Private Clouds Conference

James Watters is currently the Sr. Manager of Cloud Solutions Development at VMware where he is responsible for developing partner run public cloud computing solutions. He is active in the SF Bay Area technology community and organizes the SF Cloud Club. Prior to VMware James held positions in sales, corporate strategy, product management and engineering at Sun Microsystems and Level 3 Communications. Over his career James has focused on strategic issues around scaled data-center infrastructure, open source and virtualization software.

Lew Tucker is the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Cloud Computing at Cisco, where he is responsible for helping to shape the future of cloud and enterprise software strategies.
Tucker has more than 20 years of experience in the high-tech industry, ranging from distributed systems and artificial intelligence to software development and systems architecture. Prior to joining Cisco, he was the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Cloud Computing at Sun Microsystems, where he led the development of its infrastructure-as-a-service offering and the development of Sun Cloud. Other accomplishments in his career include Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, the java.com developer community, and the massively parallel Connection Machine.
Tucker’s interest in distributed systems stems from his tenure at Thinking Machines, an early leader in supercomputing technology, where large-scale problems could only be addressed by using thousands of individual processors. Today, as the Internet evolves, companies are following a similar trajectory and building out large-scale cloud computing platforms. Transformation of systems into scalable platforms remains a long-term interest.
Tucker holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Cornell University, a master’s degree in computer science with a specialization in artificial intelligence from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, and a doctorate in computer science from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

Christopher Brown joins Opscode from Microsoft, where he was a Director of Engineering for the Edge Computing Network within Global Foundation Services. Prior to Microsoft, Christopher was a Founding Member, Architect, and Lead Developer for Amazon.com’s Elastic Compute Cloud ("EC2"). He holds several patents in the areas of Internet routing, VM/runtime hosting, content delivery and cloud computing.

As CTO of BML, David Linthicum focuses on emerging technology spaces and the industry's move toward cloud computing. Linthicum is a widely recognized technology thought leader who has appeared in InfoWorld, Intelligent Enterprise, and eBizq.net, covering SOA and enterprise computing topics. He is a regular columnist in Government Computer News, Cloud Computing Journal, SOA Journal and Align Journal, and is the editor of Virtualization Journal. In addition to daily communications, Linthicum is the author of 13 books on computing.

John Treadway is the Global Director of Cloud Computing Solutions at Unisys. In this role, John is responsible for cloud services and solutions business lines, and leads the Unisys Cloud Strategy Council. Prior to joining Unisys in 2009, John was an entrepreneur and consultant on enterprise technology marketing and strategy. John has been both a user of cloud computing in his companies, and a consultant on cloud computing. John blogs at http://cloudbzz.com and tweets at http://twitter.com/cloudbzz.

In his role as director of IT Services for the City of Asheville, NC, Jonathan Feldman fosters innovation, including incorporating cloud services, while making sure that parachutes are ready and packed. Asheville is a rapidly growing city; it was recently named Fodor’s top travel destination and has been recognized nationally and internationally (including the receiving International Economic Development Council New Media Award) for improving services to citizens and reducing expenses through IT innovation.

Jonathan’s 20 years’ experience with government, military, law enforcement, financial services and healthcare technology informs his work with IT innovation. He’s written, taught and consulted extensively on security, human resource management and IT soft skills, notably as co-author of “Maximum Security” and author of “Teach Yourself Network Troubleshooting.” As a consultant and award-winning Network Computing and InformationWeek contributing editor, he has worked with dozens of public- and private-sector organizations, helping them calculate the real business benefits, risks and appropriate governance of new technologies and surrounding practices and policy.

Jonathan is a frequent speaker at venues including Interop and PC Expo. He has been active in the IT community with groups such as Infragard and GMIS International, and holds an MS degree from Georgia Tech.

Scott is currently a solutions architect at MassMutual Financial Group focusing primarily on infrastructure architecture, but is also involved in developing cloud computing strategy. He has 17 years of IT experience having worked in a wide variety of roles including unix, windows, and security architecture/engineering. Prior to joining MassMutual Scott spent the bulk of his career at Medtronic, the world's largest medical device manufacturer. Most of Scott's career has been spent in larger global enterprises however he has also spent time designing and managing infrastructure environments at academic institutions including Wabash College and the University of Minnesota. Scott has been a proponent of open source solutions since he first used Linux in 1994.

Francesco is an entrepreneur who brings more than 20 years of experience in e-commerce, software development and professional services. He has a proven track record of success building and launching venture-backed businesses from founding through IPO or acquisition in rapidly growing industry sectors.

Francesco has held leadership positions at WINS Global Services (a leading provider of business process outsourcing services), Cambridge Technology Partners, Scient, JPMorgan Chase, Trinity Partners, WNS Global Services and IronRidge. He received his MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, and his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Patrick McFadin is the Director of Systems and Architecture at Hobsons Inc. Hobsons delivers a powerful suite of education-oriented Software as a Service (SaaS)-based applications to K–12 schools and colleges, which include Web-based course and career planning, recruiting, enrollment, and retention tools; services supplied to education organizations around the world. Patrick’s role is to research and develop new technology for use in a highly agile environment with a particular emphasis in DevOps. He has over 20 years of experience ranging from open source development to enterprise infrastructure management.

Patrick has a BS in Computer Engineering from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and can be found at various meetups, conferences and always on Twitter @PatrickMcFadin.

Mark is the Vice President of Community at Cloud.com, makers of open source cloud computing software. He is responsible for driving all of the community efforts around the company's open source, cloud computing software and ecosystem. Before that he was the force behind the Zenoss Core open source management projects adoption and community involvement, growing community membership to over 100,000 members. He is a co-founder of both the Open Source Management Consortium and the Desktop Linux Consortium, has served as Editor-in-Chief for both LinuxWorld Magazine and Enterprise Open Source Magazine, and authored the book, "Windows to Linux Business Desktop Migration." (Thomson, 2006) Mark has also held executive positions at a number of technology start-ups, including Earthlink, (previously MindSpring)--where he was the head of the technical support organization recognized by PC Computing and PC World as the best in the industry--Win4Lin and Emu Software.

James Urquhart manages cloud computing infrastructure strategy for the Server Provider Systems Unit of Cisco Systems. Named one of the ten most influential people in cloud computing by the MIT Technology Review, and author of the popular cloud computing 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. James has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics and Mathematics from Macalester College.

Bret Piatt leads the Technical Alliances team for Rackspace Hosting. In this role he is responsible for helping cloud companies build solutions that integrate the Rackspace Cloud. He is also actively involved in the cloud computing community helping open source projects such as OpenStack gain awareness and adoption.

Panelist - Martin Buhr, Vice President, Sales and Business Development, Nimbula

Martin is an accomplished Sales and Business Development executive who brings a solid track record to Nimbula. Most recently, Martin spent four and a half years with Amazon Web Services (AWS) where he first led business development and sales for Amazon EC2, and then served as Business Director for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Before joining Amazon, Martin served business development and strategy functions in the Windows Networking and Connected Devices group at Microsoft. Prior to that, Martin was Vice President of Business Development for Neomar, a startup backed by Research in Motion and subsequently sold to Good Technologies / Motorola. Martin has also held sales and business development roles at IDT and Ericsson Wireless Systems. He holds a Masters degree in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Adrian Cockcroft is an architect at Netflix leading the Cloud Systems group. He authored Sun Performance and Tuning, Resource Management and Capacity Planning for Web Services while being a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. He was also a founding member of eBay Research Labs, where he contributed to the Skype Java API and built mobile application prototypes.

Duncan Johnston-Watt is a serial entrepreneur and industry visionary with over twenty years experience in the software industry. Immediately prior to founding Cloudsoft Duncan was CTO at Enigmatec Corporation, the enterprise data center automation company he founded in 2001.
A Computerworld Smithsonian Laureate for his pioneering work introducing Java Enterprise to financial services, Duncan holds an MSc in Computation from Oxford University and a BA in Mathematics and Philosophy from Leeds University.

Tim is responsible for Xtium's technology direction and execution. His 19+ years of hands-on expertise in architecting, engineering, securing and managing technology solutions has focused on networking, storage, virtualization and information security. Tim is one of Xtium's original founders responsible for building strong relationships with its eco-system partners VMWare, EqualLogic, Microsoft, Dell and Citrix. His practical approach to IT management is drawn from years of working with many leading companies, including GMAC Mortgage, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, the Bank of America, Fiserv, Alpo Pet Foods, Compensation Risk Managers, ECRI and the Midlands Companies. Earlier, Tim held several leadership positions with large and mid-sized companies, including AirClic, Zeneca, Bell Atlantic and CGI Systems. Tim holds extensive technical and information security certifications.

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

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