of software engineering experience in the area of distributed computing and information retrieval. He joined Inktomi's Web Search division in 1997 where he held both engineering and management positions. During his five year tenure, he designed and developed large-scale distributed systems, including significant pieces of the crawling and indexing software. Doug later joined Kosmix, Inc., where he built a distributed web crawler and scaled it to a billion documents. Doug currently holds the position of Principal Search Architect at Zvents, Inc., a local search engine. Doug earned a B.S. in Computer Science from U.C. Santa Barbara in 1992 and holds four patents in search technology.

Paul Kedrosky

Senior Fellow, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

As Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, Paul Kedrosky shares his experience as a technology entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and academic to explore new programming opportunities for the Foundation in the areas of entrepreneurship, innovation, and capital markets.
Kedrosky is a venture capitalist, media personality, and entrepreneur. He is a sought-after speaker; an analyst for CNBC television; a columnist for TheStreet/RealMoney; the editor of Infectious Greed, one of the best-known business blogs on the Internet; and he is frequently quoted in major publications around the world. He has published more than 300 articles in academic and non-academic publications. Kedrosky also is a venture partner with Ventures West, one of North America's longest-standing institutional venture capital firms.

Yousef Khalidi

Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft Corporation

Yousef Khalidi is a Distinguished Engineer in the Windows Azure team. Windows Azure is a platform for developing, deploying, managing, and hosting cloud services. Yousef is responsible for several aspects of the platform, centered on the goal of building a low-cost, automated, large-scale computing system, using commodity hardware, with efficiently managed shared resources. Before joining Microsoft, Yousef was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. During his 14 years tenure at Sun, he held several development, architecture, and management positions in Sun's software division as well as in Sun Labs. Yousef was the CTO and Chief Architect of Solaris, Chief Architect and Director of the Sun Cluster product line, Chief Architect of Sun's N1 utility computing initiative, as well as a principal architect of Solaris MC and Spring operating systems. Yousef has a Ph.D. and an M.S. in Information and Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech).

Avinash Lakshman

Engineer, Facebook

I am an engineer in the infrastructure group at Facebook. At Facebook I helped architect and build Cassandra, a large scale distributed storage system, which powers multiple applications within Facebook. Prior to Facebook, I spent close to three years at Amazon.com as an engineer in the Distributed Systems group started by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. In that time I helped architect and build a system called Dynamo which resulted in a publication at SOSP 2007, details of which can be found over here - http://s3.amazonaws.com/AllThingsDistributed/sosp/amazon-dynamo-sosp2007.pdf. In short I can claim I have some reasonable experience in building systems at Internet scale.

Allan Leinwand

Venture Partner, Panorama Capital

Mr. Leinwand is a venture partner in the firm and focuses ontechnology investments. Prior to this role, he joined JPMorganPartners as an operating partner in 2004. From 2001 to 2004, he wasPresident and Co-founder of Proficient Networks, Inc. From 2000 to2001, he was Chief Technology Officer and Vice President ofEngineering at Telegis Networks, Inc. In 1997 Mr. Leinwand joinedDigital Island, Inc. (NASDAQ: ISLD) at inception and served as theirVice President of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer through thecompany's IPO and secondary offering. From 1990 to 1997, Mr. Leinwandserved as Manager of Consulting Engineering and Senior SoftwareEngineer at Cisco Systems, Inc. helping to build and engineer serviceprovider and enterprise networks worldwide. He co-authored "CiscoRouter Configuration" and "Network Management: A PracticalPerspective" and has been granted a patent in the field of datarouting. He currently is an Adjunct Professor at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley where he teaches the subjects of computernetworks, network management, and network design. Mr. Leinwand holds aB.S. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder.He presently serves on the board of directors of GridNetworks andVyatta, Inc. He is also a board observer to Belair Networks, CedarPoint Communications and Sylantro Systems.

James Lindenbaum

Co-Founder and CEO, Heroku

Having founded an enterprise software consultancy that was one of the earliest to see the potential of Ruby on Rails, James Lindenbaum and his co-founders set out to build Heroku, a cloud platform committed to being the fastest and easiest place to develop and deploy web applications of any scope through provisionless hosting and other breakthroughs. James was a managing partner of the consultancy, Bitscribe, which focused on bringing agile software practices into the enterprise. Prior to Bitscribe, James built a large-scale distributed software system to track copyright piracy across peer-to-peer networks. James has been programming for 20 years, studied finance at Boston University, and is technical advisor to several next-generation cloud startups.

David Lipscomb

SVP, Engineering and Co-Founder, NetSuite

Dave Lipscomb is charged with driving the overall strategy of engineering and IT operations for NetSuite. He has been with NetSuite since its inception in 1998. As a high tech engineering veteran, Mr. Lipscomb leads a team of 85 engineers. Under his leadership, NetSuite provides unbreakable and reliable back-end support for thousands of NetSuite customers worldwide to do business in real-time; and NetSuite has achieved unprecedented uptime in the on-demand industry. Prior to joining NetSuite, Mr. Lipscomb founded mBED Software with Evan Goldberg. He was also a director in Oracle's New Media Division. Mr. Lipscomb has been building client/server and Web server software products for seventeen years. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Geir Magnusson, Jr.

Consulting Architect, Platform, Gilt Groupe

Geir is a consulting architect for Gilt Groupe, Inc. His professional career includes a range of experiences in systems infrastructure, from data distribution at Bloomberg to video distribution for Joost. He's worked on Java application servers for Gluecode (acquired by IBM), and middleware architecture for Intel. Most recently he worked on cloud technology as VP of Engineering at 10gen. In addition to his commercial software experience, Geir is an internationally-known leader in open source. He is currently a Director of the Apache Software Foundation and represents the ASF in the Java Community Process. He's a co-founder of several open source projects, including Apache Geronimo and Apache Harmony. He holds degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering as well as Physics from the Johns Hopkins University.

Dominic Monkhouse

Managing Director, PEER 1

Dominic Monkhouse is the Managing Director of PEER 1's UK operations. Dominic has spent 14 years working in sales, marketing and business management within the IT sector. Dominic is responsible for sales, marketing and service delivery across the UK business and ultimately ensuring excellent customer satisfaction. Prior to joining PEER 1, he held senior positions at IT Lab and Rackspace. Dominic has a BSc in Agricultural and Food Marketing from Newcastle and a MBA from Sheffield Business School. Dominic is also a regular public speaker on creating great places to work and achieving continuous client satisfaction and an assessor on the Sunday Times Customer Experience Awards.

Lew Moorman

President, Cloud and Chief Strategy Officer, Rackspace Hosting

Lew lead Rackspace's move into cloud hosting and cloud applications in 2006 with the launch of Mosso The Rackspace Cloud, and the acquisition of webmail.us, now the backbone of Rackspace's Cloud Applications offer. Lew leads Rackspace's efforts developing new models to meet customer needs and maintain market leadership. Lew has built the cloud offers into the fastest growing piece of the business and home to 40,000+ customers. He joined the company in 2000 and has served in a variety of strategy, product and marketing roles throughout the company's growth. Before Rackspace, Lew held several positions at management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, advising high technology clients on critical strategic issues. Lew received a B.A. from Duke University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

K. Scott Morrison

Chief Architect, Layer 7 Technologies

K. Scott Morrison is the Chief Architect at Layer 7 Technologies, where he works to scale, simplify and secure Web applications. He has extensive IT and scientific experience in a number of industries, was previously Director of Technology at Infowave Software, and has also held senior architect positions at IBM. Scott has published over 50 book chapters, articles, and papers in various publications, including: ComputerWorld, ZDNet, Web Services Unleashed, Professional JMS, Ajax World Magazine, SOA World Magazine, Communications News, and the Business Integration Journal. Scott has spoken at 70 shows around the world, including InfoWorld, JavaOne, Gartner and IDC conferences.

Matt Mullenweg

Founding Developer, WordPress

Matt Mullenweg blogs at ma.tt. He is best known as the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software he guided from a handful of users to the most widely used open source blog tool. In late 2005 he left CNET to found Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet.com, and Gravatar. In his spare time he enjoys taking photographs and playing jazz.

Michelle Munson

President and Co-Founder, Aspera

Michelle Munson, president and co-founder of Aspera, Inc., is co-inventor of Aspera’s core technology and responsible for overseeing the company’s direction. Before founding Aspera in 2004, Michelle was a software engineer in several research and start-up companies including the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. She is a frequent speaker on how new data transfer technologies are revolutionizing content production, transformation and distribution workflows. A Fulbright Scholar, Ms. Munson holds B.S. degrees in electrical engineering and physics from Kansas State University, as well as a master's in computer science from Cambridge University. She was the 2006 KSU College of Engineering Alumni Fellow (the youngest recipient ever), and has received national achievement awards from Glamour Magazine and USA Today.

Greg Papadopoulos

CTO and EVP - Research and Development, Sun Microsystems

As Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Research and Development at Sun, Greg Papadopoulos directs the company's approximate $2B in R&D portfolio with an eye toward innovation, simplicity, and open development models. With more than 20 years experience in the technology industry, Papadopoulos is responsible for managing Sun's technology decisions and architecture. His team leads Sun Labs, global engineering architecture and advanced development programs. He holds a bachelor's degree in systems science from the University of California at San Diego, as well as master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.

Raj Patel

VP, Infrastructure and Operations Strategy, Yahoo!

Raj Patel is the Vice President of Infrastructure and Operations Strategy for Yahoo!. He is responsible for architecture, strategy and operations for Yahoo's production and corporate technology infrastructure. Under his direction, Yahoo!’s technology infrastructure has scaled to support hundreds of millions of users and corporate applications with a highly available and high performance network optimized for content and application distribution. He has also been instrumental in defining Yahoo!’s data center and content delivery network (CDN) strategies. Previously, he was vice president of network services for Exodus Communications, and before that, general manager for advanced technology operations for SBC Communications. Raj holds a Masters in Business Administration from University of Southern California and a Bachelors of Science in Electrical Engineering from California State University.

Renu Raman

Executive-in-Residence, Tallwood Ventures

Renu Raman has more than two decades of experience in semiconductors, computer systems and network infrastructure architecture. His focus has been delivering innovation through early adoption of disruptive trends in existing markets both consumer and infrastructure. During his tenure at Sun Microsystems spanning more than a decade, Renu was responsible for delivery of multiple generations of SPARC microprocessors starting with initial RISC designs in the 80s to leading the multi-core/multi-threaded designs at Sun in the 90s ahead of industry adoption of multi-threaded designs. After Sun, Renu was at a fabless semiconductor startup building innovative mobile imaging silicon for the camera phone market. At Tallwood, Renu focuses on semiconductor and systems related investments.

Paul Sagan

President and CEO, Akamai

Paul Sagan, president and CEO of Akamai, joined the company in October 1998. Mr. Sagan was elected to the Akamai Board of Directors in January 2005, and he became CEO in April 2005. He brings to Akamai the experience of leading visionary technology companies and media businesses and a wealth of management experience. Previously, Mr. Sagan served as senior advisor to the World Economic Forum from 1997 to 1998, consulting to the Geneva-based organization on information technology for the world's 1,000 foremost multinational corporations. In 1995, Mr. Sagan was named president and editor of new media at Time Inc., a division of Time Warner, and worked in that role until 1997. Previously, he served as managing editor of Time Warner's News on Demand project and was a senior member of the team responsible for the development of the company's online, cable online, electronic publishing, and Internet publishing activities. He was a founder of Road Runner, the world's first broadband cable modem service, and Pathfinder, one of the Web properties that pioneered Internet advertising. Mr. Sagan joined Time Warner in 1991 to design and launch NY 1 News, the cable news network based in New York City. The most successful regional news channel in the nation, NY 1 News became known for its groundbreaking use of digital video technology and video journalists carrying their own small-format cameras. Mr. Sagan's career began in broadcast television news. He joined WCBS-TV in 1981 as a news writer and was named news director in 1987 at age 28, the youngest person to hold the position in the network's history. Mr. Sagan is a three-time Emmy Award winner and was named a Global Leader for Tomorrow in 1996 by the World Economic Forum. Mr. Sagan is a Trustee of Northwestern University and a graduate of the University's Medill School of Journalism.

Rohit Sharma

Investor, Independent

Rohit Sharma works with early stage entrepreneurs in the area of infrastructure for cloud computing, networking, and storage systems. He was most recently a partner at Mohr, Davidow Ventures. He serves on the board of Vdopia, India's leading iPhone & online video advertising network and is an angel investor in Pacific Biosciences, a real-time DNA sequencing platform. Previously, Rohit was an entrepreneur in the valley ecosystem, creating the optical switching technology for ONI Systems in 1997 (funded by MDV, KPCB, Canaan, Fidelity, Chase, Bowman). He served as ONI Systems EVP and CTO. He holds a PhD from the University of Alberta, Canada where he supports a Chair position in Digital Communications and BSc from National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, India.

Vishal Sikka

CTO, SAP

Dr. Vishal Sikka is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of SAP, leading the company's technology and innovation strategy across its product portfolio. Vishal is responsible for ensuring a clear and harmonized road map for SAP products to deliver ongoing innovation and long-term value to customers worldwide. Furthermore, Vishal leads the company's forward-thinking efforts around emerging technologies using design thinking to build SAP next generation products. He is responsible for SAP's global research efforts and is chartered with SAP's architecture governance and standards. Vishal holds a doctoral degree in computer science from Stanford University in California, and his experience includes research in automatic programming, information and application integration, and artificial intelligence at Stanford, at Xerox Labs in Palo Alto, and at two startup companies.

Jim Smith

General Partner, MDV-Mohr Davidow Ventures

At MDV Jim Smith leads investments in software and systems companies, and extends MDV’s relationships with leading universities and research centers. He serves as a board member for companies including Mantara, Packet Motion, ParAccel, RingCube, Vast Systems, Vivaty, and Xambala. Prior to MDV, Jim developed computing architectures and integrated circuits for high performance multimedia systems at Silicon Graphics, Inc., including the O2 and Octane workstation lines. He authored and refereed numerous papers on computing systems and circuit design. He was also a researcher in the Computer Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. Jim received a doctorate in electrical engineering and a master’s in industrial management from Stanford University. He also earned a bachelor’s in computer systems engineering and a master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford.

Javier Soltero

CTO, Management Products, SpringSource

Javier Soltero is CTO of Management Products at SpringSource, the leader in Enterprise Java. Soltero was most recently co-founder and CEO of Hyperic, the leader in web infrastructure management which SpringSource acquired in 2009. Prior to co-founding Hyperic, he was chief architect at Covalent Technologies, where he led the design and implementation of multiple enterprise products. Soltero also held senior engineering positions at Netscape, where he participated in the design development of e-commerce and Internet infrastructure suites. Over the last 10 years, Soltero has been actively involved in various open source communities as both user and contributor to projects like JBoss and Tomcat. Soltero is originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico and received his BS in Information Systems and Industrial Management from Carnegie Mellon University.

Lloyd Taylor

VP Technical Operations, LinkedIn

Lloyd Taylor is the VP Technical Operations for LinkedIn, where he is responsible for cost-efficient scaling, performance, and reliability. Prior to LinkedIn, Lloyd was Director of Global Operations for Google where he was responsible for developing and running massive-scale production datacenters worldwide. Earlier responsibilities included VP Technology & Operations for Keynote Systems, and founding VP Technology & Operations for Digex Web Hosting in the late 90's. Lloyd started his career in the early 80's at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab where he designed flight hardware and software for the Space Shuttle, and was involved in early DARPANet work.

Mark Taylor

VP of Product Management, Content Delivery and Vyvx, Level 3 Communications

Mr. Taylor is vice president of product management for Level 3 Communications' Content Delivery Network and Vyvx Services. Over the past five years, he has held a variety of positions within the company, including head of Strategy and Mergers & Acquisitions in Europe and head of IP and Data Services Strategy in Europe. Prior to joining Level 3, Mr. Taylor spent two years as a Business Leader for Concert, a joint venture between AT&T and British Telecommunications, where he managed global customer contract origination and execution. He also worked with BT Syncordia Solutions, the Information & Communications Technology unit of BT. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Telecommunications Engineering from Plymouth University and a post graduate Diploma in Management Studies from Kingston Business School.

Joseph Tobolski

Director of Cloud Computing, Accenture

Joseph Tobolski is a Senior Executive in Accenture Technology Labs. This group generates game changing results by creating innovations using emerging technologies and applying them in client engagements. Joseph leads Accenture’s cloud computing for infrastructure. He also has responsibility for R&D, infrastructure technology vision and asset development related to data centers, networking, security and biometrics. Joseph holds a MS in Mechanical Engineering and a BS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Lew Tucker

VP and CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems

Lew Tucker is Vice President and CTO of Cloud Computing at Sun Microsystems, Inc. His focus today is on the evolution of computing as it moves into the cloud, but his contributions span several waves of technology innovation over the last 20 years. Prior to re-joining Sun Microsystems, he was a Vice President at Salesforce.com where he created AppExchange, advancing the company's strategy to become the leading SaaS platform for business applications. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and has a background in Artificial Intelligence, Neurobiology, and large-scale parallel algorithms.

Juergen Urbanski

Managing Director, TechAlpha

Juergen Urbanski is Managing Director of TechAlpha, a consulting and research firm focused on IT infrastructure and applications. He recently co-authored a report on next-generation IT infrastructure which was acclaimed for breaking new ground by illustrating how server virtualization remakes the economics of data center automation, server software and storage. He is recognized as a thought leader on the future of applications and infrastructure software, including contributions to the NY Times, BBC, Red Herring, PC Magazine as well as on his blog. At TechAlpha, he has advised several top 10 software vendors on topics ranging from M&A due diligence to market requirements definition, marketing performance optimization and SaaS go-to-market strategy. Previously, Juergen was a Director of Marketing with NetApp, where he had responsibility for growing the company’s Consulting and Integration business from $20m to over $60m in revenue. Prior, he spent 4 years with McKinsey and Company’s Silicon Valley office, where he led teams on a variety of strategy, product management and marketing topics. Juergen holds a Bachelor of Arts from the European School of Business (ESB) in Reutlingen (Germany) and a Master of Business Administration with a concentration in Finance from the Wharton School.

James Urquhart

Technology Strategist, Cloud Computing and Virtualization, Cisco

James Urquhart manages cloud computing and data center virtualization strategy for the Data Center Solutions group at Cisco. One of the most respected subject matter experts on the cloud, and author of the popular C|NET Blog Network blog, The Wisdom of Clouds (http://news.cnet.com/the-wisdom-of-clouds), Mr. Urquhart brings a deep understanding of these disruptive technologies and the business opportunities they afford.Mr. Urquhart is a seasoned field technologist with almost 20 years of experience in distributed systems development and deployment, focusing on service-oriented architectures, cloud computing, and virtualization. Prior to joining Cisco, Mr. Urquhart held leadership roles at Forte Software, Sun Microsystems, and utility computing infrastructure vendor Cassatt Corporation.

Werner Vogels

VP and CTO, Amazon

Dr. Vogels is Vice President & CTO at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company's technology vision, which is to continuously enhance innovation on behalf of Amazon's global customers. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a researcher at Cornell University where he led several research projects that targeted 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. Vogels holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles, most of them on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing. He was named the 2008 CTO of the Year by Information Week for his contributions to Cloud Computing.

Brandon Watson

Director, Azure Services Platform, Microsoft

Brandon Watson is an entrepreneur on loan to Microsoft, having returned to the company after selling IMSafer, the last company he founded. Upon returning to the Pacific Northwest, he was lured back to the company where he cut his teeth to work on their cloud computing efforts. In his role as a Director for the Azure Services Platform team, Brandon is responsible for technical product management and competitive analysis of cloud offerings. Brandon has done stints as an operator at all stages of the funding cycle, and at Soros Private Equity, investing over $70M in technology deals. He’s got an MBA from Wharton, and a BSEcon and Systems Science Engineering undergrad from the University of Pennsylvania. Follow him at twitter.com/brandonwatson or read his blog www.manyniches.com.

Joe Weinman

Strategy and Business Development VP, AT&T Business Solutions

Joe Weinman leads global portfolio strategy and business development for AT&T. A 28-year veteran of the company, a prolific inventor and author, and frequent global keynote speaker, he has held a variety of executive positions of increasing responsibility spanning research and development at AT&T Bell Laboratories, marketing, sales, product management, engineering and operations, and corporate strategy and business development. He has a BS and MS in Computer Science from Cornell University and UW-Madison respectively, and has completed Executive Education at the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne.

David Yen

EVP and GM, Data Center Business Group, Juniper Networks

David Yen, Ph.D., serves as the Executive Vice President of the Data Center Business Group (DCBG), for Juniper Networks. Dr. Yen came to Juniper from Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he served in a broad range of executive assignments during his nearly 20-year tenure. In the '90s, his team developed Sun's first- and second-generation multi-CPU SMP servers, which transformed Sun from a workstation company to a leading enterprise server company. After Dr. Yen took over Sun's Microelectronics group in 2001, he turned around Sun's declining SPARC business by focusing on execution and innovation. His group introduced the industry's first 8-core, 32-thread general-purpose processor in 2005 and developed it into a multi-billion dollar business. He also managed Sun's storage business for one year. Prior to joining Sun Microsystems in 1988, Dr. Yen was a cofounder of Cydrome, Inc., a mini-supercomputer start-up. He also served in engineering roles at IBM Research and TRW, Inc. Dr. Yen earned a bachelor's in electrical engineering from the National Taiwan University in 1973, and received an MS and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1980. He also completed a General Management Program at Stanford Business School in 1993. Dr. Yen holds three U.S. patents.

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