Chat with the Experts

Mark Webb
Consultant, MKW Ventures

Mark Webb is Principal/Consultant at MKW Ventures Consulting LLC. He is currently working in the areas of SSD and semiconductor technology and competitive analysis as well as SSD business and market development. Mark works with SSD OEM and ODM companies, storage providers, controller companies, and semiconductor manufacturers.

Vic Ye
Flash Analysis Manager, SiliconGo

_bio

Brandon Hoff
Director Product Management, Broadcom

Proven ability to lead in an executive position, drive corporate strategy, build and manage marketing, engineering, and sales teams. Extensive knowledge and understanding of customers and markets to drive corporate strategy, innovation, product development, messaging, and investor value. Extraordinary combination of advanced engineering and marketing with the passion to build the business to bring the customer a solution they will buy.

Ron Herrmann
Director Sales Engineering, E8 Storage

25+ years selling and supporting computer software, hardware and networks... Specialties: Storage, networking, backup and recovery, SAN, DR, software, etc, etc...

Michael Krause
VP and Fellow, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

VP and Fellow at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) within the corporate CTO organization. He is a member of the PCI-SIG Board of Directors. Since 2001, he has co-authored numerous PCI-SIG specifications, as well as co-chaired multiple technical workgroups. He is the HPE technical lead for PCI Express, as well as a variety of interconnect and fabric technologies covering multiple market segments.

Ahmet Houssein
VP Marketing and Strategic Development, Solarflare

Ahmet Houssein is responsible for establishing marketing strategies and implementing programs to drive revenue growth, enter new markets, and expand brand awareness to support Solarflare’s continuous development and global expansion. He has over twenty-five years of experience in the server, storage, data center, and networking industries, and held senior level executive positions in product development, marketing, and business development at Intel and Honeywell. Most recently, Houssein was SVP/GM at QLogic where he successfully delivered first to market with 25Gb Ethernet products securing design wins at HP and Dell.  A key leader in creating the INFINIBAND and PCI-Express industry standards, Houssein is a recipient of the Intel Achievement Award. He was also a founding board member of the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), a global organization of 400 companies. He was educated in London, UK and holds an Electrical Engineering Degree equivalent.

Sean Yang
Research Director, TrendFocus

Research Head of NAND Flash Division. 2.) Coverage: Memory Industry (special focus on NAND Flash) 3.) Coverage: Downstream hardware such as smartphone, tablet, PC and consumer electronics.

Tom Friend
Director Industry Standards, Toshiba

An expert in the art of engaging competing personalities, with the skills to lead in a matrix organization; Thomas has a proven history in creating consensus from chaos and ambiguity. Thomas spent his early professional career in Silicon Valley honing his hardware and software design skills. Moving back to the Seattle area in 1985, Thomas quickly found his place in device drivers, low-level file systems work and operating system internals. Through the years, he has acquired significant skills in managing engineering teams, start-up culture, business development and communications to all levels.

John Geldman
Director of Industry Standards, Toshiba

Storage interface leader, mover and shaker: * architect for ground-breaking technical developments * adept at guiding standards organizations * adept at helping organizations reach copyright & IP agreements * adept in technical communications (within the standards community, within product * development and with customers/partners)

Don Jeanette
VP, TrendFocus

DON JEANETTE is leading our NAND/SSD work and is a major contributor to our Cloud, Hyperscale, & Enterprise and HDD programs. Prior to joining TRENDFOCUS, Don was Toshiba’s Sr. Director of Marketing, responsible for storage products marketing and new business development for Toshiba’s SSDs and HDDs. He brings 17 years in marketing and product management background, including marketing support for OEM, data center, and distribution sales, product planning and roadmap alignment. He started at Fujitsu in 1999 and also worked in various marketing and business development roles at Marvell and Infoseek. Don received a Bachelor’s Degree from Central Connecticut State University and an MBA from San Jose State University. Don has also taught Management, Communication, and Ethics courses at the University of Phoenix.

Eric Burgener
Research Director Storage, IDC

Eric Burgener serves as a Research Director for IDC’s Storage Practice, which includes Storage Systems, Software and Solutions research offerings, quarterly trackers, end-user research as well as advisory services and consulting programs. Mr. Burgener’s areas of coverage include flash (from a solutions not a component point of view) and software-defined storage, and he is an active participant in the IT Buyers Research Program at IDC. He has worked with enterprise storage technologies since 1991, including both hardware and software-based solutions. For most of his career on the vendor side, Mr. Burgener worked with emerging open systems technologies, including high availability in the early 1990s, replication, SAN management and storage virtualization in the late 1990s, continuous data replication and most recently flash and software-defined storage for use in virtual environments.

Mike McKean
Director, Encore Semi

Mike has 30 years of experience in the design, marketing, business development and application of semiconductors and systems. Mike is currently driving business development and firmware engineering for Encore Semi, Inc., a design services firm focused on ASIC and FW/SW developments. Prior to Encore Semi, Mike served as General Manager for multiple companies in the data storage space including Synapse Design and STMicroelectronics. He was also part of FHOOSH, a cyber security startup, as VP Product Solutions, which received funding in late 2016. Before moving to Colorado in 2005, Mike served in a variety of business development and customer management roles at Agere Systems, both in North American and in Asia. The earlier years of Mike's career were with Motorola Semiconductor in Austin, Texas, Phoenix, Arizona and Japan where he was the Director of Sales and Marketing for the Distribution and Components businesses. While in Japan Mike led the spinoff of ON Semiconductor from Motorola as their Country Manager before joining Lucent to help with the spin-off Agere Systems.

Hakim Alhussien
SSD Architect, Seagate Technology

Specialties: Error correction coding and signal processing for digital wireless communications, magnetic recording channels, and non-volatile NAND flash memories. Focus: Turbo equalization, non-binary LDPC, Polar Codes, Tensor product codes, channel estimation and ISI equalization and sequence detection.

Peter Murray
Technical Evangelist, Virtual Instruments

_bio

David Patmore
Dir Flash Controller Firmware Development, Seagate Technology

Direct a multi-site team of Firmware engineers in crafting the next-generation platform for LSI's Flash Controllers Division. The goal is to effectively create a high-performance and high-quality base that can be extended across a family of processors, covering Enterprise and Consumer-grade storage applications.

John Kim
Director of Storage Marketing, Mellanox

John Kim is Director of Storage Marketing at Mellanox Technologies, where he helps storage customers and vendors benefit from high performance interconnects and RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access). After starting his high tech career in an IT helpdesk, John worked in enterprise software and networked storage, with many years of solution marketing, product management, and alliances at enterprise software companies, followed by 12 years working at NetApp and EMC.

Jon Tanguy
Sr. SSD Product Engineer, Micron

As an SSD Product Engineer, I bring great experience in the data storage industry to bear, helping to develop and deliver Crucial's solid state drive products to the marketplace. In my past, I've been a Technical Marketing Engineer, an Applications Engineer, a Quality/Reliability Engineer, and a Manufacturing Engineer, working on magnetic media and solid state.

Anu Murth
Principal Manager, Seagate Technology

A Seasoned Architecture, Strategy, Marketing and Business Development Executive with a Strong track record of developing New/high-growth businesses, Analyzing and segmenting markets, Defining new product architectures, Creating/Executing technology positioning, Business development, Strategic insight, Technology Evangelization. Enterprise Storage is evolving dramatically with Hyperscale and the cloud. Change is happening faster than expected and will be more disruptive to, and have a profound impact on the industry than most hype predicts. The challenge is to move faster and be more creative in enabling this transition than the competition.

Chris Bross
CTO, DriveSavers

Chris Bross is Chief Technology Officer at DriveSavers, a worldwide leader in secure data recovery. He joined DriveSavers in 1995, and is celebrating his 20th year of watching storage devices fail in all kinds of unique ways! Today he manages key technical alliances and guides the R&D team for solid state devices and emerging storage technologies.

Robin England
Senior Research and Development Engineer, Kroll OnTrack

_bio

Wayne Rickard
VP Business Development, Radian Technologies

Prior to taking on the role of V.P. of Business Development, Wayne was Radian’s first advisor and helped build out the company’s extended leadership team and strategic initiatives. Wayne has been a pioneer in storage networking, working hands on with the early versions of fibre channel and initiating standardization efforts through industry consortiums such as SNIA and FCIA. He was Co-Founder and held V.P. of Engineering and CTO roles at Gadzoox Networks, an early leader in fibre channel SAN switches. As a Director of Engineering at Emulex, Wayne led an Advanced Technology group that developed the industry’s first fibre channel HBA. He has held V.P. and division Chief Technologist positions at Seagate and been an Advisory Board member at PMC Sierra.

Steve Sicola
Corporate Fellow, WD

I have been in Storage and Systems for 41 years. Working first right out of high school for the engineers and physicists who worked not the first computer for Grace Hopper. I am known as gumby in this industry as a senior executive, technical visionary, architect for hardware and software and systems, all with rigor and endless forward moving and looking products, from the first array controller, the first backplane controller, the first SAN with Brocade @ DEC and Compaq, the first modular arrays, and the first autonomic storage device, ISE, done at Seagate and sold through spin out at Xiotech.

Osso Vahabzadeh
Staff Design Engineer, Texas LDPC

_bio

Roddy Luo
Marketing Manager, SiliconGo

_bio

David Wu
General Manager, SiliconGo

_bio

Eduardo Duarte
Worldwide Product Manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

_bio

Peter Onufryk
Fellow NVM Solutions, Microsemi

_bio

Luca Bert
NVMe Solution Architecture, Seagate Technology

Luca Bert is Director SSD Architecture and Advanced Development at Seagate. He currently leads firmware/software architecture and advanced development, focusing on a long-term technology innovation roadmap in NVMe and NVMeoF. He has over 30 years of storage industry experience, including stints at Olivetti, AMI, LSI, and Avago. His main technology areas are storage controllers, RAID, and storage architectures. He holds 9 issued US patents (plus 17 international ones), with additional 29 US patents filed (plus 19 international ones). He earned a Bachelor’s degree (Laurea) with honors in applied physics from the University of Turin.

Barbara Murphy
VP Marketing, Weka.io

Barbara Murphy brings over 20 years of marketing leadership for storage systems to her role as Vice President of Marketing for Weka.IO. Prior to joining the company she was VP of Marketing for the Converged Infrastructure business unit at HGST where she led the marketing efforts for HGST’s emerging cloud infrastructure products.

Gerry Smith
VP and CTO Cloud Systems, Seagate Technolog

Engineering and business executive with extensive experience leading muti-geo teams and delivering highly successful storage products to the market. Deep technical skills in the storage and embedded systems domain. Strong business acumen and customer communication skills. Currently responsible for all Architecture and Advanced Development activities for Seagate's Cloud Systems Group.

Mark Clark
Senior Director Technology, Intermolecular

Experienced in novel processing and materials development. Background in thin film deposition and analytical characterization techniques.

Joy Watanabe
Senior Director Customer Enablement, Intermolecular

_bio

Terry Hulett
VP/GM System Solutions, Everspin Technologies

Terry Hulett is Vice President, Systems Engineering & GM Systems Solutions Group. Terry and his team are responsible for growing Everspin's capabilities and business strategy as a world class solutions provider, developing the expended memory ecosystem for spin torque MRAM, and accelerating the success of customers integrating ST-MRAM in their storage and memory applications.

Barry Hoberman
Emerging Memory Expert

Barry Hoberman has more than 35 years of management and engineering expertise in the semiconductor industry. He most recently served as chief marketing officer at Crocus Technology, a semiconductor company. Prior to Crocus Technology, Hoberman was the founder and CEO of inSilicon, a leading semiconductor IP supplier, which was acquired by Synopsys in 2002. His leadership experience also includes CEO positions with Virtual Silicon and T-Zero Technologies. Earlier in his career, Hoberman held management positions at AMD and Monolithic Memories.

Chanson Lin
President, EmBestor Technology

_bio

Tom McCormick
Chief Engineer/Technologist, Swissbit

Thomas McCormick is currently Chief Engineer/Technologist at Swissbit, where he leads market focused R&D for product development and full life cycle support. He has over twenty years experience designing PC and embedded computer systems, including over fifteen years focused on flash memory product research and development. He holds a PhD in Computer Engineering from Northeastern University. His on-going research is focused on flash memory and next generation non-volatile memory systems for highly reliable storage in embedded applications. He has presented at Flash Memory Summit, the Non-Volatile Memory Workshop, and has published an article on embedded flash in EE Times. He also holds an MBA and an MS in Computing Engineer from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and an MSME and BSME (summa cum laude) from Drexel University.

Kent Smith
Sr Director Product Marketing, Seagate

Kent Smith is responsible for outbound marketing of all Seagate Flash and SSD Products. Prior to Seagate, in 2008, Kent joined SandForce as the Sr. Director of Marketing, which was acquired by LSI in 2012, which was acquired by Avago in 2014, and finally sold to Seagate that same year. Through the last eight years, He has written dozens of articles, blogs and presentations on helping users understand how flash technology is different from HDDs.

Mike Murphy
Computer Science Professor, Foothill College

_bio

Jim Ballingall
Executive Director, Industry-Academia Partnership

Jim Ballingall is Executive Director of the Industry-Academia Partnership (IAP), an association dedicated to pushing forward the next generation of cloud technologies to meet the demands of the 2020 data center and its end customers. IAP members include leading companies and the top computer science and engineering programs in the world (www.industry-academia.org). Jim serves on the High Performance Computing Committee of the IEEE Computer Society and is President of Ballingall Consulting.

Dennis Martin
President, Demartek

Dennis Martin is the founder and President of Demartek, a computer industry analyst organization with its own ISO 17025 accredited test lab. Demartek focuses on lab validation testing and performance testing of storage and related hardware and software products and is recognized by the EPA as an official test lab for ENERGY STAR Data Center Storage. Dennis has been working in the Information Technology industry since 1980, primarily involved in software development and project management in mainframe, UNIX, and Windows environments. These include a variety of large and small end-user customers, and engineering and marketing positions for storage vendors such as StorageTek.

_name
Product Marketing Manager, Advantest

_bio

Axel Kloth
CEO, SSRLabs

Axel is the Founder, President & CEO of Scalable Systems Research Labs Inc. Prior to SSRLabs, he was tasked with implementing a private cloud for a highly customized CAD Design System with the goal to unify mechanical, thermal and electrical design for probe cards at FormFactor. This tool set was supposed to be driven by a work flow process, and once fully implemented, it was intended to feed into a BI System such that all work effort can be monitored in real-time. Preceding FormFactor, he was a founder, CTO and member of the executive management team of a Silicon Valley startup focused on real-time image and video analysis. For that startup, Parimics, he created the underlying architecture for and supervised the implementation of a massively parallel chipset targeted at image and video analysis in real-time.

MP Divakar
Founder and CEO, Stack Design Automation

Dr. MP Divakar is the CEO of Stack Design Automation, a company focused on developing ECAD-MCAD integration software platform, design stacks, services and training for next-generation electronics including MEMS, 3DIC, Printed Electronics, Wearable & Stretchable Electronics and the Internet-of-Things. He has more than 18 years of experience in electronic packaging development in microwave-, millimeter-wave and RF-communications, power electronics and MEMS at component-, module- and system-level applications. He has also worked on hardware development for semiconductor test and high speed communication fabric. His expertise includes electronic & optoelectronic packaging (JEDEC, IPC, MIL-STD, & Telcordia), thermal and thermo-mechanical modeling, characterization and finite element simulation.

Erich Haratsch
Director Engineering, Seagate

Dr. Erich F. Haratsch is Director of Engineering, Flash Channel Architecture at Seagate Technology. He leads the development of advanced signal processing, error correction coding and NAND management features for solid-state drive controllers. Prior to joining Seagate, Dr. Haratsch was Director of Engineering at LSI Corp., where he worked on Sandforce branded solid-state drive controllers. Earlier in his career, Dr. Haratsch developed signal processing and error correction technologies for multiple generations of HDD controllers at LSI and Agere Systems. He previously worked at Bell Labs, where he invented new equalizer and decoder architectures for Gigabit Ethernet over copper and optical communications. Dr. Haratsch regularly speaks at many industry events, is the author of over 40 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, and holds 77 U.S. patents. He also is a Senior Member of IEEE, and earned his MS and PhD degrees from the Technical University of Munich (Germany).

Shiva Planjery
Co-Founder and CEO, Codelucida

Shiva received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Arizona in Aug. 2013, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cergy-Pontoise, France in Dec. 2012, under a dual doctoral degree program. His doctoral research focused on the design and analysis of new low-complexity finite-precision decoding algorithms for LDPC codes. His research experience in the field of LDPC codes spans more than 8 years.

Howard Marks
Founder and Chief Scientist, DeepStorage

In over 25 years as an independent consultant Howard has built and/or reengineered server and storage infrastructures and networks for organizations from Borden Foods and The State University of New York at Purchase to accounting and law firms. He started testing and reviewing products at PC Magazine in the late 80s and has written hundreds of articles and product reviews for Network World, Network Computing and InformationWeek amongst others. He’s spoken at Comdex, Interop, Networks Expo and developed training programs for organizations including JP Morgan and American Express. Where other analysts typically have marketing or sales backgrounds Howard’s continuing involvement with users facing real problems brings a perspective those users find more useful.

Marc Staimer
President, Dragon Slayer Consulting

Marc Staimer is the founder, senior analyst and CDS at Dragon Slayer Consulting in Beaverton, Ore. The consulting practice has focused on the areas of strategic planning, product development and market development. With more than 30 years of marketing, sales and business experience in infrastructure, storage, server, software and virtualization, Marc is considered one of the industry's leading experts.

Tanya Freedman
VP Group Services, Connetics Communications

As Talent Acquisition professional with 20 + years of experience, I co -founded Connetics from scratch.I wanted to create a unique niche "hub"​ where both passive and active candidates could "​ put their feelers out " to evaluate new opportunities throughout their careers. My true passion is to partner with key influential companies and help them to grow through proactive relationship recruitment .I love finding suitable candidates and helping them understand the true potential of the opportunity and how it will benefit them in the long term.

Arthur Sainio
Director Product Marketing, SMART Modular

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.

Jeff Chang
VP Marketing/Business Development, AgigA Tech

Mr. Chang joined the AgigA Tech team in March 2010 as our Vice President of Marketing. He has provided strategic direction in senior marketing roles in both start-up and public company environments. Mr. Chang has managed product portfolios that span multiple end markets including PC, consumer electronics, mobile handsets and operator-class communication systems. Most recently, he was the Senior Director of Marketing at Entropic Communications, a leading fabless semiconductor company in the development of home networking solutions. Prior to Entropic, Mr. Chang was Vice President of Marketing at Staccato Communications, where he helped establish the company as a leader in Ultrawideband (UWB) and Wireless USB solutions. Earlier in his career, Mr. Chang spent over 7 years at Cypress Semiconductor where he held various roles in marketing and business management. As the Business Unit Director of the USB Product Line at Cypress, he helped grow the business from its early stages to the industry leader in USB controllers. Mr. Chang holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington.

Neal Christiansen
Development Lead, Microsoft

Neal Christiansen is a Principal Software Development Lead for the NTFS file system team in the Windows Storage, File Systems and Protection Group at Microsoft (Redmond, WA). Neal joined Microsoft in 1999 as a member of the Core File Systems Group working in the File System Filters team. In 2002 he became the Lead for the File System Filters team and was involved with the design and implementation of the Windows FilterManager. In 2007 he became the Lead for the NTFS development team. Neal has 30+ years of system software development experience. He led the design and implementation of the NSS File System for NetWare while at Novell. Neal also led the design and implementation of the Motorola 68000 based WMCS operating system while at Wicat Systems. Neal has a BS in Computer Science from Brigham Young University.

George Crump
Chief Steward, Storage Switzerland

George Crump is President and Founder of Storage Switzerland. With 25 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS and SAN. Prior to founding Storage Switzerland he was CTO at one the nations largest storage integrators where he was in charge of technology testing, integration and product selection.

Syed S Hussain
Director, Winbond Technology

I have been in the semiconductor and systems industry for last 20 years with emphasis in business development and Marketing. Worked at companies like Silicon Storage Technology Inc, Paxcelnet Inc, Infineon Technologies, LSI Logic, NEC Electronics, Integrated Device Technology and National Semiconductor.

Dr. Alan Messer
CEO, InnovationShift

Dr. Alan Messer has been a worldwide leader in advanced software and intelligent services for connected consumers for 20+ years. Currently he is working on a stealth startup, but previously Alan was Vice President of Software and Innovation and CTO of Global Connected Car eXperience at General Motors where he led GM’s work on products, platforms and future technologies for the Connected Car and Services. Before General Motors, Alan was Vice President of Advanced Software Technology at Samsung Electronics covering Internet of Things, Intelligence, Privacy, Mobile Social/Media, Content Delivery, and Cloud Services. Alan has also worked at a variety of other consumer electronics companies including HP, Sony Electronics and startups. Alan also serves on numerous industry organizations, industry organization board of directors and with analysts/media.

Chris Budd
Director Engineering, SMART High-Reliability Solutions

I have been working with solid-state storage since December 2003 when I started at Adtron. I have been with the same company ever since -- we were just bought out and renamed a couple of times. My background is in embedded firmware development, but I am now focused on creating an environment where engineers can succeed and produce great designs in shorter development cycles.

Tom Matson
Business Development Manager, One Stop Systems

_bio

Jean Bozman
VP/Principal Analyst, Hurwitz and Associates

Jean S. Bozman is a well-respected IT professional with more than 20 years of experience covering the worldwide markets for operating environments, servers and the workloads that run on servers. Ms. Bozman began her career at IDC in 1996, focusing on the worldwide market for server operating systems. In her current role as research vice president in IDC's Enterprise Server Group, she analyzes the worldwide server market and she manages the Clustering and Availability Software (CLAS) market research for IDC.

Steven Lamb
Co-Founder and CEO, ioFABRIC

Steven forged himself as a data storage expert with server-side caching at Nevex Virtual Technologies and now with ioFABRIC, he has a game-changing product in the data storage arena. Steven is a successful serial entrepreneur on his fifth venture, bringing a broad range of strategic positioning, management skills, and leadership experience. Steven’s first company, Border Network Technologies, became the second largest firewall vendor worldwide. Others included INEX, Nevex Software and the most recent, NEVEX Virtual Technologies, a cache acceleration company.

Michael Abraham
Business Line Manager, Micron

Experienced business leader working in the semiconductors industry bringing new products to the right markets and customers. Skilled in 3D XPoint™ and NAND Flash memories, Go-to-Market Strategy, Customer Enablement, and Business Development.

Jeongdong Choe
Senior Technical Fellow, TechInsights

I am a trusted consulting engineer professional as a senior technical fellow at TechInsights. I have 26+ year professional on cutting-edge manufacturing technologies for semiconductor products including DRAM, 3D NAND FLASH, SRAM/Logic and emerging memory such as STT-MRAM/PCRAM/ReRAM/FeRAM and 3D XPoint Memory. I'm an author of over 100 US filed patents, manufacturing expertise in high technologies including direct experience on semiconductor process flow, unit process and equipment for photo-mask, photo-lithography, plasma/wet etching, CMP, CVD/PVD/ALD deposition, IIP/diffusion and annealing.

Jim Pappas
Marketing Director, Intel

Mr. Pappas brings more than 30 years of industry experience with building, running and managing dozens of successful industry associations and cross–industry initiatives. He is currently the Chair of the Solid State Disk Form Factor Working Group and co–Chair of the InfiniBand Trade Association and was also a Founding Director of the PCI Special Interest Group and The Green Grid as well as Founding Chairman of the USB Special Interest Group.

Paul Grun
Storage I/O and Interconnect Architect, Cray

Paul Grun is a senior technologist in Cray’s Storage and Data Management group. During his more than 30 year career he has been intimately involved in all aspects of server I/O beginning with storage for large mainframe systems, turning to high performance network architecture and now focusing on applying I/O technology to building large scale systems at Cray Inc. His association with advanced networking technology stretches back to prior to the emergence of InfiniBand when as a member of Intel’s technical team he contributed to the creation of its predecessor technology, known as Next Generation I/O (NGIO). He went on to serve as one of Intel’s representatives to the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) where as a member of the Link Working Group he played a key role in creating the InfiniBand transport protocol. Since then he has served as chair of the Technical Working Group and as chair and principle author for the working group responsible for creating the RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) specification, and he has been influential in the OFA since prior to its inception. In addition to his current role serving as the OFA’s Vice Chair, he is also active as a member of the IBTA’s Steering Committee.

Sundip Arora
Dir Product Marketing, Kaminario

Effective marketing and product leader. Focused on creating true business value through innovation and process excellence. Enterprise Storage and Data Intelligence domain expertise.

Eugene McCabe
EVP Enterprise Computing & Storage, Newisys

Eugene McCabe is known for his hard-driving style, his innovation, execution, and leadership capabilities. He has more than 20 years of experience in both engineering and supply chain. Well-rounded, McCabe has a track record of managing businesses to profitability, through financial, operational, engineering and technology leadership.

Tim Stammers
Senior Analyst, 451 Research

Tim Stammers is a Senior Analyst at 451 Research, where he covers flash- and disk-based primary storage. Before joining 451 Research in 2013, Tim was Senior Storage Analyst at Ovum. He has over 20 years of experience as an IT industry analyst and journalist, and has also worked as a gas turbine development engineer at Rolls-Royce, and a mainframe systems engineer at the London Electricity Board.

Tom Coughlin
Founder, Coughlin Associates

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates is a widely respected digital storage analyst as well as business and technology consultant. He has over 35 years in the data storage industry with engineering and management positions at high profile companies.

Eyal David
CTO, Kaminario

As CTO, Eyal David is responsible for charting Kaminario's technical vision and is the company's lead technology evangelist. Eyal joined Kaminario in 2009 as a developer then software team leader. He has also held the positions of VP of Product Management and VP of Business Development at Kaminario. Prior to Kaminario Eyal led the advanced algorithms group for a large enterprise. Eyal holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a M.Sc. in Computer Science from The Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya.

Rick Kumar
VP Engineering, Newisys

Top-performing engineering management executive with stellar record of success with technological innovator. Recognized for translating strategic concepts into action and delivering on goals. Demonstrated track record of executing complex, global projects that meet best-in-class quality, cost, and delivery expectations. Readily accepts challenges, masters new responsibilities and produces outstanding results in line with business objectives. Adept at assembling cross-functional teams and aligning resources. A talented team leader who excels at bringing out the best in employees; respected by executive management, peers and direct reports.

Lee Stein
Consultant, Stein Writes

During his extensive marketing career, Lee Stein has applied innovative and unique marketing and sales approaches to grow business for his broad range of clients. His first client, Seiko Instruments, launched his career-long love of advanced technologies. He has since served clients in a wide variety of semiconductor, electronics, software, IT, Internet security, and advanced engineering fields.

Aravindan Gopalakrishnan
Product Line Manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Result oriented product management leader with a track record of successfully taking multi-million dollar hardware and software products from definition to launch. Deep experience in setting product portfolio level strategy and direction. Expertise in the primary storage market as well as the enterprise system software market. Over 15 years of experience in the technology space with a background in software development, web analytics and product management.

Mohamad El-Batal
Sr. Director of Architecture, Seagate

20+ years experience in creating leading edge data-storage architectures, with special emphasis on innovating quality-of-service, data-integrity, high-availability and optimal cost/performance balance. Award-winning record of highly efficient visionary storage solutions. Pioneering and revolutionizing data-storage architectures, with optimal IO protocols, data-path acceleration and system topologies, and rich storage patent portfolio with 26 issued patents, and 9+ in process. Strong history of initiating and influencing new storage-industry standards, driving leading storage vendors’ roadmaps, and enabling customers with evolved and powerful storage solutions.

William Oppermann
Co-Founder, MPSTOR

Mr. William Oppermann Co-founded MPSTOR Limited (Alternate Name MPSTOR) in 2005 and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Oppermann has over 20 years experience in leading edge technology development.

_name
_tile, _company

_bio