Speakers

 
Following were the speakers who presented at IMC Summit 2015.

Keynotes and General Sessions

	Mike Gualtieri – Principal Analyst, Forrester Research Mike Gualtieri’s research is focused on software technology, platforms, and practices that enable technology professionals to deliver prescient customer experiences and breakthrough operational efficiency. His key technology and platform coverage areas are big data strategy, Hadoop, advanced analytics, machine learning, data science practices, predictive apps design, and emerging technologies that make software faster and smarter. Mike is also a leading expert on the intersection of business strategy, architecture, design, and creative collaboration. Mike is a recipient of the Forrester Courage Award for making bold calls that inspire leaders and guide great decisions. Slides (PDF)
	John Fanelli – VP Marketing, DataTorrent John Fanelli is the VP Marketing of DataTorrent. John joined DataTorrent from Citrix Systems where he served a variety of marketing roles including product marketing for industry leading XenDesktop and XenApp products. With over 20 years of marketing experience, Fanelli has led marketing teams at LeftHandNetworks, Wind River and Sun Microsystems. Slides (PDF)
	Nikita Ivanov – CTO, GridGain Systems, PPMC Member Apache Ignite™ Nikita Ivanov is co-founder and CTO of GridGain Systems. Nikita has led GridGain to develop advanced and distributed in-memory data processing technologies — the top Java in-memory data fabric starting every 10 seconds around the world today.Nikita has over 20 years of experience in software application development, building HPC and middleware platforms, contributing to the efforts of other startups and notable companies including Adaptec, Visa and BEA Systems. Nikita was one of the pioneers in using Java technology for server side middleware development while working for one of Europe’s largest system integrators in 1996. Slides (PDF)
	Brian O’Krafka, Engineering Fellow, SanDisk Brian O’Krafka is a Sandisk Engineering Fellow who manages the Advanced Development team in the Emerging Storage Solutions group. His expertise is in the architecture and performance analysis of computer systems. At Sandisk/Schooner Brian has focused on the flash optimization of noSQL and SQL database systems, and flash-optimized object stores for storage appliances. Prior to Schooner, Brian was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems working on the architecture and performance of commercial database and HPC systems. Brian has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. Slides (PDF)
	John Webster – Forbes Columnist, Senior Partner, Evaluator Group John Webster is a Senior Partner and contributes to Evaluator Group’s ongoing research into data storage technologies including hardware, software and services management. His specialties include storage and big data analytics, data management, virtualization, and analysis of storage infrastructure acquisition alternatives. Mr. Webster has over 30 years experience in IT and is the author of numerous articles and white papers. He is also the co-author of a book entitled “Inescapable Data – Harnessing the Power of Convergence,” published in April, 2005 by Prentice Hall. He contributes regularly to Forbes and is often quoted in business and trade publications. Mr. Webster has also been a featured speaker at Storage Networking World and Storage Decisions events. Slides (PDF)
Track Sessions
	David Abercrombie, Principal Data Analytics Engineer, TapJoy David Abercrombie is a Principal Data Analytics Engineer at Tapjoy; Tapjoy is a mobile advertising, publishing, and recommendation platform with more than 500 million users who can earn rewards in their favorite apps by engaging with personalized advertisements. Mr. Abercrombie’s expertise is database performance and data structure design. He is the performance engineer for Tapjoy’s real-time decision making and analytics systems based on MemSQL and Spark. He is also responsible for all aspects of Tapjoy’s business intelligence systems, from product management, support, and training to ETL, metadata architecture, database design and performance monitoring. Slides (PDF)
	Sami Akbay, Co-founder & EVP, WebAction Sami Akbay is a founder of WebAction. Prior to WebAction, he served as the CEO of Altibase, Inc. – an in-memory RDBMS company with customers in financial services, utilities, and telecommunications. Sami was the Vice President of Marketing and Product Management for GoldenGate Software from 2004 through its acquisition by Oracle. Prior to GoldenGate, he served in senior product marketing and business development roles at Embarcadero and AltoWeb. He spent his earlier career in technical and consulting roles working at Rabobank Nederlands, Hearst New Media, American Stock Exchange, MediaMetrix, OneMain.com (Earthlink), and ALK Associates. He is a graduate of Rutgers University. Slides (PDF)
	Dan Baigent, Senior Director Strategic Business Development, SanDisk Dan Baigent has been in the technology business for more than 20 years, working in a variety of roles from software engineering to technology sales, business development, corporate development and strategic alliances. Dan has experience in hardware and software architectures, database development, desktop user interface development, cloud infrastructure architectures, personal productivity tools and open source software. Working on ground breaking software systems like Java, OpenOffice, Open Solaris, Linux and OpenStack, Dan has helped bring some of the industry’s most disruptive and innovative technologies to market. Slides (PDF)
	Dr. William L. Bain, Founder and CEO of ScaleOut Software Dr. William L. Bain is Founder and CEO of ScaleOut Software, Inc. Bill has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering/parallel computing from Rice University, and he has worked at Bell Labs research, Intel, and Microsoft. Dr. Bain holds several patents in computer architecture and distributed computing. Bill founded and ran three start-up companies prior to joining Microsoft. With his previous company (Valence Research), he developed a distributed Web load-balancing software solution that was acquired by Microsoft and is now called Network Load Balancing within the Windows Server operating system. As a member of the Seattle-based Alliance of Angels, Dr. Bain is actively involved in entrepreneurship and the angel community. Slides (PDF)
	Himanshu Bari, Director Product, DataTorrent As Director of Product Management at DataTorrent, Himanshu is responsible for all aspects of DataTorrent’s product strategy positioning, pricing & roadmap. Most recently, he was a product manager at Hortonworks where he drove the addition of Apache Storm & Apache Falcon to the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) and was also responsible for integrating HDP with OpenStack and Teradata. Prior to that he was a product manager at Symantec. Himanshu has over 10 years of experience in functions ranging from product development to UX of enterprise software products in data management, security & application performance monitoring(APM) space. Slides (PDF)
	Milind Bhandarkar – Founder & CEO, Ampool, Inc. Milind Bhandarkar was the founding member of the team at Yahoo! that took Apache Hadoop from 20-node prototype to datacenter-scale production system, and has been contributing and working with Hadoop since version 0.1.0. He started the Yahoo! Grid solutions team focused on training, consulting, and supporting hundreds of new migrants to Hadoop. Parallel programming languages and paradigms has been his area of focus for over 20 years, and his area of specialization for PhD (Computer Science) from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He worked at the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets, Siebel Systems, Pathscale Inc. (acquired by QLogic), Yahoo! and Linkedin. Most recently, he was the Chief Scientist at Pivotal (formerly, Greenplum, a division of EMC). Currently, he is the founder and CEO of Ampool, Inc, building the next generation data infrastructure products. Slides (PDF)
	Alexandre Boudnik – Senior Solution Architect, EPAM Alexandre is a former computer scientist who worked on software development tools: compilers, hardware emulators and testing tools for real-time systems. This background allowed him to lead the SQL query engine development for MPP grid in early 2000, to design seamless persistent storage for Java, and to design mandatory access control framework for JVM languages. He then returned to concurrent computing on MPP appliances and clusters. Alexandre is working with many of the Big Data aspects: the whole Hadoop ecosystem, streaming, complex message processing, in-memory caches, as well as graphs on scalable, fault tolerant distributed share-nothing clusters. Slides (PDF)
	Dr. Konstantin Boudnik – VP Open Source Development, WANdisco and Member of the Apache Software Foundation Dr. Konstantin Boudnik is one of the early developers of Hadoop and a co-author of Apache BigTop, the open source project that focuses on building community around Bigdata software stacks, including Hadoop-related projects. Dr. Boudnik has authored 14 US patents in distributed computing. With extensive experience in software development, including Hadoop, analytics, Git, distributed systems and more, Dr. Boudnik contributed to multiple open source projects in the storage and data processing area. Slides (PDF)
	Keith Busch, Data Center Software Engineer, Intel Keith Busch is a Sr. Operating Systems Software engineer working for Intel’s Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group. He develops Intel NVM products, writes the Linux drivers and software, and is the NVMe maintainer for both QEMU virtualization and Linux user-space tooling. Keith authored contributions included in NVM-Express specifications, and presents this technology and the software supporting it at various Linux Foundation and storage industry conferences. Slides (PDF)
	Mark Carlson – Principal Engineer Industry Standards, Toshiba, and Vice Chair SNIA Technical Council Mark A. Carlson, Principal Engineer, Industry Standards at Toshiba, has more than 35 years of experience with Networking and Storage development and more than 20 years experience with Java technology. Mark was one of the authors of the CDMI Cloud Storage standard. He has spoken at numerous industry forums and events. He is the co-chair of the SNIA Cloud Storage and Object Drive technical working groups, and serves as vice chair on the SNIA Technical Council. Slides (PDF)
	Maria Colgan, Master Product Manager Oracle Database In-Memory, Oracle Maria Colgan is a master product manager at Oracle Corporation and has been with the company since version 7.3 was released in 1996. Maria’s core responsibility is the Oracle Database In-Memory Option. She is responsible for evangelizing the new functionality and getting the feedback from our customers and partners incorporated into future releases of the product. Prior to this role, she was the product manager for the Oracle Database query optimizer. Based on Maria’s extensive experience in Oracle’s Server Technology Performance Group, where she conducted competitive customer benchmarks and tuning sessions, Maria creates material and lectures on the Oracle Database In-Memory Option and the best practices for incorporating it into Oracle environments. She is also a contributing author to the Oracle Optimizer blog and the new Oracle Database In-Memory blog. Maria has spoken at hundreds of conferences worldwide including Oracle Open World, Collaborate, RMOUG Training Days, UKOUG TECH, DOAG, ODTUG Kscope, and many more. Slides (PDF)
	DJ Das, Founder and CEO, Third Eye Consulting Services and Solutions Dj Das is a senior-level product & consulting services executive with global operations background. He founded Third Eye Consulting Services to deliver Big Data consulting services. He also runs a popular Bay area monthly meetup, Big Data Cloud. Prior to this, he held various business development and technical roles in companies like LG CNS America, Siebel Systems & Microsoft among other Bay area startups. Slides (PDF)
	Seshika Fernando, Technical Lead, WSO2 Seshika Fernando is a Technical Lead at WSO2 and focuses on the applications of WSO2’s middleware platform in Financial Markets. Throughout her career, she has had extensive experience in providing technology for Stock Exchanges, Regulators and Investment Banks from across the globe. Her current area of interest is in Real time anomaly detection and its usage in e-commerce. She holds a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka and an MSc in Finance from the London School of Economics, UK. Seshika is a British Chevening Scholar and holds a National patent. She is a Visiting Lecturer at the Institute of Chartered Accountants Sri Lanka, where she lectures for the MBA from the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. Slides (PDF)
	Chris Fregly, Data Solutions Engineer, Databricks Chris Fregly is a Data Solutions Engineer at Databricks focused on distributed systems, advanced analytics, high performance streaming data pipelines, machine learning, and graph processing. He is an Apache Spark Contributor and author of a the upcoming Spark book, Effective Spark. Chris regularly speaks at Spark and big data meetups and conferences across the country. Previously, Chris was a Streaming Platform Engineer at Netflix, Content Engineer at Playboy Enterprises, and a Distributed Systems Engineer at BEA Systems. He’s also a Netflix Open Source committer. Slides (PDF)
	Eric Frenkiel – Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, MemSQL Eric Frenkiel co-founded MemSQL and has served as CEO since inception. Before MemSQL, Eric worked at Facebook on partnership development. He has worked in various engineering and sales engineering capacities at both consumer and enterprise startups. Eric is a graduate of Stanford University’s School of Engineering. In 2011 and 2012, Eric was named to Forbes’ 30 under 30 list of technology innovators. Slides (PDF)
	Bob Frey – Senior Director of Memory and Systems Engineering, SMART Modular Technologies Bob Frey is Senior Director of Memory and Systems Engineering at SMART Modular Technologies. His group is responsible for developing DRAM-based products including Hybrid DIMM modules. He has 25 years of industry experience working at companies including Amdahl, Sony, SUN Microsystems, VERITAS, AdvanSys, and Maranti Networks. Bob has a system architecture background in servers, storage, and networking. He has contributed to the Linux kernel and participated in ANSI/INCITS and IEEE standards groups. He has a BA from Amherst College. Slides (PDF)
	Vlad Giverts, Senior Director of Software Engineering, Workday Vlad Giverts is a Senior Director at Workday responsible for building prediction and recommendation systems for the company’s HR and Financial management products. He was previously the CTO at Identified, a data and analytics startup acquired by Workday in early 2014. Vlad holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. Vlad was previously one of the lead speakers at The Big Data Conference 2014 and at the NLP conference Text By The Bay 2015. Slides (PDF)
	Michael Hay, Vice President and Chief Engineer at Hitachi Data Systems As Vice President and Chief Engineer at Hitachi Data Systems and the Information Technology Platform Division, Michael leads a global team of thinkers that contemplate and help enact the future of Hitachi’s expanding IT portfolio. Michael engages a variety R&D teams, using a clear understanding of customer and market requirements, to guide direction and inspire innovation. Previously Michael was on long term assignment in Japan where he served in several roles with a focus divining and ideally realizing long term directions. Michael joined HDS in 2001 after serving as CEO and owner of a consultancy company focused on complex Enterprise and Systems management design and deployment. His professional background also includes stints at IBM, IBM partners, and other IT start-up companies. These roles have helped Michael develop his keen focus on solutions for the problems of tomorrow. Michael holds a M.S. in Industrial Engineering from San Jose State and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, NM. Slides (PDF)
	Michael Joyce, Manager Software Engineering, iCrossing Mike Joyce is a Manager of Software Engineering at iCrossing, a digital marketing agency. He has several years of experience building scalable enterprise applications to assist data scientists in analyzing and reporting on marketing data. Over the past year, he has been passionate about putting interactive web 2.0 interfaces in front of complex big-data analysis algorithms. Mike is a strong believer in Open Source Software, Agile software development, & Extreme Programming practices. Slides (PDF)
	Ed Julson, TIBCO Integration Platform Product Marketing, TIBCO Ed Julson is a software industry veteran who has spent more than a decade working with Service Oriented Architecture and Middleware products. Ed led the effort to develop and deliver web services APIs into the Java SE and EE platforms and worked within industry standards groups to define the underlying web services specifications. Ed’s current focus at TIBCO is on Integration technologies and Fast Data architecture and solutions. Slides (PDF)
	Sam Lightstone, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect Cloud and Software Data Warehousing, IBM Analytic Platform Group, IBM Sam Lightstone is IBM Master Inventor, Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect for Data Warehousing. He is currently the Chief Architect for both IBM’s dashDB product providing data warehousing in the cloud, and “BLU Acceleration” IBM’s breakthrough technology for parallel vectorized in-memory columnar analytics. His recent work has included numerous topics in cloud computing, hardware optimized analytic processing, database language interfaces, data warehousing, autonomic computing and relational database management systems. He is founder and past chair of the IEEE Data Engineering Workgroup on Self Managing Database Systems. Sam is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and an IBM Master Inventor with over 50 patents and patents pending. He has published widely on in-memory analytics and self-managing database systems and is co-author of four books, including the critically acclaimed guide to software development professionalism “Making it Big in Software“. He is a former competitive and carded foil fencer on the Canadian national circuit, who enjoys cycling and playing guitar. Slides (PDF)
	Sujee Maniyam, Founder and Principal, Elephant Scale Sujee Maniyam is an experienced consultant and instructor in Big Data technologies (Hadoop, Spark, NoSQL and Cloud). He is an open source contributor and author of ‘Hadoop illuminated’ (an open-source book on Hadoop) and ‘HBase Design Patterns’. Sujee is a frequent speaker at various conferences and meetups. He also advises and mentors various firms. Slides (PDF)
	Fred Melo, Technical Marketing Director, Pivotal Fred Melo has been in the software industry for +15 years. Currently working as a Director of Technical Marketing for Pivotal, his job is to help customers from all industries build business-relevant Big Data, Fast Data, Mobile and IoT solutions. In recent past, he leaded the Pivotal Cloud Foundry specialists pre-sales group – which gives him an unique perspective of the intersection between Cloud, PaaS and Big Data / Fast Data. Before Pivotal, he was responsible for starting the VMware vFabric business in South America / Latam, led a pre-sales engineering team for Red Hat and worked for IBM, Ericsson and HP. Slides (PDF)
	Shawn Nguyen, Lead Software Engineer, iCrossing Shawn Nguyen is a lead engineer at iCrossing, a digital marketing agency. Shawn has many years of experience building distributed processing architectures. He currently leads the Data Lake project @ iCrossing. An avid tennis player who questions the use of human ball boys in this time and age of robots. Slides (PDF)
	Frank Ober, Data Center Solution Architect, Intel Frank is a Solution Architect and NVM evangelist in Technical Marketing for Non-Volatile Memories at Intel. He focuses on Flash optimized Data servers for the Data Center. Places where Flash and SSD can be a differentiator for developers and end users. Slides (PDF)
	William Markito Oliviera, Enterprise Architect, Pivotal After spending years focusing on Enterprise Integration Systems, William has narrowed his focus and specialized on Java development, with emphasis on Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), Distributed Systems and Open source. William works at Pivotal helping customers mainly on big (fast) data and highly distributed in-memory systems, and has co-authored some books on the field (Java EE and Oracle WebLogic). Slides (PDF)
	Arthur Sainio, Director of Product Marketing, SMART Modular Technologies Arthur Sainio is a Director of Product Marketing at SMART Modular Technologies. Arthur has been driving new product launch and business development activities at SMART since 1998. Prior to Smart, Arthur worked as a product marketing manager at Hitachi Semiconductor America. While there, his focus was on DRAM, SRAM and Flash technologies. Arthur holds a MBA from San Francisco State University and a MS from Arizona State University. Slides (PDF)
	Amit Satoor, Sr. Director Product and Solution Marketing, SAP Amit Satoor is a solution expert in SAP’s global Database & Technology (D&T) organization. As a technologist, Amit drives a unified solution vision and is responsible for various product areas for SAP HANA and Data Management portfolio. He has provided technical marketing leadership for several key campaigns such as Suite on HANA and HANA platform. Prior to his current role, Amit served as a senior member of product management team at Sybase. During that time, he was responsible for the product strategy and go-to-market programs for various data management products. He has extensive experience in software infrastructure, networking and business applications through his work at Netscape, Novell and Saba Software. Amit Satoor holds a master’s degree in computer science and business administration. Slides (PDF)
	Dmitriy Setrakyan – EVP Engineering, GridGain Systems, PPMC Member Apache Ignite™ (incubating) Dmitriy Setrakyan is co-founder and EVP of Engineering at GridGain Systems. Dmitriy has been designing, architecting and developing software and applications for over 15 years and has expertise in the development of distributed computing systems, middleware platforms, financial trading systems, CRM applications and similar systems. Prior to GridGain, Dmitriy worked at eBay where he was responsible for the architecture of performance sensitive high-traffic components of an add-serving system processing several billion hits a day. Slides (PDF)
	Roman Shaposhnik, ASF Member, PMC Member, Mentor and Committer, Apache Software Foundation Roman Shaposhnik is a member of the Apache Software Foundation, committer on Apache Hadoop, founder of Apache Bigtop and holds a Chair position in Apache Incubator project. Roman has been involved in Open Source software for more than a decade and has hacked projects ranging from Linux kernel to the flagship multimedia library called FFmpeg. He grew up in Sun Microsystems where he had an opportunity to learn from the best software engineers in the industry. Roman’s alma mater is St. Petersburg State University, Russia the school that almost turned him into a mathematician. Slides (PDF)
	Yiftach Shoolman, Co-founder and CTO, Redis Labs Yiftach Shoolman is an experienced technologist, having held leadership engineering and product roles in diverse fields from application acceleration, cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS), to broadband networks and metro networks. He was the founder, president and CTO of Crescendo Networks (acquired by F5, NASDAQ:FFIV), the vice president of software development at Native Networks (acquired by Alcatel, NASDAQ: ALU) and part of the founding team at ECI Telecom broadband division, where he served as vice president of software engineering. Yiftach holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science, and has completed studies for Master of Science in Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University. Slides (PDF)