CDW Data Center Summits 2014
 

Presenters

Snehal S. Antani
CIO, Commercial Distribution Finance and CIO, Enterprise Architecture
GE Capital Americas

Snehal Antani holds dual roles at GE Capital: first, he serves as the CIO for Commercial Distribution Finance (CDF), where he is responsible for driving digital business strategies; and second, he serves as the Chief Architect and CIO of Enterprise Architecture for GE Capital Americas, where he's responsible for defining the technology vision, strategy, and architecture for the Capital-Americas business. Prior to GE Capital, Snehal spent over a decade at IBM within Software Middleware Group, where he held a variety of roles across development, lab services, and product management. He has served as a trusted advisor to many Global 500 companies across industries including financial services, insurance, healthcare, telco, etc; where he has helped shape their technology strategies, drive transformations, and enable them to capture new revenue with emerging technologies. Snehal has disclosed numerous patents and technical publications in the domains of enterprise application infrastructure and high-volume transaction processing. He earned a BS in computer science from Purdue University, and an MS in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY with a thesis in the area of quantifying and improving the resiliency of middleware infrastructures.

David Convery
Data Center Architect
CDW

Dave Convery has worked in technology since 1998. He has been working with server virtualization since 2002 and has been consulting since 2005. During that time, he has participated in many enterprise-level assessment, planning, design and implementation engagements. Previous to consulting, he worked at a major disaster recovery services company, where he assisted in recoveries during disasters such as 9/11, and hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Dave currently holds the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) credential for VI3, vSphere 4 and vSphere5. He is one of about 180 VCDXs worldwide. He is also a VMware Certified Professional in VI2, VI3, vSphere 4 and vSphere 5. Dave was awarded the VMware vExpert designation for 2009 and 2010. He also holds several certifications from EMC, Cisco, HP, RedHat, Citrix, Brocade and Symantec. Dave maintains a technology blog at http://www.tech-tap.com.


James Robertson
Chief Technology Architect
Time Warner

James Robertson is Vice President of Technology Infrastructure and Broadcast Transmissions for Turner Broadcasting System, Inc (TBS, Inc.) and Chief Technology Architect for Time Warner’s Enterprise Shared Services Group. James is responsible for the strategic and technical engineering needs across a suite of core services that covers the range of traditional IT and Broadcast Transmission. James and his team specialize in: providing agile transport, technology and security solutions; creating innovative and effective ways to more efficiently drive business value; reduce time to market; enhance business processes; and enable the further integration of video media into an ever increasing broadband delivery model. In his role as Chief Technology Architect, James has responsibility for setting technical and strategic direction across the entire Time Warner family of companies, which includes HBO, Warner Bros, Time Inc., Time Warner Corporate, and Turner Broadcasting.


Charles Pelton
Contributing Editor
CIO magazine

Charles Pelton has run dozens of business and IT roundtables, moderated IT and other business-focused panels, and hosted executive conferences for CIO, Computerworld and other groups.  A former editor-in-chief of events and research at InformationWeek magazine, Charles founded Modern Media Partners, a conferences production company that focused primarily on the content of live events. Charles has been an IT and business journalist for more than 20 years.


Dale Pickford
Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Business Director
EMC

Dale is an internationally experienced CIO & CTO. He started his career in the UK while earning an Honors Degree in Computer Studies from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and a Degree in Business Studies from Slough Business College. He has over 30 years of international experience deploying state of the art data centers and large scale solutions on a global basis. The last 20 plus years he has held CIO/CTO positions for organizations such as Lockheed Martin, Seisint (now a division of LexisNexis), Ocwen Financial Corp. and more. During this time he has architected, designed and deployed many leading edge solutions. Being an early adopter of centralization and consolidation, deploying multi-site fault tolerant solutions and “cloud” architecture solutions before the term “cloud” as widely used. The results of his achievements have been widely documented in White Papers by EMC, Cisco, Citrix, Sun, IBM and others, along with being the subject of feature articles in many trade magazines. He is recorded as the inventor of a business process that brought together the best in class of; consolidation, diverse location fault tolerant data center deployment, global network infrastructure, VOIP, and artificial intelligence applications to create what has been often called “the call center in the cloud”. The initial deployment of this solution spanned 8 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Far East.


Mark Lesher
Cloud Business Director
EMC

Mark is an Enterprise Cloud Business Director responsible for the strategy and execution of EMC’s Cloud Business for Enterprise clients in the NorthEast. He assists customers in planning and implementing their cloud strategy across both Private and Hybrid cloud environments. During his 15 years with EMC, Mark has served as managers of the Cloud Infrastructure Engineering Team within the EMC Solutions Group, where he was responsible for engineering solutions to enable customers to deploy large scale cloud services securely in both private and public environments. These solutions are leveraged by Service Providers and Enterprise customers to offer best-in-class services to their customer base while reducing costs through resource sharing in multi-tenant environments. Mark has spent time in Japan as the Managing Director of EMC Global Services where he helped build out a consulting services business to support complex engagements. Prior to joining EMC, Mark was a senior manager at Accenture in the financial services organization as well as a Senior Consulting Engineer with AT&T. Mark has his Bachelor of Science in Solid State Electrical Engineering from Brown University.


Brian Whitman
Global Functional Director
EMC

Brian Whitman is a Global Functional Director at EMC, leading a team of Specialist SEs (vSpecialists) who help customers accelerate their Software Defined Datacenter, Hybrid Cloud, and End User Computing efforts through integrated EMC, VMware and Pivotal solutions. With 20 years of experience in the information technology field, Brian has developed a breadth of knowledge in virtualization, storage, and converged infrastructure. Prior to EMC, Brian was a Sr. Systems Engineer at VMware, supporting Enterprise customers in the US.