UP 2012 Speakers

Deni Connor

Founding Analyst, Storage Strategies NOW

Deni Connor founded SSG-NOW in 2007. She is a well-known storage expert, who was previously a reporter for IDG’s Network World. In addition, she worked in marketing and editorial positions for Novell, IBM, Control Data, Radix International, Thomas-Conrad and LAN Times and Networking Solutions magazine. While she has written for Data Communications, Byte, Datamation, the Computer Shoppper and Storage Magazine, now she writes primarily for Network World — the Storage Alert Newsletter. She has also written four books on computer networking and data communications. Deni holds a B.A. degree in Fine Arts and Biology from the University of Northern Colorado.

Efrat Kasznik

President, Foresight Valuation Group

Efrat Kasznik is an intellectual property (IP) and valuation expert, with close to 20 years of consulting experience, focusing on assisting clients with the management and commercialization of their innovation. She specializes in analyzing and valuing IP portfolios and emerging technologies for clients across industries, including some of the largest telecom IP holders. Efrat has worked with corporate clients that range in size from Fortune 100 to start-ups, law firms, universities, research institutions, inventors, IP brokers and patent funds. She is the founder and president of Foresight Valuation Group, a Silicon-Valley based IP valuation, strategy and start-up advisory firm. She teaches a class on IP Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and is a frequent speaker and author on IP valuation and strategy issues. Throughout her career, Efrat also served as a co-founder, CFO and adviser to several Silicon Valley start ups. She is Chair of the Nanotechnology Committee of the Licensing Executives Society (LES), and a member of the leadership committee of the LES High Tech Sector. She serves as a mentor to several start up incubators in the US and in Europe, where she routinely advises start ups on topics related to business strategy, financial modeling andIP portfolio management. Efrat received an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in Accounting and Economics from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Chris Keene

VP, Big Data Fast Data Initiative, VMware

Chris Keene is Vice President for the Big Data Fast Data initiative at VMware, a cloud platform combining 9 products that was launched at the VMworld Keynote in front of 20,000 customers. Keene is responsible for driving the adoption of VMware's cloud application platform adoption with SI, ISV and OEM partners. His preious company, WaveMaker Software, was acquired by VMware in 2011. WaveMaker is the most popular visual development platform for building cloud applications, backed by a 30,000-strong developer community. Prior to that, he was founder and CEO of NASDAQ-listed Persistence Software, the company that pioneered real-time, distributed data management. He has also held management positions at McKinsey & Company and Hewlett Packard.

Antonio Piraino

CTO, ScienceLogic

Antonio Piraino is the CTO of ScienceLogic, Inc. Previously, Piraino was vice president and research director at Tier1Research, a division of The 451 Group, focused on managed services and cloud computing sectors. He spent a decade in the telecommunications, CDN and software development areas. During this time, Piraino was director of IP and data services for China Telecom, Telecom Italia and Teleglobe's e-Business division. His creation of a video streaming distribution network while at Teleglobe achieved success as a 'Top 10 Broadband Streaming Implementation for 2001’ by the Aberdeen Group. Piraino followed this success up by managing technical business developmentwith Akamai. He started his career in the satellite space, for industry giant INTELSAT, driving developments in the TDMA access technology segment. Originally from South Africa, Piraino has a BSc from the University of Natal, and holds an International MBA from Georgetown University. Antonio Piraino has published articles and collaborated on several reports on cloud computing management, virtualization and trends in the space throughout his career. He is also a regular speaker at managed hosting, virtualization and cloud computing conferences.

Khazret Sapenov

CTO, Cloudcor

A 20-year veteran of ICT, Khazret Sapenov is chairman and chief technology officer of Cloudcor, which serves hundreds of enterprise clients and works closely with a set of managed partners and independent software vendors. In this role, Sapenov is responsible for leading Cloudcor's overall strategy and technology direction across the United States and Canada, including employees in IT, partner, marketing, operations and vertical industry teams. <p>Sapenov serves as advisor and technology editor to a number of publishing houses and had been featured in global printed editions such as Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, PMI Network Magazine, PCWeek, Open Systems, PCWorld, CIO Magazine. <p>Sapenov previously served as the corporate director of research and development at Enomaly, where he was responsible for growing the company virtualization solutions business, including development and service delivery. <p>Prior to working with Enomaly, Sapenov held the positions in technology solutions development in various Fortune 500 companies. In that role he was responsible for global network, data centers, information security, core IT services and enterprise line-of-business applications. <p>Cloudcor organizations under Sapenov's leadership have developed into one market leaders and gained wide recognition as thought leader in cloud computing. Before Cloudcor, he was at corporate and academic research roles, covering oil and gas resources prospecting and development. Sapenov is a graduate of the University of Karaganda, where he received B. Sc. degree in Applied Mathematics.

Kurt Milne

Managing Director, IT Process Institute

Managing Director of IT Process Institute Kurt Milne is the managing director of the IT Process Institute, he oversees research, benchmarking, and the development of prescriptive guidance for IT decision makers. He has more than 20 years of experience in various executive management, marketing, and engineering positions at leading technology companies, including Hewlett-Packard and BMC Software. He released a book in April 2011 Visible Ops Private Cloud: from virtualization to private cloud in 4 practical steps. He was primary investigator and author of 5 major research studies from IT Process Institute on IT controls, Change config release, strategic alignment, IT governance, and production server virtualization. He has written dozens of white papers and articles on topics as diverse as semiconductor design and manufacturing, manufacture shop-floor automation, supply chain integration, IT controls, IT service management, datacenter operations, virtualization, and private cloud. He is a professional presenter and frequent speaker at conferences.

Todd McKinnon

CEO, Okta

Todd McKinnon is the CEO and co-founder of Okta, the first cloud-based identity management platform. Founded in 2009, Okta helps companies of all sizes secure their users, applications and data — both in the cloud and behind the firewall — so work gets done, from any device, anywhere. Under Todd’s leadership, Okta has grown into the leading identity solution with hundreds of enterprise customers. From 2003 to 2009, Todd was overall head of engineering at Salesforce.com, where he helped grow the team from 15 people to more than 250, and the service from 2 million daily transactions to more than 150 million with industry-leading performance and reliability. Todd’s team developed and launched Force.com, the industry’s first platform-as-a-service product, and AppExchange, the first online marketplace for cloud computing applications. Prior to Salesforce.com, Todd spent nearly a decade working in various engineering and leadership roles at PeopleSoft. Todd currently serves on the Board of Directors for Family House, a not-for-profit organization that provides temporary housing to families of seriously ill children receiving treatment at the University of California San Francisco Children’s Hospital. Todd is a regular contributor to industry publications, including Forbes, Fast Company and Fortune. He earned a BS in Business from BYU and a MS in Computer Science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Jean-Paul Smets

CEO, Nexedi SA and VIFIB

Founder of Nexedi and initial author of ERP5, Jean-Paul is currently in charge of Nexedi international development, investment relations and technology partnerships. Jean-Paul graduated from Ecole Normale Supérieure with a PhD in computer science and from Ecole des Mines de Paris with a Master in Public Administration. He gained industrial experience in Apparel Industry, Oil industry, Non Profit Organizations and Lorraine Region Public Administration. He is an active member of Free Software associations and has played in key role in the Eurolinux campaign which succeeded in protecting innovation from software patents. Associate Speakers: Cédric de Saint Martin (VIFIB SARL) and Stéphane Konan (Ministry of the Interior)

Carlos Escapa

CEO, VirtualSharp Software

Carlos Escapa is the co-founder and CEO of VirtualSharp Software where he works closely with customers on next generation Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery solutions for private and public clouds. He has extensive expertise in virtualization following a successful career at VMware where he was a senior executive in Europe. Under his leadership, VMware’s customer base grew to 4,500 customers and VMware’s channel base reached more than 300 certified companies, including partnerships with IBM, HP, Dell and Accenture. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Channels EMEA at CA Technologies and Senior Director of Marketing in Japan at Sterling Software. He has a Bachelors degree in Computer Science from Illinois State University, and a Masters degree from Virginia Tech.

Adam Stern

Founder and CEO, Infinitely Virtual

Adam Stern, founder and CEO of Infinitely Virtual, is a young entrepreneur who saw the value of virtualization and cloud computing more than five years ago. Stern’s company helps businesses move from obsolete hardware investments to an IaaS [Infrastructure as a Service] cloud platform, providing them the flexibility and scalability to transition select data operations from in-house to the cloud. Stern founded Infinitely Virtual in 2007, to provide virtual dedicated server solutions to growing enterprises, offering what was essentially a cloud computing platform before the term existed Infinitely Virtual is a subsidiary of Santa Monica-based Altay Corporation, which Stern founded in 2003 to provide Windows, VMware and other service solutions to small and medium-size businesses. Since 2007, Infinitely Virtual has grown exponentially through its offering affordable, customized cloud-based solutions, using the most sophisticated technology available. Host Review named the company to its list of “Top Ten Fastest Growing” enterprises in 2011. Stern is a firm believer in corporate responsibility. The company’s products and services feature low-power consumption and fit squarely within the green IT movement. As a provider -- and consumer - of cloud based services, Infinitely Virtual is committed to sustainability. Prior to founding Altay and Infinitely Virtual, Stern worked for CallOne, Inc., a value-added reseller of computer equipment and professional services. From 1997 to 2000, Stern led CallOne as the Vice President of Operations. He then worked for 3Com in 2000 as a network consultant. Stern holds a B.S. degree in business administration and management from Cal State, Northridge.

Daniel Chalef

CEO, KnowledgeTree

Daniel is CEO and co-founder of KnowledgeTree, the first company to get ‘insight out’ of business content. As CTO of a South African systems integrator, he worked with Global 2,000 customers to unlock the value of companies' business content. He co-launched KnowledgeTree, his second start-up, to directly meet this challenge. He envisioned KnowledgeTree as a content management and business intelligence platform that surfaces companies’ most valuable sales, marketing, and corporate content. Daniel is recognized internationally for his opinions on technology and business, and has been quoted in TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Business Insider, eWeek, and The Guardian (UK). He is also an active supporter of the local technology community, where he frequently guest speaks and advocates for start-ups.

Dante Malagrino

CEO, president and co-founder, Embrane

Born and raised in Italy, Dante is the co-founder and CEO of Embrane, where he leads and inspires the team to turn the company’s vision into execution, drives the values and the culture that define the company, and sometimes stocks the break-room. His professional life before that is pretty simple: a little over 10 years at Cisco. He was part of one of the most successful teams at Cisco, building the Catalyst 6500 family of switches. He later became part of the founding team of Andiamo, a spin-off that Cisco created to enter and disrupt the storage networking market. More recently, he led the worldwide marketing campaign for Cisco’s Data Center 3.0 strategy. While at Cisco he wore several hats: engineer, product manager, marketing manager and sales manager. He even spent three years in Europe, evangelizing Cisco’s Data Center story to the market. Dante holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science Engineering from Politecnico di Torino and several patents in the areas of networking, storage and data center infrastructure. He also has experience as spokesperson with press, analysts and investors and he represented Cisco in several official industry organizations, such as SNIA Europe. When he is not thinking about how to power the agile network, Dante enjoys traveling, scuba diving, and cooking homemade pizza from scratch.

Jay Migliaccio

Director of cloud services, Aspera

Jay is responsible for Aspera's On Demand product line, providing high-speed transport to, from and across cloud infrastructure and object storage to enable big data applications in the cloud. In his previous role as Director of Sales Engineering, Jay spearheaded the architecture and deployment for numerous Aspera installations in support of complex end-to-end file-based media workflows. Jay brings over 11 years of experience providing OEM Sales, Sales Engineering, and Business Development services to technology companies with a focus on Open Source platforms. Prior to joining Aspera, Jay held business development and partner management roles at Novell and SUSE Linux. Jay holds a BS in Engineering from the University of Massachussets.

Ditlev Bredahl

CEO, OnApp

Ditlev Bredahl is an Internet and hosting industry veteran, with more than 15 years’ experience leading hosting and technology companies. Before founding OnApp, Ditlev led UK2 Group’s hosting companies as MD and CEO, and spearheaded the launch of VPS.NET, which now operates one of the world’s top 5 public clouds. He has founded numerous successful web hosting brands and, earlier in his career, had a number of roles working for the European Parliament. Ditlev is Danish, lives in the UK but travels frequently to visit clients and speak at events around the world. An entrepreneur and a specialist in startup and turnaround scenarios, Ditlev was listed in the Top 100 most influential technology investors in Europe by The Telegraph.

David Fowler

COO, Courion Corporation

Dave Fowler is a veteran of the software industry with over 35 years of industry and senior management experience in product management and development, marketing, business development and sales. As Chief Operating Officer, he is responsible for engineering, marketing, product management and strategic alliances. He is also chairman of the Physical Security Interoperability Alliance (PSIA), a global consortium formed to bring standards to the Physical Security industry. Prior to Courion, Fowler was the senior vice president of marketing and product development for VidSys. He has held numerous senior executive roles at leading technology companies including Pragmatech Software, Groove Networks, Kana Software, Sun Microsystems, FTP Software, Chipcom, Wang Labs and Gradient Technologies. While at these organizations, he was instrumental in acquisition, merger and IPO activities. Fowler is a frequent speaker at industry conferences on a variety of technology topics (PSIM, physical and logical security convergence, CRM, networking and collaboration) and has recently spoken at GovSec, ISC West, RSA and TechSec. He is recognized as a leading authority on enterprise security and access risk management, and has been published and often quoted in respected business and technology publications. An advisor and board member to a number of early stage companies, Fowler currently serves on the board of Azorus, a leading provider of creative CRM solutions for higher education. Fowler earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and an MBA from New York University.

Wally MacDermid

Head of US Operations, Centrix Software, Centrix Software

Wally MacDermid has over 20 years of experience growing enterprise software and hardware companies. After starting his career as a database developer, Wally moved into technical marketing and systems engineering roles for Remedy (now part of BMC) and Motive (now part of Alcatel-Lucent). He later directed marketing for NetApp and business development for companies such as Onaro (now part of NetApp) and VKernel (now part of Quest/Dell). Wally currently heads US operations for Centrix Software, the leader in next-generation workspace solutions, with emphasis on business development and technical alliances that will drive customer adoption and revenue. Wally has presented at numerous industry events, trade shows, and webinars on topics ranging from cloud solutions and virtualization management to enterprise systems management and storage management.

David Lucas

Chief Strategy Officer, GCE

David Lucas is responsible for the relationship management of GCE’s clients and potential clients. He has led every significant capture effort for GCE since 2005, and has been instrumental in championing the introduction of Service Oriented Architecture to the federal government. With two decades of experience in corporate management, sales, business development, corporate strategy, marketing, and federal IT program management, Lucas has a proven track record for winning large contracts and delivering enterprise solutions for federal agencies. Mr. Lucas is a noted speaker on cloud and Big Data topics, and has been a featured speaker at several key conferences including FOSE 2012, BigDataExpo 2012, Gov 2.0 Expo 2010, and Cloud Expo 2012. David holds significant expertise with government-focused cloud computing implementations, Big Data initiatives, cloud-based financial management implementation and integration strategies, federal enterprise architecture, federal IT program management, open source technology applications for federal government, and ‘big data’ requirements.

Todd Greene

CEO and Co-Founder, PubNub

Todd is the co-founder and CEO of PubNub. As an entrepreneur who has founded and successfully sold companies across the software spectrum, Todd helps shape the PubNub vision of revolutionizing the way people interact online. Todd most recently was CEO of Loyalize, an Audience Participation company successfully sold to Function(x) (FNCX), a Robert F.X. Sillerman company, where he designed the first-ever massively multi-user Social TV mobile and web applications licensed to companies like Viacom and Yahoo. Todd previously was founder and CTO/VP Products of CascadeWorks, a company providing Services Procument solutions to Texas Instruments, Charles Schwab, and ABN Amro, and acquired by Elance. After working with companies like GE, SGI, and Quantum while a consultant at Price Waterhouse, Todd joined NetDynamics (sold to Sun Microsystems in 1998) to help create a truly game-changing product: the first application server built for the Internet.

Helmuth Zimmermann

CEO, TSG AG

Helmuth Zimmermann is the Founder and CEO of TSG the sourcing group. The company, founded in 1998, is known throughout Europe for its pioneering design of the most comprehensive Service & Sourcing Lifecycle Management Platform. In order to ease the pain of a client’s cloud transformation process, the platform enables transparency and reduces complexity while reducing cost. With the Configuration Tool, clients can configure even highly complex services and the unique Service Catalog, with over 10’000 predefined items, enables benchmarking of individually selected services. The Monitoring Tool allows for comprehensive analytics and management reporting. Also, automatically generating and forwarding SLA’s to potential service providers has finally become reality. Implementation of the platform started in 2009 with several global fortune 500 companies, such as Credit Suisse, BCX, Volkswagen and UBS. Besides offices in Europe, South Africa and Asia, TSG opened its first USA office in Palo Alto, CA in 2012. Thanks to decades of IT Service experience and a unique technology and design approach, the company was able to generate more than $2.2B in service contracts in only 36 months. Before founding TSG the sourcing group, Helmuth was the Strategic Sourcing Executive of EDS Switzerland where he was awarded five times for inner circle outstanding sales performance/strategic ICT Outsourcing Contracts (pinnacle and gold). He also has a proven record in implementing successful go-to-market models for companies such as EDS Switzerland, Siemens, Swisscom IT Services and many more. He initially started his career with Siemens in Sales and Systems Engineering. Helmuth earned his post graduate MBA from the prestigious Swiss Univesity ETH/Zurich and his Mechanical Engineering Degree from the University of Applied Sciences, Zurich.

Jim McDonnell

President, Americas & Chief Product Officer, SolveDirect

In his roles as entrepreneur and technology executive, Jim McDonnell is a recognized industry leader in software for services management, big data analytics, and CRM. He launched his career with four successful start-ups, and went on to lead the creation of new Cloud business units at Cisco and Avaya. Today, Jim serves as President of the Americas and Chief Product Officer for SolveDirect. SolveDirect is a 2012 Gartner Cloud Services Brokerage "Cool Vendor" and the leading cloud-based business process network for multi-sourced IT Services. Jim is responsible for expanding the Americas market through key account aquisition and developing strategic partnerships. He leads development of the product strategy and roadmap, and engagements with industry analysts and press. While at Cisco, Jim consolidated all software teams within the $10B Cisco Services function to form the new Smart Services Technology Group, growing the business to $500M over three years and forming an architecturally unified portfolio of Cloud products. He grew the team from 30 into a globally distributed team of 1,000, and scaled the architecture to support 1M daily transactions. In addition, he led the formation of the services software patent portfolio, and the acquisition of Pari Networks. Before joining Cisco, Jim held senior IT positions at Avaya and Openwave. As Avaya’s first CIO for eBusiness, he drove the eBusiness strategy, business planning, and services portfolio implementation. He created the eBusiness organization and implemented an end-to-end solution encompassing commerce, services, and content for customers, partners and employees – positioning the company as a competitive leader in online business, and scaling the architecture to support 5M hits a month. Jim's early start-ups in systems integration, media distribution, and technology consulting services provided a strong foundation for driving viable market-ready businesses.

Arshad Noor

CTO, StrongAuth, Inc.

Arshad is the CTO of StrongAuth, Inc. a Silicon Valley company focusing on encryption and key-management. He is the architect and lead-developer of StrongKey, the industry's first open-source symmetric key-management system, of the CryptoEngine - an open-source library to encrypt files for public/private clouds and other FOSS tools. He has spoken at many conferences around the world on the subject of enterprise key-management.

Glenn Donovan

Regional Director, Cordys

20+ years experience in sales, marketing and management in the software industry. Glenn's focus has been working with emerging and start-up companies, helping them penetrate new markets. He has a background in CRM, Customer Experience Management (am a certified Net Promoter Consultant), advanced analytics such as Monte Carlo Simulation, Agent Based Modeling and Predictive Models. Glenn also has experience working with technologies such as BPMS, Middleware, Systems Integration and Real Time Data. He has worked with clients in financial services, hi-tec, cloud service companies and media.

Margaret Dawson

VP of Product Management, Symform

Margaret Dawson is Vice President of Product Management. She brings to this role more than 20 years of experience in global marketing leadership for both startups and Fortune 500 companies, including Microsoft and Amazon.com. Prior to joining Symform, she ran product management and marketing for Hubspan, a leading B2B cloud integration provider. Margaret has worked and traveled extensively in Asia, Europe, and North America, including 10 years in the Greater China region, consulting with many of Taiwan’s leading IT companies and governmental agencies and serving as a foreign correspondent for BusinessWeek magazine. An avid speaker and technologist, Margaret is a frequent author and presenter on cloud computing, network security, integration, and other business and technology issues. Margaret holds a B.A. in Communication from the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington.

Eshwar Belani

VP of Products & Biz Dev, Rocket Fuel

Eshwar Belani is VP of products and business development at Rocket Fuel. He defines the vision and leads the development of Rocket Fuel’s novel direct response, brand, social, and vertical product families. Prior to Rocket Fuel, Eshwar was the founder and CEO of Sensact Applications. Previously, he was part of Epiphany’s product management team and worked on product strategy for Epiphany’s marketing and analytics products. Eshwar was also co-founder and CTO of iLeverage, a company that built advertising and collaborative selling solutions for online retailers. Eshwar also worked as a software development engineer in the Application Server Group at Oracle. Eshwar holds a MS in Computer Science and a degree is Management of Technology from UC Berkeley, and a B.Tech in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras. He has spoken at SMX West, SMX East, SES, Ad:tech, Digiday Target, Digital Publishing and Advertising Conference, Online Marketing Summit, MarketingProfs, Interactive Insights Summit, Digital World Expo, and many other conferences.

Renat Khasanshyn

CEO, Altoros

Renat Khasanshyn is CEO of Altoros Systems and Venture Partner at Runa Capital. Renat is a subject matter expert on open source database infrastructure software. Most recently Renat scaled an idea called "Altoros" into a global software services organization with 200+ engineers in Belarus, US, UK, Denmark, and Norway. In the past, Mr. Khasanshyn was selected as a finalist for the 2007 Emerging Executive of the Year award by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council. In 2006, Mr. Khasanshyn founded Apatar, the world's first on-demand, open source data mashup software project and won the 2007 IBM Business Mashup Challenge. Prior to founding Altoros in 2001, Renat was VP of Engineering for Tampa-based insurance company PriMed, Inc. Mr. Khasanshyn is a founder of Silicon Valley NewSQL User Group, and co-founder of Belarusian Java User Group. Renat studied Engineering at the Belarusian National Technical University.

Joshua McKenty

CEO, Piston Cloud Computing

Prior to co-founding Piston Cloud Computing, Joshua McKenty was the Technical Architect of NASA's Nebula Cloud Computing Platform and the OpenStack compute components. As a member of OpenStack's Project Policy Board, Joshua plays an instrumental role in the OpenStack community. Joshua has over two decades of experience in entrepreneurship, management and software engineering and architecture. He was the team lead for the development of the Netscape Browser (vs. 8) as well as AOL's IE AIM toolbar, and a senior engineer at Flock.com. He also led the successful first release of OpenQuake, an open source software application allowing users to compute seismic hazard, seismic risk and the socio-economic impact of earthquakes.