Conference: Organizational Readiness Track

A seasoned technology executive with broad vertical experience earned through consulting, integration, and the real world application of Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Management. Classical training in architecture frameworks (TOGAF) and systems integration, with experience in leading technology trends, including mobile and cloud services.

Currently helping a global technology team enable the best outcomes for patients while reducing costs and complexity. Directing the rollout of a mobile cloud storage solution for 20,000 field associates across the globe.

In this role as Chief Architect and Technology Officer, Erik helps enterprise customers begin and complete enterprise-wide transformations to cloud-based solutions. He facilitates sessions to derive a strategic roadmap of prioritized initiatives, well balanced with the organizations capacity to achieve them. Erik has spent the past 2 years with 50+ CIOs and CTOs of F2000 companies on their cloud strategies. From his recent entrepreneurial endeavors, he separates the true benefits from the hype of cloud computing.

Thomas Kelly has 17 years of technology experience in business driven design, enterprise architectures, ‘fingers on the keyboard’ development, in addition to all phases of technology governance. Background includes extensive commercial architecture experience at the component, application, and enterprise systems level. Currently, Thomas is the director of Enterprise Architecture and Emerging Technologies at the Best Buy corporation in Minneapolis, MN where he specializes in enterprise systems design, big data, cloud infrastructure, and analytics.

Tim Dickson currently serves as CIO of Mergers and Acquisitions IT at Dell, reporting directly to the Global CIO. Mr. Dickson has been with Dell for eight years and has built Dell’s M&A IT program from the ground up. In this role, Mr. Dickson and his team are responsible for the end-to-end IT and Infrastructure integration of acquired companies into Dell, spanning the M&A lifecycle for early IT due diligence and planning through Day One, integration, and business-as-usual. He has performed due diligence for over 15 acquisition targets and led the acquisition integration of over ten companies into Dell between 2010 and 2011. Those companies include KACE, Exanet, Scalent, Ocarina Networks, Boomi, Insite One, and SecureWorks.

Mr. Dickson has over 20 years of experience in the IT software industry and a background in IT Product Management, Product Development, Program/Project Management, Consulting, Systems Deployment, Global Team Management, and Business Relationship Management with previous companies such as IBM, HP, i2 Technologies.

Mr. Dickson has a bachelor’s of science in Industrial Engineering from Penn State University and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.

During his career with Navellier, a financial services firm with $4 billion in assets, Clayton Pippenger acted as CTO for three years and a Lead Developer for eleven years prior. The market downturn called for the company to investigate more aggressive ways to cut costs, the company decided to move forward with a plan to virtualize much of its infrastructure to a private cloud environment to reduce hardware and IT management costs. Pippenger downsized his IT organization, so much so, he eliminated his own position and partnered with Quest a Cloud Service Provider.
Pippenger is currently a Managing Member for Versabill IT, LLC. He also works as the application development manager at Quest assisting various customers in the design, scope, development and testing phases of application development. He leads a Virtual Bench of consultants from almost every development skill set and background and delivers custom and packaged software solutions.

John Lake has over 15 years of experience in information technology management, largely with high growth technology companies in Silicon Valley. He currently serves as the Director of Information Systems for Panasas, a provider of high performance parallel storage solutions based in Sunnyvale, CA. Since joining Panasas in 2008, John has migrated Panasas' enterprise application architecture to a predominantly cloud-base model , leveraging solutions from popular cloud vendors such as Salesforce.com, Big Machines, Dell Boomi and Marketo. Most recently, his team completed the automation of Panasas' quote-to-cash process, successfully integrating on-premise and cloud-based applications with external partners. Prior to Panasas, John built and led IT organizations at companies such as Alphablox, Nextance, and IBM. A Bay Area native, John earned his BA from San Jose State University and his MBA from the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University.

John is currently the Director of Engineering Productivity and Agile Development at Ancestry.com. John is the architect of Ancestry's cultural transformation to Agile, Lean, Continuous Delivery, and DevOps. John is a 25 year veteran of the software industry and is passionate about creating world-class development teams that create world-class software.

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 served as a leader on the engineering team that deployed three commodity clouds for KT (formerly Korea Telecom) under the company’s uCloud brand.
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.