Chad Attlesey

Chief Technology Officer / Co-Founder

Hardcore Computer

As co-founder and chief technology / design officer for Hardcore Computer, Chad spearheads all technology design and development for the company and has filed for patents in the areas of computer hardware architecture and cooling systems. A self-proclaimed technophile, Chad has nearly two decades in technology creation, management and development, with extensive knowledge in the fields of electro-mechanical design, computer hardware architecture / design, interface design, human factors, graphic design, website design and numerous computer-aided design and multimedia applications. Prior to Hardcore Computer, Chad owned i, Incorporated, an engineering and design consulting service, where he produced designs and managed development to production ramping of high-tech deliverables including rugged, wearable and hand-held computers for military applications. Chad also co-founded and served as president and chief technology officer for MindSet, Incorporated, where he invented head-worn display technology, developed night-vision devices, created a variety of body-worn technologies and delivered prototypes to the U.S. military. Prior to his work with MindSet, Chad worked for and with Pemstar, a leading provider of engineering automation and test equipment services.

Steven Carlini

Sr. Director, Data Center Global Solutions

APC by Schneider Electric

Steven is responsible developing and messaging the value proposition for Schneider Electric's data center solutions and services. A frequent speaker at industry conferences and forums, Steven presents on the foundation layer of data centers which include Power, Cooling, Power Distribution, Racks, and Management solutions that improve availability and maximize efficiency. Prior to joining APC, Steven previously ran the UPS Division for Toshiba International Corporation. Involved with the critical power and cooling industry since 1989, Steven has been responsible for guiding the direction of many industry changing products and solutions that solve real customer problems or give businesses competitive advantages.Steven holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Oklahoma, and an MBA in International Business from the CT Bauer School at the University of Houston.

George Chernenko

Vice President, Data Centers

Nomura Securities International

George has been in IT management for the past 30 years. The last 18 years have been devoted predominantly to Data Center infrastructure, design, and support. He is currently managing two data centers for Nomura Securities International in the NY metropolitan area. At present, he is overseeing a multimillion dollar data center expansion project. George has been applying his expertise towards the challenging tasks of ensuring that financial data is always available and the systems meet the stringent resiliency and redundancy demands that the financial industry expects. Prior to joining Nomura, George was a director at Toys R Us managing the IT requirements at the corporate, regional, and store level for over 20 years. George is currently completing his MBA on line, which will be finished this fall.

Jonathan Eunice

Founder and Principal IT Advisor

Illuminata

A recognized authority on networked information technologies and their application, including system architectures, operating environments, infrastructure software, development tools, and management strategies. Mr. Eunice has closely followed the last decade's rise in consolidated datacenters, modular systems, and virtualization. He advises developers on what to build next, and users on how to best deploy the latest IT innovations and approaches.

Jim Hall

President

Blade Systems Alliance

Jim Hall is currently President of Blade Systems Alliance, an industry association focused on accelerating development and adoption of blade server technologies; and serves as Summit Chairman, BladeSystems Insight 2010.

Jim has over two decades of leadership experience in business development, marketing, engineering, and operations management in the power industry and has held marketing, business development, and product management positions with Emerson Network Power (Liebert), Marconi (formally RELTEC), American Power Conversion, and Antec. He is a graduate of General Electric's Manufacturing and Raytheon's Advanced Management Programs and holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Bowling Green State University and an MBA from the University of Illinois, Champaign.

Mitchell Kemp

VP Application Modernization and Security

Unisys

Mr. Kemp leads Unisys's application modernization and security initiatives in North America. He works with the world's leading companies to drive value out of their existing applications and improve the security of their systems while reducing operating costs. Previously he worked as a Group Vice President, at Oracle Consulting leading the strategic accounts, and also as a Director with Price Waterhouse.

Botond Kiss

Worldwide Business Line Manager

IBM BladeCenter

Botond Kiss is currently the Business Line Manager in the Systems & Technology Group at IBM where he manages the team responsible for IBM BladeCenter's global product portfolio, marketing, and sales enablement activities. Before joining the Systems & Technology group, Botond worked in IBM Corporate Market Intelligence as an analyst providing headlights for IBM in key growth industries. Prior to his career with IBM, Botond also worked for Sapient Corporation as a senior IT consultant. Botond earned his MBA from Duke University and holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Columbia University.

Dan Kusnetzky

Vice President of Research Operations

451 Group

Dan Kusnetzky has joined The 451 Group as vice president of research operations. In addition to heading up research operations, he will ramp up The 451 Group's market research and analysis on cloud computing and virtualization. He is a well-established analyst and blogger with a reputation spanning his own analyst practice as Kusnetzky Group, his ZDNet blog and more than a decade with IDC."Our clients rely on us to provide straight talk about who wins and who loses as a result of disruptive changes in IT," said Martin V.McCarthy, Chief Executive Officer of The 451 Group. "And cloud computing is one of the most profound changes we have seen in two decades. Dan's addition will be key to helping us assess the viability of these and other emerging segments for vendors, investors, bankers and technology end users."Dan Kusnetzky brings The 451 Group more than three decades of industry experience. Before joining the senior team of The 451 Group, Kusnetzky was Principal Analyst at KG LLC. Prior to that, he was Executive Vice President of Corporate and Marketing Strategy for Open-Xchange, a software company that provides open-source collaborative solutions.Kusnetzky also spent 12 years at International Data Corporation (IDC), four of them as Vice President of System Software Research. During this time, he led an extended team of 16 analysts and created an industry-leading research practice based on both quantitative and qualitative analysis.Prior to that, Kusnetzky spent 16 years with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), where he was responsible for program and product management and marketing in the areas of client software, server software, and clustered and networked systems, and he had the responsibility of being the Intel/UNIX Business Manager.

Mike Lance

Vice President of Product Marketing

NextIO

Mike Lance is responsible for defining and delivering I/O virtualization solutions for NextIO, Inc. His activities at NextIO have focused on product and technology roadmaps, industry partnerships with leading OEM's, outbound marketing and product line development. Prior to NextIO he spent 14 years at HP in various Systems Engineering, Product Management and Marketing roles including 5 years managing the HP BladeSystem I/O products portfolio including HP's virtualization products. He has over 20 years experience in networking and I/O technologies and has written numerous white papers and articles on network design and applications. Mike earned his B.S. in Organizational Leadership from Biola Univeristy.

Chris Loeffler

Program Manager, Distributed Power Solutions

Eaton Corporation

Mr. Loeffler is a program manager for Eaton Corporation, specializing in power system designs for commercial, industrial, medical and military applications. With more than 19 years of experience in the UPS industry, he has overseen product management of more than 20 UPS products for data centers, medical imaging, military and industrial applications. These UPSs include the Best Power Unity/I, IPM BPIII, Powerware® 9330, Eaton® 9390 and, most recently, Eaton's scalable building block UPS, the Eaton BladeUPS®. Mr. Loeffler has held a variety of positions within Eaton, roles including service engineering, application engineering and more than 10 years of product management. He has written a number of articles for trade publications and several white papers concerning energy efficiency, UPS design technology, virtualization and power distribution for applications from the factory floor to the data center. Mr. Loeffler attained his electronics engineering degree from Education Dynamics Institute, is currently a board member on the Blade System Alliance and is a member of The Green Grid.

Chris Lofton

Head of Technology Planning

SITA

Chris Lofton has over 20 years of experience in IT Infrastructure,architecture designs and IT operations across Air Transport, Finance,Government and Retail sectors. He is currently the Head of TechnologyPlanning at SITA and has led enterprise change programs as well as nextgeneration infrastructure designs and reference architecture solutions.Prior to SITA, Chris was responsible for the company's technicalinvolvement in a 4-state Department of Defense Program that introduced newtechnologies into State and Local Law Enforcement that included an Intranetbased gang tracking system. At Brokat, Chris introduced the company's firstretail web banking solution while responsible for the open systems andnetwork environments in an ASP model. In his current position, Chris isresponsible for strategic technology planning and designs, project basedarchitecture and consulting for both internal and external facing customerengagements on a global basis.

Jerry Lotto

Director of HPTC

Harvard University

Jerry earned his Ph.D. (Chemistry) in 1993 from Harvard University working on the LHASA project, a knowledge-based expert system for chemical synthesis design in the laboratory of Prof. E.J. Corey. He remained in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology after graduation, developing information technology systems for the department and working collaboratively with students and faculty integrating computation with teaching and research in the chemical sciences. Since 2007, Jerry has worked with Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, most recently in the Division of Science as Director of High Performance Computing, where he leads a team of systems administrators, analysts, and developers focused on establishing and maintaining world-class computing resources (http://rc.fas.harvard.edu) for researchers throughout the sciences and humanities

Deborah Lovell

Founder/CEO

Marketing Resource Group

Ms. Lovell has over 25 years of experience in business relationship management, marketing and sales. She currently consults with IT senior-level executives on how to strategically plan, brand and deliver software solutions and IT services to enterprise businesses. She is the Immediate Past President of The Association of Information Technology Professionals, a membership organization of over 6,000 IT professionals and students and a frequent speaker at professional associations, non-profit organizations and industry conferences on leadership, teamwork and effective communications. As a mentor to students majoring in information technology and computer science, she has been a guest speaker at several universities and student-centric conferences where she delivers "From Campus to Real World", a powerful message that encourages our next generation to develop leadership and business skills in addition to their IT-centric talent.

Jeff Main

Managing Director, Information Technology

Air Wisconsin Airlines Corporation

Mr. Main is the Managing Director of Information Technology for Air Wisconsin Airlines Corporation (AWAC) with its headquarters in Appleton, WI. AWAC, the largest privately held airline in the USA, has over 3,000 employees and revenues over $500 million per year. Mr. Main leads an IT department of 25 IT professionals in Appleton.Mr. Main has 25 years of experience in the IT field and has held IT management positions in infrastructure and application development for Fortune 1000 companies. He joined AWAC in 2004. Prior to joining AWAC, Mr. Main was the Vice President of Applications Development of USF Corporation in Chicago, a leading, national trucking and logistics services company with revenues of $2.5B and over 20,000 employees. There he was responsible for the application development of solutions including freight operations, financial systems, ecommerce, EDI, data warehouse and CRM. Prior to heading the applications group at USF, Mr. Main was the Director of IT for a USF Corporation subsidiary, USF Dugan in Wichita, KS for five years. Prior to USF Dugan, he was employed at Rent-A-Center of Wichita, KS for 10 years leaving there as the Director of Technical Services. While at Rent-A-Center, the company grew from 200 stores to over 1,200. Mr. Main started his career as a programmer while attending Wichita State University in Wichita, KS.

Jim O'Connor

Chief Engineer Advanced Systems RAS & Quality

IBM

Jim is an IBM Distinguished Engineer responsible for STG Advanced System Level RAS and Quality. He is a recognized expert in cross brand common hardware design, cross brand system quality, cross brand system RAS design and architecture and in the analysis and architecture of open and virtualized clusters systems including Power Systems and BladeCenter. Jim has hardware, firmware, and software development and test experience. Jim is frequently asked to solve complex crossbrand system problems and customer issues. Jim continues to work closely with the technical team at Los Alamos on System reliability and availability analysis of Road Runner and future system designs. Jim earned an Engineer's Degree in Computer Engineering, a Phd for Working Professionals, from Syracuse University in 1999. He has a MS in Computer Engineer Syracuse University earned in 1983 and a BS Electrical Engineer Rutgers University he earned in 1980.

John Parkinson

CTO

TransUnion LLC

John Parkinson is the former CTO at TransUnion LLC, an advisor to the TransUnion executive leadership team and the Chairman of ParkWood Advisors LLC. He has served as the US CTO for Capgemini and as a Partner at Ernst & Young. A published author, he writes the "Strong Signals" column for CIO Insight. In 2003, John was named as one of the world's 25 most influential consultants and in January 2005 as one of the Computerworld 100 Leaders in IT.

Rob Peglar

Vice President, Technology

Xiotech

Rob Peglar is Xiotech's Vice President, Technology. A 32-year industry veteran and published author, he has global responsibility for the shaping of Xiotech's strategic vision and emerging technologies, defining future offering portfolios, including business and technology requirements, marketing direction, planning, execution, technology futures, and serving as industry/customer liaison. Rob was recently re-elected as Treasurer of SNIA, and also has served as the co-Chair of the SNIA Tutorials, the co-author of the SNIA Virtualization Tutorial and co-Chair of the DMF LTACS Initiative. He has extensive experience in information risk management; the architecture, design, implementation and operation of large heterogeneous SANs; archiving strategy; disaster avoidance and compliance; and distributed, clustered virtual storage architectures. He also is a sought-after speaker and panelist at leading storage and networking-related seminars and conferences worldwide.Prior to joining Xiotech in August 2000, Mr. Peglar held key technology specialist and engineering management positions over a nine-year period at StorageTek and at their networking subsidiary, Network Systems Corporation. Prior to StorageTek, he held engineering and product management positions at Control Data Corporation and its supercomputer division, ETA Systems. Rob holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, and performed graduate work at Washington University's Sever Institute of Engineering. His research background includes I/O performance analysis, queuing theory, parallel systems architecture and OS design, storage networking protocols, clustering algorithms, and virtual systems optimization.

Beth Pirrie

Association President

Association of Information Technology Professionals

2010 Association President,2009 EVP / President Elect,2008 Secretary-Treasurer,2003-2007 Association Board of Directors,2000-2002 Region 2 President,Past President, Region President's Council,2x Puget Sound Chapter President,2004 Lifetime IPA,AITP (DPMA) member since 1970

Tom Pisello

CEO

Alinean

Tom Pisello has built his 20-year career with a single-minded vision: helping companies prove and improve the business value from IT investments. Tom's latest endeavor, Alinean, was founded in 2001 to develop software, methodologies and tools for accurately evaluating, presenting and measuring the value of IT investments using benchmarking and ROI analysis; particularly helping vendors use business value selling to streamline the justification of new investments and assuring true value delivery. Alinean has exclusive partnership with leading IT industry analyst firm IDC, and customers including Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Intel, BellSouth and Dell, many of the worlds leading consultancies and CIOs.Tom's pioneering ROI and TCO experience began in 1993 with Interpose, a company he founded to develop the first automated ROI and TCO analysis software for CIOs and IT vendors. Interpose was acquired by Gartner in 1998 and formed the foundation for Gartner's Measurement, ROI and TCO software solutions. Tom served Gartner as managing VP and was instrumental in the software becoming the industry standard for TCO assessment.Tom is a serial entrepreneur having served as a founding member or advisor for several technology start-ups including Full Armor Corporation (acquired by NetIQ in 2003), Connotate Technologies, Digital Owl, OurBeginning.com and Spiral-Up Interactive.Tom is a regular contributor to ComputerWorld, CIO Decisions and other TechTarget online journals, CIOInsight and other leading IT publications. He holds several software patents and is a featured speaker at major IT and management conferences. He has written several key e-books on ROI and TCO analysis; including "Return on Investment For Information Technology Providers: Using ROI as a Selling and Management Tool" and "IT Value Chain Management - Maximizing the ROI from IT Investments."

Paul Prince

CTO, Enterprise Product Group

Dell Inc.

As Director and CTO for the Enterprise Product Group at Dell, Paul Prince is responsible for Dell's technology strategy and planning. Paul and his team lead technology development and integration across Dell's Enterprise solutions portfolio, including servers, storage, networking and software products. Paul has over 20 year's industry experience in the planning and development of enterprise systems architectures. By leveraging the best of ingredients from partners and from the open industry eco-system, Paul and the CTO team have been integral to Dell's continuing focus on building and delivering effective and efficient customer solutions.

Bill Sell

Vice President & General Manager

Financial Technology Insight

Bill Sell has over 33 years in events and media management. At CrossTech, Bill oversees the Forums hosted events program group and the CrossTech Media portfolio of e-newsletter publications, conferences, ITEC-TV netcasts and strategic alliances. Bill's past leadership experience includes being a Vice President and General Manager of COMDEX, CeBIT America, and the VON events with responsibilities for audience development, program creation and event sponsorships and sales. Bill also served as the Vice President of Events with Fidelity Investment's Fidelity Capital/Seaport World Trade Center Boston; and as VP of Planning and Development at IDG's World Expo, with ComNet and MacWorld Expo. A frequent industry speaker on benefits of face-to-face marketing, Bill is a founding member of the Society of Independent Show Organizers and past chair of the New England chapter of the International Association for Exhibitions and Events.

Kash Shaikh

Senior Manager, Data Center Switching

Cisco

Kash Shaikh is a Senior Manager for the Data Center solutions marketing team at Cisco Systems. Kash has been at Cisco since the beginning of 2007 and his current responsibilities focus on marketing and positioning of the Cisco data center switching business. This includes the Nexus and Catalyst Data Center Switches and Blade Switching with multi-billion dollar in annual revenues.Prior to joining Cisco, Kash spent about a decade at Nortel in various Ethernet Switching centric roles across various functions. Kash came to Nortel through Bay Networks acquisition. He was Senior Product Line Manager responsible for managing Modular Ethernet Routing Switch at Nortel prior to joining Cisco. Previous roles at Nortel included, managing projects at Nortel to an engineer implementing network systems.He has a Masters degree in Engineering with emphasis on computer networks from Wichita State University, Kansas and have completed Executive Education marketing program at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Harkereet Singh

Global Head of Energy & Sustainable Technology

Thomson Reuters

Harkeeret (Harqs) Singh is Global Head of Energy & Sustainable Technology at Thomson Reuters. He is seen as the Energy 'Czar' and one of the main enablers of a greener and more sustainable future for the company. In his role Harqs is responsible for energy efficiency and sustainability across the Markets division, including Data Centres, Servers, Storage, Network and Desktop. Harqs has been working within the industry specifically looking at data centers and IT in both Europe and the US for some time, particularly in the pursuit of advancing energy efficiency principles and working across traditional boundaries to achieve 'holistic' efficiency. Prior to joining Thomson Reuters in August 2009 he held a variety of roles at BT, including Head of Data Centre Strategy.At Thomson Reuters Harqs is responsible for industry engagement around energy optimization, liaising with The Green Grid, ASHRAE, the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres and the US EPA/DoE energy efficiency initiatives and many other forums across the industry. He is also a lead representative for Global Climate Change Policies - UK CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme, ACES (American Clean Energy & Security Act) and others across the world. Harqs holds a BSc in Computer Science and Business Management from the University of Birmingham and awards which include a Strategy Award from Accenture.

James Staten

Principal Analyst

Forrester Research

James serves Infrastructure & Operations professionals providing insights into server-centric issues including infrastructure consolidation and virtualization, data center migration and reconfiguration (including the transition to 10GbE), cloud computing (public and internal), and high performance and technical computing infrastructures. Staten is the author of best practice analysis on IT consolidation, the new IT service outsourcing (strategic right-sourcing), maturing your virtualization practice, building a cloud computing consumption strategy and optimizing web site infrastructures for blazing fast performance. He also assists clients in understanding the technical and vendor landscape of server and virtual infrastructure choices in the market including blade servers, CPU choice, virtualization platforms, and configuration optimizations.

Jon William Toigo

CEO and Managing Principal

Toigo Partners International

Jon Toigo is a consultant, author and writer with 25 years of experience in IT operations and data storage management. He is the founder of the Data Management Institute, an organization for those who create, manage and protect their organizations' most irreplaceable assets: their data. DMI has more than 7000 members, most of whom have completed DMI Certification courses in disaster recovery, data management and data security. Toigo is a prolific author has written 15 books, including 5 covering the topic of disaster recovery planning. He has also produced thousands of articles for the trade press and his blog, DrunkenData.com, is read by over 120,000 visitors each month. As part of his global consulting practice, he has developed, tested, and in some cases assisted with the implementation of, disaster recovery plans for more than 100 companies in the US, Europe, Africa, and Australia.

Raphael Wong

Director

Supermicro

Raphael is the Director of Blade Product Group at Supermicro, a leader in application-optimized and high-performance server solutions. Raphael has 3 Ivy League degrees and 20 years of management and engineering experience in computer hardware & software, storage and networking products, including stints at Intel, SGI, and National Semiconductors.