IT Conference Overview

Peter Laird is the Managing Architect for Oracle's WebCenter product group. In this role, Peter leads the architecture team and focuses on the future of the portal and enterprise application spaces. Prior to this role, Peter served as Chief Architect of the BEA SaaS Platform (a PaaS offering) and has continued to focus heavily on the cloud/SaaS/PaaS spaces. Prior to those roles, Peter was a long time architect and developer on BEA's WebLogic Portal product team.

Ben has spent most of his career standing in the intersection where infrastructure and application development meet. He is the managing partner at ServiceCloud, a consultancy that helps companies navigate through this *new* cloud computing world. ServiceCloud works with their clients to help them identify what belongs in the cloud and what doesn't and then they manage the whole solution for them. Previously, Ben founded and led ThinSpace, a mobile application integration firm. Before that, Ben founded and led MSB Systems, a networking consultancy and ERP integration firm.

For the past 25 years, Jim Salem has been a pioneer in distributed computing and in the software/platform as a service space. He has extensive experience in all aspects of internet service delivery including scalable hosting infrastructure design, automated application provisioning, efficient storage and server management, and 24x7 operations. Since 1999, Salem has served as Chief Architect of Intuit QuickBase where he has been responsible for designing, building, and delivering fast, reliable PaaS and SaaS services to hundreds of thousands of users in more than half of the Fortune 100 and thousands of smaller businesses. He has also held senior management positions at Intuit in engineering and internet operations. Prior to Intuit, Salem served as Director of Web Hosting Engineering at GTE Internetworking (BBN Planet) where he supported thousands of servers in ten data centers. Earlier, he was engineering manager at Thinking Machines, which developed a 65,536 processor parallel computing platform. Salem earned a B.S.E.E. degree from M.I.T. in 1984. He is based in Massachusetts.

Andrew Gross has over 16 years of experience in the design, development, administration and security of complex IT operations systems. In his current role as Chief Scientist and Architect at StackSafe, Gross is responsible for product architecture, evaluation of new technologies and research efforts. An expert in DSP algorithm design, architectural evaluation and source code review, Gross has extensive experience providing strategic consultation to companies on a variety of mission-critical operations and security issues. Prior to joining StackSafe, Gross served as a key software architect for Zenph Studios, an entertainment technology company. Gross also held the title of Chief Architect for Counterpane Internet Security, where he was responsible for the design of production operations and real-time forensic analysis systems in support of the Secure Operations Center. Gross conducted security research for the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), where he was responsible for covering a broad range of areas, including dynamic network monitoring and kernel auditing. In addition, he developed new tools for intrusion analysis and tracing and eventual system recovery. He also served as a network and security administrator for SDSC. Gross received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 1997, where he wrote the seminal dissertation on computer forensic analysis.

Mr. Armijo is co-founder and Senior Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Product Management for Cloud Computing firm 3tera, where he is responsible for product and service definition as well as building customer and partner relationships. Prior to 3tera, he was Director of Marketing with SolarFlare Communications, a fabless semiconductor startup developing 10GBASE-T. Earlier, he was co-founder and Director of Marketing for fabric computing pioneering startup Topspin Communications. At Topspin, he developed the company's product roadmap for transparently combining LAN, SAN and server area networks into a virtualized resource pool, now Cisco's V-Frame. Bert has also held management positions with Nortel Networks, Bay Networks, Rapid City Communications, Cipher Data Products, California Peripherals, CMS Enhancements, Everex and Mobius Technologies.

Michael Baum Chief Executive Officer & Co-founder Michael is an unconventional chief executive with revolutionary ideas. He co-founded Splunk in 2004 with two friends and an ambition to assist humans in the battle against increasing IT complexity and the onslaught of machine generated data. Under his leadership, Splunk has quickly grown from a geeky idea to a disruptive, fast growing company and an amazing place to work. In just 24 months the company has delivered immediate benefit to more than 500 enterprises, service providers and government organizations and more than 175,000 users around the world. Michael is also co-founder of Collation, acquired by IBM's Tivoli Group, Arthas, acquired by Yahoo, 280, acquired by Infoseek and Reality Online, acquired by Reuters. He was a software engineer at IBM's Silicon Valley Laboratory and a member of the original IBM PC development team. Michael has a B.S. in Computer Science from Drexel University and an M.B.A. from the Wharton Business School. He pontificates and speaks regularly about the intersection of humans and complex IT systems.

Vip has a demonstrated track record of more than 12 years of success in the design, implementation and management of multi-disciplinary engineering initiatives geared toward developing new and innovative technology solutions. In his extensive small and large firm experience, Vip has built strong and successful engineering organizations both on- and off-shore, re-oriented product directions from hardware to software, and worked with leading- edge technologies in the networking, virtualization, security and embedded space. His experience includes management and leadership positions at various companies, such as Verint Video Systems, Eden Networks, Cognio, Zagros Networks, Seneca Networks and Hughes Network Systems. Software developed by Vip and his teams has been deployed in large enterprises, such as Ford, ED Jones, Target, Mobil, Home Depot and Exxon. Vip has been granted three patent, and has filed many more in the QoS, Virtualization and security spaces.