My name is Erick Marshall and I live in rural western Oklahoma on a farm. I have been married to my wife for almost 16 years and have been blessed with 8 children that we homeschool. Our family enjoys spending time outdoors by fishing, hunting, and camping whenever possible. I have been a volunteer firefighter for our local fire department for the past 3 years. In my spare time, I enjoy lighting up the Yoder and smoking all types of meat.

Growing up on a farm in rural Missouri – where, even today, some of the most basic technologies are limited - I at first did not realize my passion for technology. It was during my spare time while serving in the Army, I taught myself how to repair and replace cracked and damaged iPhone screens, and with that, my never-ending education began. I’ve spent time working as a Network Administrator, a UI developer, and have established myself as a VDI SME and Solution Architect at VMware. I support customers across all deployment platforms focusing on multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

Stephen Smith has been with Iron Bow Technologies for 8 years and currently serves as Cloud Practice Director. He is a former United States Marine with over 20 years in the enterprise IT space including stays at NASA, SPAWAR and USDA. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and an MBA. Steve currently resides in the New Orleans area with his wife, Tracey and their 3 cats and 2 dogs.

Kendrick Coleman is a reformed sysadmin and virtualization professional. His attention has shifted from hypervisors to cloud native platforms focused on containers. In his role as a Sr. Technical Marketing Manager, he develops interesting content around the VMware Tanzu portfolio and with a focus on making the best Kuberntes experience. He’s been on the Kubernetes release team and has been a speaker at DockerCon, OpenSource Summit, ContainerCon, CloudNativeCon, VMworld and many more. His free time is spent sharing bourbon industry knowledge hosting the Bourbon Pursuit podcast. Kendrick tweets over at @kendrickcoleman

Emad Younis is a Staff Cloud Solutions Architect in the Cloud Services Business Unit (CSBU) at VMware. He leads VMware’s Multi-Cloud Center of Excellence, focusing on solving customer problems related to cloud architecture, connectivity, workload mobility, and native services across all VMware-based clouds. His responsibilities include generating technical content, evangelism, and working with VMware’s hyperscaler partners to drive VMware Cloud adoption.

Jim Senicka is a Director of Technical Marketing at VMware. He and his team are responsible for outbound technical marketing efforts for VMware Cloud Foundation. Jim has been at VMware for over 10 years and has previously led technical marketing teams responsible for VMware vCloud Suite and VMware vSphere.

John Dias specializes in Cloud Management solutions and is a veteran IT professional with over 23 years of experience. Most of his experience has been on the customer side running data center operations, data storage, virtual infrastructure and Unix environments for a major financial institution. In his spare time, he enjoys astrophotography, and repairing and refurbishing vintage computers.

Eric Gray is a Principal Architect from VMware Technical Marketing. He joined in 2005 after spending a decade working at a variety of Silicon Valley technology companies.  His current focus is VMware Cloud on AWS, and most recently he served on the nascent team that launched VMware Cloud on Dell EMC - the first on-premises data center-as-a-service offering. In his previous role Eric provided customers with guidance on operationalizing and automating VMware ESXi lifecycle management, and prior to that he specialized in technical competitive analysis. Find him on Twitter: @eric_gray

Daniel Shapira is a Sr Staff Researcher at VMware, currently involved in security research of CNCF projects with a focus on OS implementations. For the past 11 years he has found and fixed critical security problems for various enterprises, government agencies, healthcare and open-source projects around the globe.

Shannon leads product marketing for Dell Technologies’ leading and comprehensive portfolio of primary storage, HCI, and CI offerings, including PowerStore and VxRail. Shannon joined the company in 2014, helped launch the first EMC hyperconverged solution in that year, and has continued to expand her marketing leadership and influence since then.

Shannon has more than 20 years of IT experience in several cross-functional and management roles including product marketing, business development, sales enablement, manufacturing and quality with both direct manufacturers and channel partners. Before joining EMC, Shannon led Cisco product management and marketing for a national channel partner; was a product marketing manager and quality engineer at IBM/Lenovo; and worked as a manufacturing process engineer for IBM’s microelectronics division.

Shannon received her M.B.A. from Kenan-Flagler School of Business in North Carolina, and her M.S. and B.S. in chemical engineering from the University of Rochester in upstate NY.

Andrew Nielsen is the Senior Director for Cloud Migration and Technical Enablement in the Cloud Services Business Unit at VMware. He leads a team of Cloud Architects and Business Critical Application Specialists focused on making customers successful on their multi-cloud journey. In addition to his focus on cloud migration, Drew is the creator of the very popular VMware podcast, DrewTube, that focuses on all things VMware Cloud from a sales enablement perspective. When he is not working at VMware, Drew is an active participant in the United States’ national body for cybersecurity, INCITS CS-1, and holds multiple information security and cloud certifications.

Matt Wakefield joined Oshkosh Corporation in February 2019 as Director of Platform Services after spending the previous 26 years at JLG Industries where he held several roles, most notably Director Global Technology & Infrastructure Services. Matt has demonstrated experience leading high-performance global IT teams while employing results-oriented information solutions and services. He excels in combining strategic and tactical IT management experience with a strong technical expertise.

Aaron is a Senior Cloud Architect on the Cloud Incubation team at VMware. He has experience building hybrid cloud solutions with both open source and enterprise cloud products. His current focus is supporting customers with their on-premises cloud challenges ranging from edge computing to local cloud as a service.

Matt has been a sales and marketing leader at VMware for over 13 years working in presales technical consulting, research, product marketing and technical marketing. Matt has held product marketing leadership roles in several VMware product groups.

Matt has extensive experience engaging with customers including technical and executive stakeholders. Matt has domain expertise in commercial and enterprise segments across private and public sector verticals, including financial services and healthcare.

Matt is a Mexican American native of California who grew up horseback riding and surfing. He lives in Oakland with his wife and three children. Matt is a proud member of Latinos@VMware and is an advocate for VMware’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In his role as Principal Technologist and Evangelist at Boomi, Mike’s core role is helping create a Boomi solutions that serves to connect businesses in the Digital Era. Mike has a wealth of experience and knowledge in most business roles. Before joining Boomi, Mike was the Global Pre-Sales Director at Dell EMC, supporting seventeen strategic global partners to develop industry solutions to address the complex needs of being a digital business. Established and led EMC’s Consulting business across EMEA focusing on app development and cloud.

He has led and delivered complex solutions while as an Enterprise Architect with EDS, and finally he has been a CIO for a UK based international law firm. His broad industry knowledge and experience expands into government, defense, legal and financial service.

Mike holds a Masters Degree in Information Technology and Strategy, a passion and curiosity for emerging technology.

Keith has 40 years in the IT field. He has 30 years in security. He has worked for Internet Security Systems and IBM acting as an SE for Intrusion Prevention Systems, Unified Treat Management, Network Anomaly Detection Systems, and Data Loss Prevention. At IBM he was an X-Force speaker and virtualization security specialist.

As a Principal SE at VMware he is a global resource speaking to security and compliance and particularly how it relates to virtualization and Cloud computing.

Keith is also a member of the Office of the CTO, Global Field representing security and compliance to VMware’s Office of the CTO.

Keith has been certified as an instructor for the Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK) put forth by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).

As a Network Security Solution Engineer and Ambassador for the Office of the CTO at VMware, Brian brings 30 years of industry expertise in enterprise and service provider environments to help customers solve their security and business challenges. A frequent conference and user group speaker, a large focus of his role is to educate customers on VMware and industry solutions where he brings his passion for teaching and a persistent curiosity to help others simplify and navigate the exciting shifts that are constantly occurring in Security and IT.

David Hutt has been with VMware Carbon Black for 5+ years, where his time in CB Professional Services created opportunity to become a SME in the Carbon Black Cloud platform & On-Prem products. Working with customers across all industries and sizes providing security consulting and implementation services along the way. Presently, concentrated on everything to do with the Endpoint Protection Platform, with a special focus on Carbon Black and Horizon VDI integrations!

Donald Cannon is a Product Manager at Dell with a tenure of over 20 years with the company, driving innovation and workforce transformation. Donald holds a patent in platform independent imaging method and system and holds several certifications from the Pragmatic Institute including PMC Level 3, Build, Focus, and Foundations.

Colin helps organizations to make their workforce happier and more productive, with secure and cost effective access to their applications and data, when they work from the office, home or whilst mobile. As the Senior Strategy Consultant for the Services Client Product Group, Colin creates solutions that matches Dell's mantra that all of our products should be open, capable and affordable.

With more than 20 years of experience delivering significant business and technology change programs for the benefit of customers, Colin has led a number of large (£100mn+) engagements as the Solution or Security Architect, delivering business value to the client as well as offering operational efficiencies to the IT operations team.

Mike Foley is a Staff Technical Marketing Architect in the vSphere Group at VMware. His current focus is on enabling vSphere Administrators to navigate the world of vSphere with Kubernetes. He is the author of whitepapers on vSphere with Kubernetes 101 for the vSphere Admin, hypervisor security, virtual machine encryption and the vSphere Security Configuration Guide.

Mike was awarded a patent (8,601,544) in December 2013 for dual-band authentication using the virtual infrastructure.

Belu works as a Product Line Marketing Manager at VMware, in charge of VMware's Data Protection Portfolio. She joined VMware in November 2020, after driving Cloud Product Marketing for Data Protection at Veritas Technologies. Before that, she completed her Full Time MBA at Haas School of Business and a B.S. in Industrial Engineering in Buenos Aires, where she's originally from.

Chris McCain a Director in the Networking and Security Technologist group at VMware. In addition to being a dual VCDX in DCV and NV Chris is also a VMware Certified Instructor and holds numerous other industry certifications. Chris joined VMware in December of 2013 to help build the NSX training and certification portfolio after 15 years of running his own consulting, training, and content development company. Chris lives in St Petersburg, FL with his wife and two sons.

Tony Vetter is a Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager with VMware focusing on developer experiences for all things VMware Tanzu, with a focus on Tanzu Build Service and Tanzu Application Catalog. He is experienced in distributed systems and and infrastructure automation, and has held various roles like at Silicon Graphics working in high performance computing (HPC), managing a portfolio of developer libraries for building distributed HPC modeling software. Then working on storage and infrastructure automation for CenturyLink Cloud. And has been working in Product Marketing since joining Pivotal in 2018. Tony has been a speaker at VMworld, KubeCon, SpringOne, SuperComputing, various Linux and system administrator conferences, and now the VMware Sales Kick Off. He can be found blogging on the VMware Tanzu blog  and on twitter @anthonyjvetter.

Tom Fenton is a Technical Marketing Manager at ControlUp. Before joining ControlUp he was a Senior Course Developer in VMware’s Education Department, where he developed their first Horizon View course. Tom also worked at The Taneja Group as a Senior Validation Engineer heading their Validation Service Lab. He writes monthly columns for Virtualization & Cloud Review magazine and StorageReview.com. When not working, Tom In enjoys skiing, snowboarding, and hiking in the Pacific Northwest, where he resides.

Trentent Tye had supported end user computing environments for over a decade when he joined ControlUp as an end-user computing expert and advocate for VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft RDS technologies. Trentent shares his considerable expertise via blogs on controlup.com, his personal blog at theorypc.ca, Twitter, or any open microphone.

Dhiren Patel is a Client Technologist at Dell Technologies who empowers organizations through their workforce transformation journeys by helping them put their employees first. He is a Certified Project Management Professional with a demonstrated history of working in the IT and financial services industries for over 10 years.

Veeam offers customers a single platform for cloud, virtual, and physical backup and recovery. Join this session to learn about new features for VMware customers including: Continuous Data Protection for critical workloads, reliable ransomware protection immutable Linux repositories, Amazon S3 Glacier support, and more!

Protecting data whether on-premises or cloud shouldn't be complicated or leave your business assets exposed for up to 24 hours. Backups shouldn't be separate from disaster recovery or migration use cases, either. Join this session for a technical overview of how Zerto continuously and non-disruptively protects your workloads in vSphere, enabling greater resilience for any data protection use case, including our recently-announced protection for containerized applications managed by Kubernetes, and SaaS workloads.

Want the freedom to run and protect your virtualized or hyper-converged workloads, across any cloud, with a unified, simple, as a service experience? Free your data with HPE Cloud Volumes, HPE’s intelligent data, storage, and management services for your edge, on-premises, and cloud workloads. Join us for this technical overview, and learn how HPE has transformed the cloud anywhere experience.

The idea of running more VMs and workloads on fewer systems presents enticing TCO reduction possibilities for IT professionals, but concerns around blast radius often delay or even prevent serious server consolidation efforts in public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud deployments. Let’s talk about how the concept of blast radius has evolved over the years, and how the rapid evolution of hardware and VMware capabilities like: software defined storage, network, life cycle management, operational tools like vRealize, vMotion, DRS, SRM, and other capabilities, address all of those concurrences. We’ll show how these new capabilities are related to the resilience, reliability, security, manageability needed to minimize impact to end customers by mitigating those concerns. We’ll also discuss best known methods for using the revolutionary Intel® Optane™ persistent memory and SSDs to deliver the TCO benefits of server consolidation.

Running a multi-cloud environment with Kubernetes clusters can be challenging. Let’s investigate a strategy to unlock the power of a “Kubernetes everywhere” architecture. Some of the topics we will cover in this session include:

• Status of VMware in Public Clouds
• Primer on VMware Tanzu
• Tanzu as the central management plane for multi-cloud container management
• Multi-Cloud data as part of your Tanzu architecture.

This session will cover:

• Harmonizing VMware cloud infrastructures to deliver success in cloud transformation
• Notes from the field on mitigating risk. How Softchoice and VMware collaborated on multi-region VCDR.
• Why does workload placement matter?t
• Achieving an overall reduction in spend and resources.

With the trend of anywhere work, organizations are looking to virtualization solutions to increase mobility, ensuring anytime access to data while also enabling improved security. Enterprises will benefit from greater elasticity of scale, data security, and simplified manageability with GPU-accelerated VDI. Addressing the challenges of virtualization is more important than ever, as an increasing amount of the work force moves to flexible, hybrid workspaces. Learn how NVIDIA virtual GPU solutions running on VMware Horizon address the deficiencies of VDI by bringing graphics and compute acceleration to the data center, enabling IT to extend the reach of virtualization to every user, from knowledge workers to designers and engineers, delivering unparalleled NVIDIA graphics performance and a great user experience that rivals physical PC’s.

Digital Transformation is very much the buzzword of yesteryear, having been supplanted by Multicloud. Whatever term you prefer, most of us are in a position where our more traditional workloads are going to be with us for some time. Visibility into hidden risks and security issues is important, whether those workloads are running on vSphere, VMware Cloud Director, AWS, Azure or Kubernetes (everybody take a drink!). In this 30 minute talk, Technical Marketing Manager Kev Johnson will walk you through the challenges and show you how Runecast Analyzer can help to keep you sane, remove risks and save money. Who wouldn't want that?

Data is the lifeblood of all businesses, and each day IT professionals are tasked with protecting more of it all while maximizing uptime for their organizations. In an ongoing battle against cyber threats and attacks on your data, one of the most impactful investments any organization can make is in its employees. An end user who’s educated and empowered plays an integral role in defense of your networks and data. At Unitrends, we’ve integrated our backup and recovery solutions with powerful security tools to provide protection beyond simple backup and restore capabilities.

A modern BCDR solution enables complete data protection, whether it lives on-prem, across remote endpoints, or in clouds and SaaS applications. If you're ready to embrace a solution complete and agile enough to address all workloads while injecting automation and artificial intelligence to simply complex systems, you've come to the right place.

Join Adam Marget, Unitrends Technical Marketing, on this VMUG webcast as he explores:

• Powerful recovery options to meet aggressive RTOs and RPOs for VMware and other environments
• Automation of application-level recovery testing of Windows and VMware environments for 100% confidence in recovery
• Key security integrations to harden the backup environment and enable employees to defend through actionable, front-end protection
• Cloud integrations, including no-touch failover of VMware VMs with Unitrends Disaster Recovery as a Service

Building robust monitoring integrations will save time and money in your long-term data center management. Integrating VMware vSphere into the Microsoft Operations Manager enables crafting new monitoring scenarios, bringing together information from various subsystems like storage, hardware, network, and application information. NiCE helps companies seamlessly integrate VMware vSphere monitoring into the Microsoft System Center suite using their advanced SCOM monitoring integration tool, the NiCE VMware Management Pack for SCOM.

In this webcast, you will learn about VMware monitoring lessons learned from various customer scenarios and how to save costs in your data center management.

Organizations are extending VMware based applications in data centers to the cloud using VMware Cloud. As customers embrace VMware Cloud, they have multiple options for protecting their VMware environments and enhancing their DR capabilities - use the same tools and store data on-premises, deploy existing backup tools into the cloud (lift n’ shift), or adopt a cloud native backup solution. Are you ready to maximize the benefits from a VMware hybrid cloud environment?

Attend this webinar to learn:

The business challenges driving change in VMware environments

Important disaster recovery considerations for VMware Cloud on AWS

How Druva data protection for VMware can help you

Working closely together with VMware as a Technology Alliance Partner, Supermicro has been a pioneer in bringing innovative next generation cloud technologies. In this session, we will dig deeper on how partnering with VMware and Intel, Supermicro has been able to introduce new solutions that make configuration, deployment and management of solutions at scale simple & faster for compute and storage in the datacenter as well as at the edge.

Google Cloud VMware Engine is the fastest and easiest way to migrate and run your VMware-based applications in the cloud. Join this session where we will show how you can transform your business by unlocking new insights to respond to customer needs in real time by modernizing your application more efficiently and flexibly than ever before. Manoj Sharma, Product leader for Google Cloud VMware Engine, will lead this session and share how to accelerate cloud migrations and how customers have found success across industries in unique and interesting ways.

Software vendors are pushing updates at an ever-increasing rate. Keeping your VMware Horizon environment current can easily become a bottleneck – preventing you from making changes and slowing down your business. Even worse, you might disconnect your end-users from the critical applications and data they require.

In this session, Mark Plettenberg (VMware EUC vExpert & Microsoft MVP) will share his take on the importance of automated pre-production and production testing as the only way to provide a reliable and cost-effective service for your users. Whether they are on-premises, in the cloud or working from anywhere (WFx).

Mark will also discuss the latest performance findings from his labs, touch on topics like Windows 10 21H1 and AppVolumes 2103, their impact on user experience, and offer simple tricks to improve performance and EUX.

In this session, we will cover:

• Testing the impact of changes on performance before bringing them to production
• How to guarantee all your applications still work, after every change
• How to make automation work in your favor, instead of automating disaster
• Testing user experience before going live
• How to migrate to the cloud safely

Get all the advantages of a public cloud while retaining full control and access for your VMware-based infrastructure. With Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, you’re in the driver's seat. It's the VMware software you know, but unlike other cloud services, you control all the policies, settings, and versions for ESXi, vCenter, vSAN, and NSX; that means you can keep the same tools, processes, and certifications that you’re currently using on-premises. You can migrate your entire data center, gain hybrid cloud capacity and flexibility, or build your disaster recovery site in any of 28 cloud regions worldwide with one consistent price. Our industry-first transparent L2 networking secures your full isolation and access control, enables innovation with NSX, and offers high-performance connections to databases and other cloud-native services. Come learn how you can get behind the wheel to drive your company where it needs to go, using all the power and convenience of a public cloud engine and the VMware software you're already using.

The financial industry’s digital transformation efforts are under siege with a myriad of attacks: payment card fraud, synthetic IDs, integrity attacks, and more.

With our fourth annual Bank Heists Report, we’ve taken the pulse and perspectives of 126 bank CISOs. Helmed by Tom Kellermann, Head of Cybersecurity Strategy for VMware and member of the Cyber Investigations Advisory Board for the US Secret Service, this session will provide compelling insights on the evolution of cyber kill-chains, cybercrime cartels, counter incident response, island hopping and analysis of a new paradigm for cybersecurity entitled Intrusion Suppression.

Join Jonathan Toulon, President of the CONVERGED User Group & Global Infrastructure and Security CoE Leader, Mohawk Industries, as he sits down with Ritch Houdek, SVP of Technology at Kohl’s Corporation, to learn how Kohl’s is transforming their Edge with VxRail deployed at over 1,100 stores across 49 states, elevating the Kohl’s customer experience

Data is the fuel of the modern economy. Yet while data is being created in clever and innovative ways, its storage in silos is inhibiting organizations from extracting the full potential of its value. Additionally, web-scale architectures have made it easier to deploy new distributed applications, creating “silo sprawl” In this presentation, we will examine some of the problems associated with silo sprawl, and then provide intuitive ways to use Boomi’s modern integration platform to be quickly create composite applications, easily abstract services and comprehensively extract value from data pipelines.

Participants for this session will:

• Understand the problem of “silo sprawl”
• Gain an intuition of multicloud distribution
• Grok composite applications and their potential patterns

Join National Geographic Explorer and Dell Ambassador Mike Libecki as he takes us on a expedition-like journey to some of the most remote expeditions possible! From -50 degrees and 100+ mph katabatic winds in Antarctica to the deep sweltering 110-degree and 98% humidity of the Polynesian jungle, come explore a unique perspective of our Mother Earth and experience the immaculate mayhem, magic, power and beauty of our planet. Mike will not only dive into what it's like in front of the camera, but behind the scenes and the complex equation it takes to bring these stories to life with Dell Precision, Dell Rugged, 8K footage, Virtual Reality, and 3D renderings.

Telemetry data has changed the world of IT support. Today we can use it to learn, optimize and automate many of the manual IT tasks of the past. We’ve made great strides, but what’s to come? Join us to learn how we’re helping IT streamline the user experience today and what you can expect in the future.

Today, this data has helped us learn how people use their PCs and how we can help improve their experience depending on how they work and what they work on. As the way we work and where we work continues to evolve, the tools needed to manage end users have to become more and more sophisticated.

Just like many of our customers, Dell IT needed to transform to meet business demand, leverage infrastructure as code, and remove IT as a barrier. Join our conversation with product and cloud architect leadership as they demo and discuss how they took advantage of the automation and simplicity of Dell EMC VxRail and PowerFlex to shrink install timelines from weeks to days, extend workflows to public cloud, and give development teams immediate access to resources.

At Dell, we are constantly exploring new ways to make our products and packaging more sustainable. With every new product Dell launches, we have an opportunity to innovate with design changes, material changes, and also packaging changes. From servers to PCs and monitors, we are going big on our commitment to make the most sustainable technology in the industry to achieve our recently stated sustainability Moonshot goals.

Kubernetes continues to gain traction as the leading open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services. However, the increased agility, portability and scalability are juxtaposed with susceptibility to vulnerabilities specific to Kubernetes environments. This session will analyze each of the four layers of the Kubernetes tech stack (code, container, cluster, cloud/on-prem data center) to uncover emerging threats and common security pitfalls to avoid. Gain insights into the vulnerabilities, how they came to be, and mistakes to avoid- all to help you strengthen your security posture.

Join us for an interactive demonstration of how Dell SafeBIOS and VMware Carbon Black work together to provide state-of-the-art security above and below the operating system. These integrated endpoint security solutions enable surfacing telemetry from the off-host verification status on the endpoint within the VMware Carbon Black console and remediate compromises resulting from BIOS tampering.

Many companies are struggling with large numbers of legacy applications and infrastructure that consumes all of IT staff time, leaving none for new business requirements. While these apps could be refactored to address security and workload mobility issues, this takes time away from building net new revenue generating applications. Learn how moving to Cloud Foundation can help. The VMware Cloud Foundation platform can provide significant enhancements like full East/West security, intrusion detection and multi site workload mobility with zero application changes. Learn how VCF can help with datacenter consolidation, CoLo changes and M&A IT onboarding, AND provide the best on prem platform for new applications in containers and virtual machines.

Tuan Nguyen is Sr Technologist at VMware NSBU Networking and Security based in Palo Alto California. He is working on building Go-to-market strategy and demo of Networking and Security use-cases for large enterprises leveraging next generation security, network virtualization.

He is SME on Network Automation, Modern App Networking and End-to-end Security solutions to strengthen different vertical industries using VMware NSX product and solution portfolio. Tuan holds Ph.D in Telecommunications from Sorbonne University France..

You have begun your proactive support journey, and now you're ready to begin acting upon the recommendations made by Skyline. In this session, you will:

• Learn best practices
• See valuable tips and tricks in action
• See feature deep-dives
• Understand business value that Skyline provides

But even if you’re not currently using the VMware Skyline service, and you’re just looking to learn more about it before you commit to installation and configuration, you’ll benefit as well, because you’ll have a deeper understanding Day 1 and Day 2 capabilities right out of the gate.

Kelcey is a Sr. Technical Marketing Manager for the Cloud Management Business Unit at VMware, where his primary focus is VMware Skyline. Over the last 20 years, Kelcey has worked with software and hardware solution providers, training their technical specialists, enabling their sales teams, and helping them transform their business models to include SaaS-based delivery and cloud computing services to better serve their customers.

Matt Lloyd is a Global Alliances Director at Veeam Software and is based near Chicago, IL. Currently, he supports partnerships with Dell, VMware, and other strategic alliance partners. Matt's experience includes planning, designing, and implementing solutions for virtual environments, working with channel partners, and sales; with virtualization being the central theme throughout his career.

Andy Sturniolo, a Solutions Architect for the Global Alliance Architecture group at Veeam®, helps customers and partners successfully plan, design, and implement strategies to protect their data around virtualization. Andy has over 16 years in the industry, and his work has primarily focused on infrastructure design, implementation, and administration. Andy is based out of Ohio and is responsible for technical initiatives related to the Veeam alliance with VMware and Dell EMC.

Gene Torres is a Technology Evangelist at Zerto with 21 years of previous experience as an IT Professional focusing on data center virtualization and resilience. Prior to Zerto, Gene was a Solutions Engineer before advancing to Enterprise Architect, where he was responsible for architecting resilient solutions for companies for varied sizes. He lives in Tacoma, WA with his wife, Rhea, and 3 daughters. He maintains his own technology-focused blog as an active vExpert and enjoys gaming, art, barbecue, and spending time outdoors.

Dianne Gonzalez is a Principal Technical Marketing Engineer for HPE Cloud Data Services. She has over 23 years of experience in the technical field that covers infrastructure administration, data center design, and application delivery for both cloud and on premises environments. Her career spans several industries, such as government, education, healthcare, medical research, and technical sales. At HPE, Dianne is focused on developing technical solutions for HPE Cloud Data Services.

Simon is a Technical Solution Specialist within the Intel Optane Group and mainly focuses on Optane Solutions in VMware deployments. Simon is also known in the industry as Mr vSAN due to his extensive background in VMware vSAN during his tenure at VMware before joining Intel. You may have seen Simon present at other events such as VMworld, VMUG, USERCON and other events globally. You can read the blogs that Simon writes on his website: www.mrvsan.com

Sridhar Kayathi is a Senior Technical Solutions Specialist within the Intel Optane Group and current focus is Sales & Marketing enablement of Intel® Optane™ Persistent Memory & SSD Solutions. Sridhar has over 18+ years of industry experience including working as a Tech Solutions Specialist, Solutions Architect, Platform Architect and System Administrator. Sridhar works with Enterprise to Cloud customers deployments to deliver innovative solutions with SQL DB - Oracle DB, MS SQL, SAP HANA, MySQL, RocksDB, MariaDB, PostgreSQL; NOSQL/Document DB - Redis, Cassandra, MongoDB; Infrastructure - VMWare, vSAN, Nutanix, Hyper-V … Containers like Dockers, Kubernetes & OpenShift. Follow Sridhar @kayathi.

As Field CTO of Alliances, Ray is responsible for leading the charge for Hybrid and Mult-icloud strategies throughout the Faction and Dell community. Along with evangelizing solutions and architectures with customers and partners, he plays a key role in supporting strategic sales opportunities along with performing enablement sessions with account teams.

Prior to Faction, Ray was a Partner Solutions Architect for Hybrid Cloud for VMware, winning multiple awards and assisting with the GTM strategies for partners and public cloud offerings. With 20+ years of IT experience, he has played key roles with several large organizations in the fintech, pharmaceutical and defense contractors.

Andrew Schilling is a Technical Marketing Engineer focused on NVIDIA vGPU content creation. He works closely with internal members to identify documentation refresh, curation, and creation to better support and enable customers. Andrew’s past accomplishments include developing and deploying a state of the art vGPU VDI deployment for a large design firm as part of a new data center build out. He has a deep experience with vGPU both as a consumer and in his position at NVIDIA.

Judy Lee is a Sr. Product Marketing Manager supporting NVIDIA Virtual GPU. With over 15 years of experience in the technology space, she has held engineering, product management, and marketing roles and worked on medical devices, defense, and data center products at many leading companies, including Cisco, Oracle and Sun Microsystems. Judy holds Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Jeff Jackson, Sr. Technical Architect Data Center Software, SoftChoice As Senior VMware Technical Architect, Business Development, Jeff Jackson is responsible for Softchoice’s VMware Cloud business in North America with specific emphasis on VMC on AWS, Azure VMware Solution (AVS), Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR). Jeff has more than 25 years of experience in IT, Sales, Operations, and Business Transformation. Prior to Softchoice, he started his career in Global Operations at Business Objects / SAP for 11 years, CTO for a Service Provider for the next 10 years, an Enterprise Architect for Life Critical Systems at 911 and finally 4 years as a Senior Engineer for VMware Canada.

Jeff has a proven transformation track record with accomplished executive experience and a demonstrated ability to integrate leading technology solutions. He holds a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering degree (BEng Hons) from the Brunel University, UK.

Kev Johnson is a Technical Marketing Manager at Runecast, where he helps customers to remove latent risks, manage compliance requirements, improve their security posture, and make sure that IT teams can go home on time. Prior to Runecast, he was a Technical Marketing Architect at VMware, with a focus on vSphere Lifecycle.

Adam Marget is an experienced technical marketing professional at Unitrends, a leader in data center backup and disaster recovery solutions. He has been a member of the Unitrends team since 2016, during which time he’s held several roles at the company. Driven by a love and curiosity for technology, Adam’s been delighted to have been afforded the opportunity help both end users and channel partners solve challenges around disaster recovery and business continuity. Prior to joining Unitrends, Adam worked with CDW where he leveraged a variety of partner solutions to help his customers achieve their goals across a variety of technology categories including backup, networking, security, power & cooling, and data center.

Christian Heitkamp (@Chris_Heitkamp) has a deep understanding of designing and developing monitoring extensions to Microsoft System Center and Microsoft 365, with specialist skills and certifications for Microsoft 365, VMware, Oracle, IBM DB2, and other business applications. He brings the industry's best IT management practice to Microsoft System Center and Azure users through his ongoing customer and partner engagement. For many years he successfully manages the product portfolio at NiCE.

Prasanna holds a MS degree in Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He has over 15 years of experience in Data Protection, holding positions as Solutions Architect and Technical Director at Dell EMC prior to joining Druva. Prasanna is currently a Product Architect @ Druva and Co-host of Backup Central’s “Restore it All” podcast.

Sim Upadhyayula is a General Manager of Solutions Enablement at Supermicro. Sim in his role interacts with various enterprise and service provider clients in understanding their next generation data center needs and identifying right solutions to achieve their goals. Along with the technical enablement functions deploying first to market solutions, Sim’s passion for next generation technologies and trends often finds him engaging in panel discussions, speaking sessions, keynotes and other technology evangelization events in the IT industry. Sim has a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering (MSEE) from Clemson University and Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) from Santa Clara University.

Manoj was formerly the VP of Products at CloudSimple, which was acquired in November 2019 by Google. Prior to that, he has been in Product Management leadership roles at VMware and Cisco. Manoj has 20+ years of industry experience in a broad range of technology areas, including cloud architectures, virtualization, storage systems, enterprise and cloud networking, business continuity (backup/DR), smart operations management, as well as analytics/ML/AI applications. He is an Alumni of the Wharton School of Business (MBA), the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and the University of Maryland, College Park.

Mark Plettenberg is a Senior Product Manager at Login VSI. Operating in the center between Sales, Product Development, Marketing, and last but not least: Research. Due to this research, Mark is regularly invited to speak at leading industry events (e.g. E2EVC, VMworld, Citrix Synergy) and share his vision on End User Computing, User Experience, and application & desktop performance. Mark is a Citrix CTP, VMware vExpert and Microsoft MVP and co-author of the annual ‘VDI Like A Pro – EUC State of the Union’, the biggest community driven market research in EUC.

John Mark Troyer is a Principal Product Manager at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, where he focuses on go-to-market programs for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution and hybrid cloud services. Prior to joining Oracle, John created an independent consulting firm, TechReckoning, focusing on influencer and community marketing for enterprise tech companies. Previously, John was a Director and Social Media Evangelist at VMware, where he created the creating the VMware vExpert program and many other content, community, influencer, and social media programs. John was the founding CEO of a venture-backed wireless enterprise software company and has a PhD in pharmaceutical chemistry. He lives on the foggy coast of California with his lovely wife and two cats.

Mike Bachman—or Bachman, as his colleagues call him—is a Principal Technologist and Global Architect in the Office of the CTO, at Boomi, a Dell Technologies business. Bachman consults with the Dell Technologies Enterprise Architecture Group responsible for Dell’s largest global enterprises. He has over 20 years of professional experience in technology consulting, including infrastructure architecture, application integration, performance analysis, data strategy and emerging technology. In the OCTO, he investigates leading- and bleeding-edge technologies and applies them to a variety of integration approaches. Additionally, Bachman has recently launched the Directorate of Sustainability within the OCTO and aims to help companies address social and environmental challenges using emerging technology. Bachman enjoys learning languages, reading, running, hiking and spending time with his family. Moreover, he likes bowties; if you ever see him in the wild, you will almost certainly observe him wearing one.

Scott DesBles is a storied veteran of the IT industry. For 25 years, Scott has worked in a variety of IT areas, with most of his career in data storage as a Principal Storage Architect and Product Manager. Scott started as a consultant performing large OS upgrades (remember NetWare?) and architecting large IP networks. One day in the lab he was working on a network configuration when a new product showed up to test. It was a Brocade Fiber Channel switch. From that day forward, Scott held many positions focusing on data storage, including building up several technical teams for a startup that was eventually acquired by Dell in 2011. Scott now focuses on helping customers design modern data services such as integration, APIs, and data discovery to unlock potential and accelerate their digital transformations. As a self-proclaimed geek and passion for technology, when Scott is not at work, he is tweaking his smart home system, upgrading his holiday light show, or tinkering with new mobile technologies

JT is the Global Infrastructure and Security CoE Leader at Mohawk Industries. Previously, he served as the Sr. Director of Infrastructure Engineering & Operations for Incomm, a leader in the prepaid and payments industry with a little over 70% of the market share, where he helped transform Incomm’s infrastructure by implementing Dell Technologies’ converged and hyperconverged technologies. JT loves change and influences his team to work smarter (not harder) as technology evolves. He is passionate about IT, but believes his purpose is in podcasting with his wife.

Ritch Houdek has served as Senior Vice President of Technology at Kohl’s Corporation since April 2016. He has responsibilities over Infrastructure, Operations, Platform, and End User Experience.

Prior to this role, Mr. Houdek served as Vice President of Technology from 2011 to 2016. He joined Kohl’s in 2010 as a Director of Technology. Before joining Kohl’s, Mr. Houdek served in Technology Leadership positions at Wells Fargo Bank and GE Healthcare.

Mr. Houdek holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and a Bachelor of Science degree from Brigham Young University.

Suzan Pickett is Director of Infrastructure Product Acceleration and CTO of Dell Infrastructure Platform Enablement. She is responsible for advancing Dell Digital’s infrastructure transformation to a modern product delivery organization, enabling teams to quickly deliver quality infrastructure products and services. Suzan leads efforts in accelerating Dell’s infrastructure engineering teams toward a product-focused organization, including DevOps practices and technology. She also oversees the strategic direction for the infrastructure organization’s roadmap. Before joining Dell, Suzan succeeded in numerous roles leading large global infrastructure teams ensuring architecture, engineering, and operational success, including U.S. Bank, Nike, and Columbia Sportswear. Suzan began her career in Oregon, but has recently relocated to Austin, Texas with her husband and two Labrador retrievers

Chad Dunn is a 14-year veteran of EMC and Dell Technologies. He currently leads the Product Management organization for the multi-billion dollar Hyperconverged and Converged Infrastructure and software defined storage portfolio for Dell Technologies. Prior to this role, Chad built and led the Product Management team that created VxRail, Dell’s flagship HCI product now recognized as number one in this rapidly growing market. Prior to his work in Hyperconverged Infrastructure, he created and led the EMC VSPEX reference architecture program that generated over $2B in incremental revenue for EMC and its partners. Before VSPEX, Chad worked in the Emerging Technologies group within EMC and is a veteran of a number of start-up companies in the Boston area.

Mike Libecki can define his life in two ways: An obsession with exploring and climbing the world’s most remote and untouched corners of the planet to find huge, world class first ascents and exploration, and a being a dedicated father to a daughter that wants to save the world. Libecki has completed more than 85 major expeditions all over the planet with a goal of 100 expeditions. He has explored everywhere from Afghanistan to Antarctica, Greenland to Guyana, Siberia to Socotra Island, Yemen and everywhere in between. Mike is also a producer, director, videographer, photographer, humanitarian, and conservationist. He is a math and tech nerd at heart and uses the latest technology on his expeditions to share stories. His pride and joy is being a father to his daughter, Lilliana. At the age of 16, Lilliana has already been to 28 countries and all 7 continents to focus on her humanitarian and conservation work. Mike and his daughter Lilliana founded a nonprofit organization that focuses on conservation and humanitarian work around the world.

“In a world where we can be and do anything, be kind and do good!” - Lilliana Libecki

"The time is now! Why ration passion? Dream big and climb those dreams." - Mike Libecki

Katie is the Global Sustainability Consultant for Dell’s Client products covering laptops, tablets, desktops, workstations, and displays. In her role, she works closely with the engineering and innovation teams to develop, source, and launch new sustainable materials, energy efficiencies, and renewable product packaging. She is also responsible for the strategy of sustainability inclusion across the various product lines and region availability. Prior to this role, Katie has been involved in public relations, campaign management, crisis communications, and competitive intelligence over the last 15 years at Dell. She is also the recipient of a Texas Emmy award for her work producing the TV show, The Daytripper. She lives in Austin, Texas, and enjoys spending her free time hiking trails, seeing live music, or lounging at the lake!

Archana is product manager in the End User Computing space focused on telemetry driven intelligence capabilities. The key objective of the solutions we develop is to empower ITAdmins to seamlessly manage their client PC environment while providing best in class digital employee experience.

Ian Haynes is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for Dell Technologies Unified Workspace. As a member of the Client Solutions Group, Software and Solution, Ian helps create the next generation of products designed to modernize end user computing. He consults with customers across the globe to enable organizations to modernize deployment, security, device management, and support enabling organization to discover new ways to improve Employee Experience and drive productivity.

Rick Martinez serves as a Senior Distinguished Engineer for Client Solutions at Dell Technologies where his responsibilities include security strategy for Dell PCs focused on trusted and resilient platforms. In addition to his role as a strategist, he is an expert resource in secure development, governance and execution for Dell PCs and pan-Dell secure supply chain efforts. Mr. Martinez joined Dell in 1997, and over the next 24 years contributed to security strategy and architecture for BIOS, implementing many fundamental platform security features including Signed Firmware Update (NIST 800-147), TPM, and Trusted Execution Technology. Currently, Mr. Martinez is active in the Trusted Computing Group and serves as Dell representative on the TCG Board of Directors.