James Staten
Vice President, Principal Analyst Serving Infrastructure & Operations Professionals, Forrester
James serves Infrastructure & Operations and CIO Professionals, providing insights and best-practice use of cloud computing (IaaS, public and private clouds, cloud storage services and related cloud technologies and services). As the content lead for Forrester's Cloud Computing Playbook, he further advises IT leadership on cloud economics, cloud outsourcing (strategic rightsourcing), IT cloud readiness and business and developer engagement on cloud.
James is the author of best-practice analysis on maturing your virtualization and cloud practices, building a cloud computing consumption strategy, and optimizing web infrastructures for blazing-fast performance.
Previous Work Experience
James has more than 25 years' experience in the industry, having served as a reseller, vendor strategist, chief marketing officer, journalist, and analyst for companies including Autodesk, Azul Systems, Gartner, Rockwell International, and Sun Microsystems.
He is a frequent speaker at industry, corporate, educational, and Wall Street events and has guest lectured at leading business schools. James has been named a top cloud computing analyst each of the last four years by leading industry associations including Web Hosting Industry Review (2009) Apollo Research (2010-11) and fWired (2012). He is also the 2011 recipient of the Forrester Bill Bluestein Award, given to the analyst whose body of work continually inspires our clients and guides their decisions to be great.
Education
Working out of Silicon Valley, James holds a master's degree from the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California and a bachelor's degree from the University of North Texas.
Michael Crandell
CEO, 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. Prior to RightScale, he served as CEO at several Internet software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies and as executive vice president at eFax.com.
Thorsten von Eicken
CTO, RightScale
Thorsten von Eicken is the CTO and a founder of RightScale and is responsible for the overall technology direction of the RightScale cloud management solution. Previously, von Eicken was chief architect at Expertcity (acquired by Citrix Online), where he directed the architecture of the company's online services, including the popular GoToMeeting service.
Joe Emison
CTO, BuildFax
Joe Emison is chief technology officer at BuildFax, a data provider serving the insurance and lending industries, which he co-founded in 2008. Today, Joe oversees BuildFax's software engineering and hybrid cloud infrastructure teams.
Sanket Naik
VP, Cloud Operations, Coupa
Sanket is driven to deliver fast, reliable and secure applications. At Coupa Software, he leads the operations team for Coupa's cloud spend management solution used by hundreds of companies ranging from small businesses to enterprises like Subway, Rent-a-Center, Salesforce.com, and Pandora to spend smarter and save money. Prior to Coupa, he has architected massive scale web operations at HP.com and done security research at Qualys. Sanket holds a Masters degree in Computer Science with an emphasis on Information Security from Purdue University. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP).
Josh Fraser
SVP Sales and Business Development, RightScale
Josh Fraser is the senior vice president of Sales and Business Development at RightScale, where he is responsible for all sales and business development initiatives. Prior to RightScale, he held executive management positions at public and private companies, including vice president of Business Development at CallWave, a publicly traded provider of SaaS-based unified communications solutions, and general manager at Student Advantage, a leading marketing and transaction services provider to higher education. He also held business development and analyst roles at Starwave/ESPN.com. Fraser holds a bachelor's degree in finance from Villanova University.
Bailey Caldwell
VP, Business Development, RightScale
Bailey Caldwell is the vice president of Business Development at RightScale, where he is responsible for RightScale's partnerships across ISVs, Channels and Clouds. Prior to RightScale, he held executive management positions at public and private companies, including vice president of Operations and Business Development at Persistent Systems, Inc.; vice president of Product, Technology and Services at Paxonix, a SaaS business in the New Ventures Division of Meadwestvaco; Director of Web Operations at Move.com, operator of the world's most popular real-estate related web properties including realtor.com; and Director of Global IT at QAD, Inc. a global provider of ERP software solutions. Caldwell received a B.A. from Boston University.
Phil Cox
Director of Security and Compliance, RightScale
Philip Cox is Director of Security and Compliance for RightScale where he focuses on security as both a consumer of a variety of cloud services as well as a provider of a cloud management solution. Prior to that he was a director at SystemExperts, a security and compliance consulting firm. He is a well-known authority in the areas of systems integration and security, and is an active contributor to multiple Cloud Security Alliance initiatives, as well as to Payment Card Industry (PCI) cloud and risk groups. He frequently writes and lectures on information security and compliance issues faced by organizations. He has written several books in the area of Windows and network security, and was technical editor of two "Hacking Exposed" editions and "Building Internet Firewalls."
Ephraim Baron
Subject Matter Expert of Global Cloud & IT Services Segment, Equinix
Ephraim Baron is a technical and marketing expert focused on IT operations, virtualization, and cloud computing. His past experience spans technical sales & marketing, IT infrastructure management and product engineering at companies such as HP, Microsoft, Barclays Global Investors, and EMC. Ephraim has also assisted multiple startups to grow and mature their IT environments.
With his strong ITIL background, Ephraim brings a process-oriented approach to management of global, mission-critical computing. For the past several years he’s been actively involved in server and desktop virtualization, both as practitioner and evangelist. He also presents at industry conferences and writes numerous whitepapers and technology articles.
Ephraim holds several technical and professional certifications in addition to a BS in Mechanical Engineering from UMass Amherst, an MS in Aerospace Engineering from Stanford, and an MS in Systems Engineering and MBA in Technology Management from San Jose State.
Peder Ulander
Vice President of Product Marketing, Citrix
Peder Ulander is vice president of Product Marketing for Cloud Platforms at Citrix. He is passionate about new, disruptive technologies and has a strong track record of bringing new, market defining open source products to market. Prior to its acquisition by Citrix, Ulander was CMO at Cloud.com, and has more than fifteen years of marketing and sales strategy experience.
Throughout his career, Ulander has held a number of senior management positions at leading technology companies including Sun Microsystems where he was senior vice president of marketing responsible for open-sourcing the Java platform, building a growth business with OpenSolaris and establishing Sun as a leader in the open source enterprise software market.
Miles Ward
Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services
Miles Ward is a three-time technology startup entrepreneur with a decade of experience building web-scale infrastructures. Miles dives deep on big data and social analytics, advanced storage, live video streaming, and HA and DR approaches for RDBMS and NoSQL systems. Miles supports emerging partners in our growing ISV and SI ecosystem, has developed several patent-pending innovations at AWS, and published the SQL Server on EC2 and MongoDB on EC2 white papers.
Mike Metral
Solution Architect, Rackspace
Mike Metral is a Solution Architect at Rackspace. Currently, he is the technical lead for the OpenStack partner program within the Rackspace Private Cloud division, aiding partners with all things cloud including architecting, engineering and adopting the proper knowledge and infrastructure for OpenStack. Before joining Rackspace, Mike worked as a Software Researcher and Developer at Sandia National Laboratories engineering, developing and evaluating software solutions in the interest of national cyber security. While at Sandia, he instilled the adoption of OpenStack within the lab as well as began a forked solution of OpenStack for high-volume instantiation of VM's in Nova-Compute and Nova-Network. Mike holds a Masters of Engineering in Computer Science from Cornell University and a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science from The University of Miami (FL).
Steven Martin
General Manager, Windows Azure Business & Operations, Microsoft Corp.
Steven Martin is a General Manager in the Server & Tools Business at Microsoft Corp where he manages the Windows Azure Business & Operations organization. This role focuses on long-term business strategy, direct sales, capacity planning, operations, and pricing for all Windows Azure services.
Previously, Martin was General Manager of Business Planning which spanned both premises and cloud technologies within the Server and Tools business at Microsoft. Prior to that, he was Senior Director of Business Services Division, where he managed operations, pricing, licensing, distribution and sales across the Server & Tools Business. In his current and previous roles, Martin spends time with partners, customers, and the Microsoft field to optimize technology and pricing to best meet market needs. Prior to that, he held a number of leadership roles in product management for the server platform technologies, including .NET, App Server, Middleware and Web.
Before joining Microsoft, Martin served as director at Netscape Communications Corp. Prior to Netscape, Martin founded Stonehenge Group Inc., a company specializing in technology consulting and software resale.
Martin is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where he completed a bachelor of science in Psychology.
Jeff Dickey
Chief Cloud Architect, Redapt
Jeff is a tech visionary with a history of helping companies save money by peering five to ten years into future technologies. He brings a depth and breadth of knowledge in the world of cloud infrastructure and IAAS. He has expertise working with top providers of strategies and solutions, Jeff is currently working on one of the largest hybrid cloud in the world. He is experienced in every silo of the IT world and has built a reputation as 'the guy who forces examination of angles no one else notices.' His on-going work with IT executives at top companies around the world gives him a rare insight to what's working, what's not, and what's on the horizon.
Jeff collaborates with companies across the country to solve current and future business problems with solutions that will stand the test of time. With more than 15 years experience in IT management consulting, Jeff has helped companies across all verticals save millions by investing in technology and IT practices that meet the needs of both short and long-term business goals.
Starting his career in IT management at Countrywide, Jeff managed a 35 person team. In 2000, he created a $10M consulting division at Avante Global. He began his own hypervisior consulting practice in 2004, which was acquired by Redapt in 2009. Always entrepreneurial in spirit, Jeff enjoys being a part of the Seattle start up scene and can often be seen at Hops & Chops or a TechStars event.
When not working, Jeff loves spending time with his family, including his son, and his dogs. He and his son enjoy exploring the latest apps on his iPad and MacBook Air, and his two dogs enjoy napping in his office while he catches up on tech blogs.
Hassan Khajeh-Hosseini
PlanForCloud Product Lead, RightScale
Hassan is a founder and the product manager at PlanForCloud where he is responsible for the overall product direction. Before co-founding PlanForCloud, Hassan was a top IT consultant at Accenture in London. He is currently based in the RightScale Edinburgh office in Scotland.
Brian Adler
Sr. Services Architect, RightScale
Brian Adler is a Senior Services Architect at RightScale, bringing years of experience working with multi-cloud environments. Brian advises on complex application architectures with customers and their cloud implementations, working directly with customers to dynamically configure cloud resources across multiple cloud infrastructures. He works with enterprise companies to facilitate their high availability configurations and disaster recovery efforts across cloud-agnostic and cross-cloud architectures, guiding them through cloud mapping and available tools. Prior to RightScale, Brian has held positions in systems engineering, architecting, hardware and software in defense industry applications, and as a software architect for Openwave, a highly-scalable enterprise-grade email messaging platform.
Shivan Bindal
Sr. Product Manager, RightScale
Shivan manages RightScale's product direction for cloud and service enablement. Before RightScale, Shivan was a senior consultant at CoreObjects (now Symphony Teleca) and was an engineering manager at OnDemandIQ (acquired by LogiXML).
Jarrett Appleby
Chief Operating Officer, CoreSite
Jarrett Appleby is CoreSite's Chief Operating Officer. Mr. Appleby brings over 25 years of telecommunications industry experience to CoreSite and is responsible for the company's "go-to-market" activities including sales, marketing, operations, engineering, and facilities.
Prior to joining CoreSite, Mr. Appleby spent three years at Equinix as Chief Marketing Officer where he led the launch of a vertical market approach that produced significant revenue growth for the company. Prior to Equinix, Mr. Appleby was with Reliance Globalcom LTD as Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer where he led re-branding initiatives as well as the acquisition and integration of Vanco Group LTD and Yipes, which expanded Globalcom's capabilities in more than 230 countries. Additionally Mr. Appleby founded and served as CEO of ILV Group, a boutique consultancy for companies seeking to accelerate growth with partnerships in hosting services, storage, managed services, and application and content delivery services. He has also held senior positions at MCI (now Verizon Business), AT&T, Qwest Solutions (now CenturyLink) and @Link Networks.
Mr. Appleby received both his B.A. in Mathematics and Economics and his M.B.A from Lehigh University.
Roy Ellis
Principle QA Engineer, Progress Software
Roy Ellis has been with Progress for over 17 years, participating in many new products and feature releases. For over 2 years now he has been the Technical Lead and Evangelist for Arcade, a “Get your Application to the Cloud” website, based on RightScale.
Arindam Mukherjee
Sr. Manager, Cloud Operations, Blackhawk Network
Arindam Mukherjee is responsible for all cloud initiatives at Blackhawk Network. His current focus is to enable cloud deployments to support Blackhawk’s multi-platform development and testing requirements. Arindam’s team is utilizing RightScale to instrument on-demand DevQA environments that support both legacy and new product initiatives and provide a streamlined process for production rollout.
Arindam has over 20 years of enterprise IT architecture and management experience and is passionate about transforming IT services to become more flexible, nimble and cost-managed to align better with business demand and priorities.
Brian Goldfarb
Head of Cloud Platform Marketing, Google Cloud Platform
Brian Goldfarb is the Head of Cloud Platform Marketing at Google. Brian and his team are responsible for global marketing and business strategy for the Google Cloud Platform including Google App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Big Query, Translation API, Prediction API and more. Formerly, Brian was the Director of Product Marketing for Windows Azure and the Director of Developer Platforms at Microsoft. Brian graduated with degrees in Computer Science and Economics from Duke University.
Chris Henry
Head of Technology, Behance
Chris Henry has devoted his professional life to building technology and teams that create truly useful products. Chris is Head of Technology at Behance, a company on a mission to organize and empower the creative world. Behance oversees the Behance Network (Be.net), the world’s leading online platform for creative professionals; The 99% (99u.com), Behance's think tank and annual conference devoted to execution in the creative world, and Action Method (ActionMethod.com), a popular online/mobile productivity application and line of organizational paper products. The Behance Network (be.net) is the world’s leading online platform for creative professionals, and serves as the backbone for AdWeek, LinkedIn, and thousands of other portfolio sites and online galleries of creative talent. Millions of people use Behance to display and find talent every month.
As Head of Technology at Behance, Chris leads development of Infrastructure to support Behance's platforms. He believes that leveraging the right web and mobile technologies is one of the keys to successfully executing great ideas. Chris has been part of many amazing projects at Behance that have taught him about what works, what fails, and why. He frequently shares these lessons at the Behance Dev Blog (http://blog.behance.net/dev) and The Technician (http://chr.ishenry.com)
Craig Irwin
VP - Channel & Alliances, Apica
Craig has worked over 15 years in the areas of web, e-commerce, cloud computing, infrastructure solutions, analytics/BI, security and business. Prior to coming on board to Apica, as the VP Channel & Alliances, he held the position of CTO at Third Wave Technology Services; leading the evolution to become one of the first technology organizations in Southern California to provide Cloud Services.
Mark Brown
Sr. Product Manager, Microsoft
Mark has been a developer since 1991 and a web developer since 1995. Mark has been with Microsoft since 2000 and has worked in a number of areas including web application security teaching developers to write more secure apps. On the Bing Maps team Mark helped developers write cool sites with maps. On Microsoft’s Web Platform team Mark helped developers write better apps on IIS and now on Windows Azure Mark is a Community Manager and helps developers build applications for the cloud.
Scott Sanchez
Director of Private Cloud Strategy, Rackspace
Scott Sanchez is Director of Strategy for Rackspace Private Cloud and a recognized name in the cloud computing space. A Racker since 2011, Scott is responsible for overall business and partner strategy for Rackspace's OpenStack-powered private cloud. Prior to joining Rackspace, Scott held leadership roles at Goldman Sachs, Unisys and has been co-founder of a number of technology startups along the way. Follow Scott on twitter at @scottsanchez.
Gordon Bailey
Lead Infrastructure Engineer, Koupon Media
Gordon Bailey is the Lead Infrastructure Engineer at Koupon Media, where he is responsible for system architecture, operations, and capacity planning.
Kent Mitchell
Sr. Director of Product Management, Zend
Kent Mitchell has an extensive background in the software industry ranging from his early days as a programmer writing embedded systems to his current position as Director of Product Management for Zend. Kent has over 30 years of experience working with companies like Rational Software, Symantec and Zend to help define Developer tools and Server infrastructure. Mitchell is a frequent industry speaker at conferences including ZendCon, the annual Zend PHP Conference; RightScale User Conferences and other events.
Duke Skarda
CTO, SoftLayer
Duke Skarda joined SoftLayer in November 2010. As the CTO, he holds responsibilities for implementing, designing and enhancing the proprietary SoftLayer Infrastructure Management System (IMS). Prior to joining SoftLayer, Mr. Skarda served as the Vice President of Information Technology and Software Development at The Planet. He served in this role from June 2009 to October 2010. Previously, Mr. Skarda spent 10 years with Level 3 Communications in a series of increasingly responsible positions. As Senior Vice President for its Content Markets Group, he led Engineering and IT development for its Content Distribution Network platform and IT support systems. As Senior Vice President for IT Architecture and Application Development, he led a broad range of programs, including business process management, order-entry and service assurance development. Mr. Skarda also served as Vice President of IT Architecture, where he led the development of a long-range systems roadmaps, systems merger and acquisition planning, and the development of the company's Enterprise Architecture team. Additionally, he has four years of experience with Sprint. Mr. Skarda earned a B.S. in Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at El Paso.
Patrick Moore
Operations Engineer, Koupon Media
Patrick Moore is the Operations Engineer at Koupon Media, where he is responsible for vendor management, building out system components, and managing the software development lifecycle process.
Patrick also likes long walks through the Colorado mountain valleys.
Dan Baigent
Sr. Director, HP Cloud Services
Dan Baigent is the Sr. Director of Business Development for HP Cloud Services responsible for HP Cloud Services solution partners, strategic partners and business strategies. Dan has over 20 years of experience in Business Development, Strategic Alliances, Software Development, Technical Sales and Corporate Development. Prior to HP, Dan worked for Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) where he directed Sun’s Strategic Partnerships with IBM, HP, Dell and Oracle, managed Sun’s Desktop Software organization, created a portfolio of start-up investments for Sun’s Corporate Development team and was the Western Regional Systems Engineering manager for JavaSoft. Dan has a degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing and a minor in Cybernetic Systems and is co-inventor on several 3-D desktop patents.
Richard Kaufmann
VP, Samsung SDS America
Richard Kaufmann is the VP of Samsung SDS America, a subsidiary of Samsung providing ICT service, systems integration solutions and consultation, and ICT infrastructure for Samsung Group in North and South America. Prior to Samsung, Richard was Chief Technologist at HP with roles in HP Cloud Services and the High Performance Computing division.
Roger Levy
Vice President & General Manager, HP Cloud Services, Hewlett-Packard Company
Roger Levy is acting general manager for HP Cloud Services, which offers leading-edge public cloud infrastructure, platform services and cloud solutions for developers, ISVs, partners, service providers and enterprises. In this role, Levy is responsible for driving HP's public cloud business, including product development, R&D, sales, business development and marketing. HP's public cloud offering is a key element in the company's converged cloud strategy to provide customers an integrated set of enterprise-grade public, private and/or managed cloud services.
Before joining HPCS, Levy was senior vice president for products at Engine Yard, where he was responsible for the company's innovative platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings; in this role he had oversight for product management, product marketing, engineering and support and professional services.
Prior to Engine Yard, Levy was the general manager and SVP for Novell's SUSE Linux business. He began his career at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs, where he attained several leadership positions at the VP level, including leading the GSM Mobility Development Center, the Software Technology Center, and creating Lucent's first internal startup incubator.
Levy holds an MS degree in computing and information sciences from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a BS degree in physics from Lafayette College. He has also completed an advanced management program at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.