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Speakers for the Virtualization - Implementation
Strategies Conference
December 13, 2007 |
Joe Fitzgerald
Joe Fitzgerald, CEO and
Co-Founder of ManageIQ, enjoys over 26 years of experience
providing operations, systems and configuration management
solutions to hundreds of IT organizations worldwide. Before
founding ManageIQ, he was CTO and Director Product
Development for Hewlett Packard’s Change & Configuration
Management Software Business, where he was named HP
distinguished technologist in 2005. Joe joined Hewlett
Packard as part of the Novadigm acquisition, a company he
co-founded and where as CTO he spent more than 12 years
pioneering large-scale configuration management solutions.
He is the author and co-author of numerous patents including
those underlying Novadigm’s adaptive management
technologies.
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Dean Hobart
Dean Hobart is Lead Systems
Engineer for Philips Lighting North America. He is an
IT professional with 15+ years experience in full lifecycle
management of information systems. Championed the
virtualization of the Windows Server environment in the
North America data center. In two years, our team
completed the successful virtualization of all systems in
the data center. |
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Gordon Jackson
Gordon serves
as the Virtualization Evangelist for DataSynapse, and is an
industry veteran with twelve years of experience as a systems
engineer and solution architect. In his role, Gordon is
responsible for communicating the value of products and
solutions to various audiences, including customers, partners,
prospects and the market at large. He is also a global resource
to the field operations team, providing in-depth knowledge of
products and expertise in infrastructure software. Prior to
becoming the Virtualization Evangelist, Gordon was director of
systems engineering for DataSynapse, working directly with
product marketing, and engineering and support. Before joining
DataSynapse, Gordon held several positions in systems
engineering and solution architecture at Borland Software,
Oracle, WebGain, ObjectSpace, Sun Microsystem and ObjectDesign.
Gordon has also worked as an adjunct professor of computer
science for the University of Massachusetts.
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Chris McDaniel
Chris
McDaniel recently joined Nimsoft Inc. this past October as a solutions
architect driving their new strategic virtualization initiatives. Prior
to his current position, Chris was the Director of Network Operations at
Rearden Commerce, a leading business travel services SaaS provider used
by American Express, GSK, Pfizer, Palm, JDSU, and many others, where he
architected and built out the IT operations infrastructure and
organization from ground zero to support the significant growth the
company is continuing to achieve. Prior to Rearden Commerce, Chris was
the Infrastructure Architect and Director of Web Engineering at Gap Inc
Direct for 10 years, where he built out the operations infrastructure
for Gap.com, OldNavy.com, BananaRepublic.com, and several other public
and internal web based solutions, as well as was awarded with the
prestigious Gap Inc President’s Award for Innovation. He currently
lives in San Francisco, CA, where he has published several articles and
spoken at leading technology focused conferences, including CIO and
Linux World, on various topics of web based infrastructures, including
performance management and capacity planning, online security, open
source and best practices architectures. He plans to publish an online
resource early next year to serve as an ongoing reference for IT
professionals based on the collection of best practices of building and
managing IT Operations Infrastructures and Services.
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John Posavatz
John Posavatz joined The
Neverfail Group in October 2003 as the director of field engineering for
North America, and was subsequently promoted to the position of Vice
President of Product Management for North America in June 2004. As Vice
President of Product Management for Neverfail, John manages all
technical aspects of the company’s customer and partner relationships,
including pre-sales engineering, professional services installation, and
post-sale support of Neverfail’s high availability software solutions.
His team is also responsible for all hands-on customer/partner technical
education and training. As a key part of his role, John takes feedback
received from customers, partners, and the entire Neverfail organization
to help identify, define and prototype new product requirements and
possible functional enhancements. He collaborates with executive
management and the development team to steer product direction and
technical strategies. Prior to joining Neverfail, John was Director of
Sales Engineering for Zilliant, where he was responsible for managing
the technical pre-sales team and overseeing the development of new
product functionalities and prototypes. Prior to that, John was Senior
Sales Engineer for pcOrder/Trilogy. During the company’s hyper-growth
stage, John leveraged his technical expertise into evangelizing and
selling the pcOrder’s product offering, resulting in multi-million
dollar revenue contributions. John holds a bachelor degree cum laude in
economics from the University of Texas at Austin.
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Jim Prentiss
Jim has spent over
20 years in the information technology industry focused primarily on
business development and customer success. He has held positions
with Digital Equipment Corporation, Computer Task Group, Platinum
Technology, Plumtree Software, and Tideway Systems. At DEC he
participated in customer success deploying the MicroVax product
line. At Computer Task Group he lead the effort in the Milwaukee
Office to transform from a focus on IT staff augmentation to one
geared towards successful projects that directly impacted the
customers’ business. At Plumtree Software, Jim focused on Business
Development to help grow the company from a start-up with less than
$1million in revenue through IPO and into an $80million public
company. He is now focused on duplicating that effort with Tideway
Systems.
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Joe Ryan
Joe Ryan is the Vice President
of Technology Operations for Jones Lang LaSalle’s Americas region, which
includes North, Central, and South America. Mr. Ryan is responsible for
all technology infrastructures including the following: Wide and Local
Area Networks, Telecommunications, Server and PC Infrastructure, Help
Desk Services, 2nd and 3rd Level Support Staff and
Mid Range Operations. Additionally, he is responsible for the
implementation of all project services that affect the above areas. Mr. Ryan
has 14 years of experience in the IT industry. He has progressed
through the ranks of the IT industry developing an in-depth
understanding of the management, financial and technical components that
provide the backdrop for today’s corporate technology landscape. His
experience in the management of corporate IT functions and the
architecting of solutions over a wide range of platforms and
technologies allows him to effectively assist customers with the
deployment of technology that meets their business objectives. Prior to
joining Jones Lang LaSalle, Mr. Ryan was the Director of IT Operations
at UNext, now Cardean Learning Group, and held various IT positions at
Sears, Roebuck and Company. Mr. Ryan has a bachelor degree from Purdue
University and an M.B.A. from Northern Illinois University.
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Mark Samuelson
Mark Samuelson is a
Senior Enterprise consultant that has been employed by Optimus Solutions
for the past eight years. Mark has been implementing storage solutions
for the past 12 years for fortune 500 companies. He has primarily been
focused on implementing large storage systems for heterogeneous backup
and recovery solutions, VmWare virtualization implementations, Highly
available UNIX clusters. Mark has implemented over a wide variety of
Storage vendors IBM, EMC, Hitachi, DataDomain, Network appliance,
Storage Tek and many others.
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Jeremy Wendel
Jeremy Wendel's
role at Hewitt Associates is in the Enterprise Engineering
organization's Desktop Infrastructure Technology unit. This unit is
responsible for Desktop Infrastructure Technology for over 25,000
desktops/laptops in 35 countries. His focus is on Desktop
Virtualization engineering and strategy. Jeremy has held previous
positions at Hewitt as the internal Product Manager of Enterprise
Software Packaging, application packaging lead, and Java web developer.
Jeremy is a Microsoft Certified Professional who graduated from
Eastern
Illinois University with Bachelor of Science in
Computer Information Systems, concentration in Client/Server computing.
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Ilir Zenku, PMP,
MCSE, MS
Ilir Zenku has
more than 10 years of experience in IT management positions in healthcare,
higher-education and non-profit industries. Currently leading the IT department
of the prestigious University of Chicago (Physicians Group) as the Director of
Information Systems. He has implemented a server virtualization project and
currently executing a desktop virtualization project. His extensive collection
of skills and knowledge spans from Microsoft technologies (MCSE with Exchange
and SQL Server expertise) to project management expertise (PMP with Healthcare
and IT project management expertise). Mr. Zenku holds a Master’s degree in IT
Management from Illinois Institute of Technology and Bachelor’s degree in
Computer Science from University of Tirana, Albania. He is a member of several
prominent organizations in the industry most notably the Project Management
Institute (PMI), Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS)
and Microsoft Healthcare Users Group (MS-HUG).
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