Catalyst Conference

Ken Agress is a Research Director with the Gartner for Technical Professionals research team, covering unified communications, contact centers and real-time communications. He focuses on helping companies select the right technologies to address business needs by providing a flexible, scalable and reliable infrastructure that offers services the enterprise can leverage under a range of conditions. This coverage focuses on selecting and deploying platforms that meet integration, collaboration and management requirements as a part of a broader enterprise architecture. This builds on his extensive consulting experience to provide relevant, functional advice on key communications and collaboration issues. He most frequently interacts with clients on call centers, contact centers, multichannel issues, VoIP or IP telephony, UC, and videoconferencing.

Jim Berenbaum is a Research Director with Gartner IT Professionals Research. Mr. Berenbaum produces detailed research and analysis of mobility, cellular, wireless, network, and related enterprise infrastructure architectures, technologies, design approaches, and techniques. He analyzes carrier mobile data and voice communications services and technologies that bring mobility to the expanding range of mobile devices. Mr. Berenbaum also works with base network technologies such as routing, MPLS WANs, QoS, and IPv6. He has more than 30 years of experience in the design and implementation of network and computing components and enterprise systems. Prior to joining Gartner, he was the Chief Network and Telecom Architect for the enterprise infrastructure at Lockheed Martin, Enterprise Business Services.

Gunnar Berger is a Research Director for Gartner's IT Professionals service. He covers desktop, application and server virtualization. Mr. Berger has spent the majority of his career as a specialized consultant focused in what is now called end-user computing. He specializes in desktop virtualization, which includes storage, networking, server, personalization and virtualization technologies.

Danny Brian is a Research Director in the Application Platform Strategies (APS) team with Technical Professionals Research. His research covers user experience design (e.g., usability, human-computer interaction and information architecture), presentation technologies (e.g., HTMLx, JavaScript, Flash and Silverlight), and requirements management applied to successful user interfaces (e.g., use cases, personas, scenarios and prototyping).

Matthew Brisse is a Storage Research Director in Gartner for Technology Professionals (GTP) group. He covers a variety of enterprise storage hardware and software topics. Topics range from storage efficiency, consolidation, virtualization, replication, backup and recovery, to storage designs for server hosted virtual desktops and cloud-based implementations.

David is the VP Product Management for Axiomatics. His main area of expertise is SOA security and IAM. David has published several papers and contributed to several books on the topic of SOA security. David is also a member of the OASIS XACML Technical Committee where he is currently authoring a JSON profile for XACML. David holds a Master’s of Engineering from the French National Institute of Applied Sciences, INSA Lyon. He is also a Sun Certified Architect (SCEA) and a Certified Security Testing Professional (CSTP).

Larry Cannell is a Research Director in the Gartner for Technical Professionals Collaboration and Content Strategies service. Mr. Cannell covers enterprise collaboration and social software, search, content management, and open-source collaboration and content solutions.

Anton Chuvakin is a Research Director in Gartner's GTP Security and Risk Management group.

Marcus Collins is the Agenda Manager for Data Management Strategies on the Gartner for Technical Professionals research team. He covers data architecture, data and information integration, database management system evaluation and selection, database architecture, and emerging technologies (big data, NoSQL). In addition to providing a technical focus, Mr. Collins looks at data management through the lens of international business, having recently completed an M.B.A. in the EU.

Mark Cortner is Research Director with the Gartner for Technical Professionals research team. Mr. Cortner provides in-depth research and analysis of voice and visual real-time communications, including unified communications and collaboration applications and cloud-based services. The topics he currently focuses on include voice over IP, unified messaging, presence, mobile unified communications including voice and video over wireless LANs, and video-based communications and collaboration including enterprise streaming media technologies.

Guy Creese is a Vice President and Research Director for Gartner Research, in the Gartner for Technical Professionals Collaboration and Content Strategies service. He covers a range of topics at the intersection of collaboration, content management and communications. Technologies covered include content management, mobility, productivity suites, SaaS and Microsoft SharePoint.

Simon Crosby is co-founder and CTO at Bromium Inc. a company leveraging hardware virtualization to transform platform security. Previously Simon was CTO, Data Center & Cloud at Citrix Systems, which acquired XenSource, where he was co-founder and CTO. Along the way, Simon was a Principal Engineer at Intel, and founder & CTO of CPlane Inc., a vendor of virtual switching software. A long time ago, he was a faculty member at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is author of 40 research papers and patents.

Mario de Boer, Ph.D., is an Analyst in the Gartner for Technical Professionals Security and Risk Management Strategies team. He covers endpoint and email encryption, mobile device security, Web browser security, and client virtualization security.

Paul DeBeasi leads the Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) mobility research team. Mr. DeBeasi performs research in many areas of enterprise mobility, including mobile strategy, mobile architecture, bring-your-own-device policies, mobile device management tools, and wireless technology.

Michael Disabato is a research vice president in Gartner for Technical Professionals Research. Mr. Disabato covers wireless and mobility technologies for end-user organizations, mobility policy and governance, and organizational change. Prior to joining Gartner, Mr. Disabato was a senior manager in network engineering for WorldCom Conferencing and held duties at McDonald's Corp. as an enterprise architect for security, network manager, and manager of the applied technology lab. With over 35 years of experience in consulting, application development, networking, security, mobility and technology assessment, Mr. Disabato was named one of the 10 visionaries in 1993 by Communications Week Magazine and one of the 50 Most Influential People in Networking Industry by Network Computing Magazine.

Homan Farahmand is a seasoned business technology management consultant who has been involved in leading transformation and modernization programs for more than 22 years. Mr. Farahmand has worked in multiple industries across North America and Europe, with a primary focus on financial services, insurance, public sector and utilities. His engagements over the last decade have spanned multiple horizontal disciplines, including security and risk management, identity and access management, service-oriented architecture, content and collaboration management, data center infrastructure and operations, benchmarking, and outsourcing.

Chris Gaun is an Analyst with Ideas Research.

Ian Glazer is a Research Vice President and the Agenda Manager on the GTP Identity and Privacy Strategies team. He leads IdPS' coverage for authorization and privacy. Topics within these two main areas include externalized authorization management, XACML, federated authorization, privacy by design, and privacy programs. Other topics he covers include user provisioning, identity and access governance, access certification, role management, identity data quality, and national identity programs. Mr. Glazer is also a member of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) Identity Ecosystem Steering Group's Management Council. As an at-large delegate to the Management Council, he ensures that all voices are heard among the wide range of industries, technologies, and advocates for whom identity, privacy, and NSTIC are crucial.

Erik Heidt is a Research Director on the GTP Security and Risk Management Strategies team. His research focus areas include IT risk management, IT GRC, application security and cryptographic controls. While Mr. Heidt has more than 20 years of IT industry experience, since 2004 he has focused on information security and risk management, including roles in IT risk management, application security and information security program design.

Gary Hein leads the Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) research teams. Gary joined Gartner with the Burton Group acquisition in 2010.

Trent Henry is a Research VP covering identity and security. His primary research topics include authentication, PKI, information protection, and mobility and identity.

Rob High is an IBM Fellow, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Watson Solutions, IBM Software Group. He has overall responsibility to drive Watson Solutions technical strategy and thought leadership. As a key member of the Watson Solutions Leadership team, Rob works collaboratively with the Watson engineering, research, and development teams across IBM. Prior to joining the Watson Solutions team, Rob was Chief Architect for the SOA Foundation and member of the IBM Academy of Technology, Rob championed an open industry architectural definition of the principles of business and IT alignment enabled by SOA and Business Process Optimization, as well as ensuring IBM's software and services portfolio is architecturally grounded to enable for efficient SOA-based solutions. This responsibility extended across the IBM software portfolio, including WebSphere, Rational, Tivoli, Lotus, and Information Management offerings. Rob has 37 years of programming experience and has worked with distributed, objectoriented, component-based transaction monitors for the last 26 years, including SOMObject Server, Component Broker, and the WebSphere Application Server. Rob previously served as Chief Architect for the WebSphere foundation with architectural responsibility for the WebSphere Application Server and the related products integrated on that core runtime.

Kyle Hilgendorf works as a Research Director in Gartner for Technology Professionals (GTP). He covers public cloud computing and hybrid cloud computing. Areas of focus include cloud computing technology, providers, IaaS, SaaS, managed hosting and co-location. He brings 10 years of enterprise IT operations and architecture experience.

Karen A. Hobert is an IT Strategy Consultant, with deep practical and market expertise in messaging, collaboration, communications, content management and social software technologies. She brings more than 23 years of experience in secure messaging, collaboration technology and operational strategy to Gartner Consulting. She works with enterprises as well as education and government clients to develop security-focused strategies for their collaboration, communications and social technology needs. She has worked on projects as broad as developing high-level strategies for implementing a collaboration services platform or as discrete as building a business case for cloud-based email services. Ms. Hobert has extensive working knowledge of communications, collaboration and social technologies, including technologies from Microsoft, IBM, Google and best-of-breed vendors. Additional areas of expertise include collaborative application design and Web development platforms. She is a contributor on numerous market analysis reports, articles and white papers on collaboration, information management, collaborative application development and software platform integration. She has also developed courses and workshops on programming and deploying Web-based business process applications.

Carlie Idoine is the Research Director for Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics in the Data Management Strategy team of Gartner Technical Professionals. She is an accomplished IT professional with more than 25 years of experience in BI and analytics. Ms. Idoine provides a unique blend of business and industry knowledge, leading successful efforts to integrate new technologies into effective business solutions. Her experience includes design, implementation and communication of an enterprise business intelligence strategy and comprehensive BI program, evaluating and managing the enterprise BI and analytics software portfolio, business needs analysis, BI tool and process support, custom solution analysis, design and development, and training development and instruction.

Richard Jones is the managing vice president for Data Center and Mobile/Wireless Strategies in the Gartner Technical Professionals Research group. He covers hardware infrastructure as a service (cloud computing), disaster recovery, business continuity, x86 server operating systems, high availability and clustering, and server and desktop virtualization. Mr. Jones brings 27 years of experience in technical analysis, engineering, and project and product management in the software industry.

Sean Kenefick covers many aspects of application platform strategies, including the software development life cycle (SDLC), development methodologies, software and mobile device testing, build and application life cycle management tools, DevOps, and open-source platforms and software.

Eric Knipp is managing vice president of the Application Platform Strategies (APS) research team in Gartner for Technology Professionals (GTP). The APS team covers topics related to application platforms, application development, and application maintenance. Mr. Knipp is based in Plano, Texas.

Kirk Knoernschild is an analyst covering many aspects of application platform strategies, including development platforms, programming languages and frameworks, mobile application platforms, and the software development life cycle (SDLC).

Ramon Krikken is an Analyst in the Gartner for Technical Professionals Security and Risk Management Strategies team. He covers software/application security; mobile application security and service-oriented architecture (SOA) security; structured and unstructured data security, including database security, data masking, redaction and tokenization; encryption and key management; security monitoring and security analytics; security metrics; and virtualization and cloud computing security as it pertains to the other categories.

Doug Laney is a research vice president for Gartner Research, where he covers business analytics solutions and projects, performance management, and data-governance-related issues.

Eric Maiwald covers infrastructure security, where he advises clients on technical controls (such as firewalls, NAC and intrusion detection) and on overall security architecture. Mr. Maiwald also covers mobile security (such as controls on mobile devices) and overall mobility strategy (including the development of a mobility reference architecture). He has more than 20 years of experience in information security as a security engineer, security officer, consultant and analyst.

Anne Thomas Manes is a VP and distinguished analyst and directs research for the Application Platform Strategies (APS) team in the Gartner for Technology Professionals (GTP) research group. Ms. Manes leads research on application development and delivery strategies, with a specific focus on BPM, SOA, and cloud computing. The APS team comprises six analysts. Ms. Manes sets the research agenda, acts as mentor to members of the APS team, maintains editorial control over all content produced by the team, and coordinates the research with other service teams in GTP and across Gartner.

Elden Nelson is a principal research analyst with Gartner. He splits his focus between field research projects across all disciplines, and professional effectiveness for IT practitioners. Mr. Nelson's research focus is primarily centered on practical strategies for effective use of social media: how to write, how to gain an audience, how to engage and maintain that audience, and how to both give and get value from social media. Mr. Nelson also works with multiple research teams, mentoring and guiding them through the process of interviewing people, interpreting results, and consolidating and understanding the data coming from Gartner's signature Field Research methodology.

Nick Nikols is a Research Director in the IT Professionals Research group. He is an expert in identity and access management. His current topics of coverage include identity and cloud computing, privileged account management, and directory services. He is well-versed in access governance, provisioning, authorization and security.

Pat Patterson has been working with Internet technologies since 1997, building secure web services and web access management software at Sun Microsystems, and cloud storage infrastructure software at Huawei Technologies. Before joining the platform developer evangelism team at salesforce.com in late 2010, Pat was best known as the community lead for the OpenSSO project. Describing himself as an ‘articulate techie’, Pat hacks all manner of code from Force.com apps down to Linux kernel drivers, writing it all up on Developer Force (http://blogs.developerforce.com/), Superpatterns (http://blog.superpat.com/) and, of course, Twitter (http://twitter.com/metadaddy).

Alessandro Perilli is a research director for Data Center Strategies in the Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) research group. Mr. Perilli covers private cloud computing (mostly infrastructure as a service [IaaS] clouds) and server virtualization. His focus is on private cloud and virtualization management includes the following topics: self-service provisioning (portals and service catalogs), orchestration, capacity management, performance management, configuration and change management, VM life cycle management, virtual infrastructure management, chargeback, external cloud connectors (for hybrid cloud environments). Mr. Perilli also has a background in computer and network security and occasionally covers virtualization and cloud security.

Adam oversees engineering and software development at Yammer, part of the Microsoft Office Division. He is considered a pioneer of the Enterprise Social Network (ESN) category and a visionary in cloud software development, as well as organizational design and transformation. Adam played a pivotal role in shaping Yammer’s unique engineering team structure and iterative, data-driven design approach to product development, which is optimized for rapid innovation, usability and end user adoption. Prior to Yammer, Adam worked at Geni - a genealogy website, where the idea for Yammer was originally conceived. Before Geni, he worked at Shopzilla, and helped lead the company to its eventual sale to Scripps Networks. Adam also co-founded and served as CTO of CNation, a web development consultancy with clients such as CBS MarketWatch, BizRate.com, Fox Interactive, Nissan of Japan and Honda.

James (Jamie) M. Popkin is the managing vice president of the Gartner for Technical Professionals Data Management Strategies team. He is also a Gartner Fellow Emeritus and chairman of Gartner U.S. Symposium/ITxpo. Mr. Popkin is currently covering sentiment analysis, text analytics, e-discovery, business analytics and information modeling topics with a background in search, enterprise content management, business intelligence and social software topics. He previously managed the IT Leaders Business Intelligence and Information Management Research group and was involved in the development of the Pattern-Based Strategy (PBS) research theme. Mr. Popkin can discuss business intelligence, performance management, data management and integration, and PBS topics. He also ran Gartner Research in Asia/Pacific and Japan, is the co-author of "IT and the East: How China and India are Altering the Future of Technology and Innovation" and was the founder of the Gartner China Outsourcing Summit. From this experience Mr. Popkin can discuss the ICT industries of China and India.

Bill Pray is a Research Director for the Gartner for Technical Professionals Collaboration and Content team. Mr. Pray joined Gartner in January 2010 as a result of the acquisition of Burton Group. He covers communications and collaboration solutions: email, calendars, instant messaging and Web conferencing. His research provides in-depth analysis and technical information to aid in the selection, implementation and management of these solutions.

Drue Reeves is the Chief of Research and Agenda Manager for Cloud Computing within for Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP). In addition to setting the research strategy for GTP, Mr. Reeves covers public, private and hybrid cloud computing, storage, client and server virtualization, and data center topics. He also presents these topics at various IT industry events, interacts directly with customers to solve real issues, and advises executive management.

Lori Rowland is the managing vice president for the identity and privacy strategies team in the IT Professionals Research group at Gartner.

Lyn Robison is a Research Vice President in the Data Management Strategies team of the Gartner for Technical Professionals research team. Mr. Robison provides guidance on topics including data mobility, mobile data strategy, BI and mobility, master data management, data clouds, unstructured and semistructured data management, metadata management, and information quality.

Mike Rollings is a research VP within the Professional Effectiveness team. His research discusses what IT professionals need to know about transformation, innovation, human behavior, contextual strategy, collaborative organizational change, communication and influence, and cross-discipline effectiveness (e.g., enterprise architecture, IT portfolio management, governance). His research can be read by IT professionals with access to Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) research. Mr. Rollings joined Gartner on 1 January 2010 as a result of the acquisition of Burton Group, at which time he held the position of research director for Enterprise Architecture on the Executive Advisory Program team.

Craig Roth is a vice president and service director for Gartner Research, in the Gartner for Technical Professionals (formerly Burton Group)group. Mr. Roth covers a wide range of knowledge and Web-related topics at the intersection of collaboration, content management, and communication. Technologies covered include enterprise portals, Microsoft SharePoint, and attention management (information overload). He also covers executive issues around these topics, specializing in governance, service delivery, and business cases.

Mary Ruddy is a Research Director on the GTP Identity and Privacy Strategies team. Her primary focus areas are: federation, Web access management (WAM) and enterprise single sign-on (eSSO.) Other topics she covers include mobile authorization, trust elevation (step-up, dynamic and active authentication), trust frameworks, government identity initiatives, and open identity. Ms. Ruddy is also a member of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) Identity Ecosystem Steering Group (IDESG) and was elected to the IDESG Management Council as the Usability and Human factors delegate. She is a founding member of the OASIS Electronic Identity Credential Trust Elevation Methods Technical Committee and Chair of Identity Commons.

Jack Santos is a Research Vice President with Gartner. He is part of the Gartner for Technical Professionals product and focuses on professional effectiveness for IT practitioners. Mr. Santos covers organizational development, leadership and management practices, development practices, governance, vendor management, data and application architecture, technical support, system integration, security, Internet business, and collaboration solutions.

Philip S. Schacter is team manager for security and risk management strategies (part of the Burton Group acquisition). His focus of research is network security, security architecture, security governance, network identity and policy systems, remote work infrastructure, and security for tablets and other BYOD devices.

Mei Selvage is a Research Director on the Data Management Strategies team of the Gartner for Technical Professionals research team. She provides guidance on topics including logical data warehouse, data integration, metadata management and data quality. She is an Open Group Master Certified IT Architect and has received more than 20 patents from the USPTO.

Svetlana Sicular has a uniquely combined experience of Fortune 500 IT and business leadership, product management at world-class software vendors, and Big Four consulting. She primarily handles inquiries in the areas of data governance, enterprise information management strategy and big data.

Eric Siegel produces detailed research and analysis of WAN performance optimization techniques and products, quality of service (QoS) technical issues, network and application performance measurement, and incident and problem management tools and techniques. He was the founder of the performance consulting group at Keynote Systems, the Web performance measurement company, was the technical lead for all 70 datacomm specialists worldwide at Tandem Computers (now part of HP), is the author of two books on network performance and QoS, and first worked on the Internet (ARPANET) in 1976.

Shawn Simon has been passionately assessing, architecting, implementing and managing complex IT landscapes for 13 years. He is an intense advocate for standardization before customization — minimizing TCO while maximizing ROI. He brings an extensive background solving unique challenges including high-performing, enterprise integration and large-sale custom enterprise deliveries. He is well-versed in both long-standing and agile software management life cycles. Mr. Simon is an expert in service-oriented architecture (SOA), cloud services (SaaS, PaaS and IaaS), mobility (phones and tablets), complex event processing (CEP), Web content management (WCM), rich Internet applications (RIA) and enterprise architecture (EA) execution. He is proficient in the overall end-to-end life cycle of large complex integration deliveries: analysis, design, modeling and development of enterprise-level integration systems, architectures and infrastructure.

Nik Simpson covers a variety of topics focused on these areas: 1. Compute platforms, x86 and RISC platforms 2. Data center infrastructure and design (power, cooling, etc.) 3. Thick, thin and zero client desktop platforms 4. Windows 7 migration planning

Ruben Spruijt (1975) is CTO and focuses primarily on Enterprise Mobility, Virtualization and Cloud Management. He is actively involved in determining PQR’s vision and strategy. Ruben is Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) and VMware vExpert and is the only European with these three virtualization awards. He gives customers advice and has them benefit from his expertise; he motivates his colleagues en writes blogs, articles and opinion pieces on a regular base. During presentations in several national and international congresses, Ruben shares his thoughts and knowledge on application and desktop delivery, and on virtualization solutions.

Darin Stewart is a Research Director in the Gartner for Technical Professionals group. Mr. Stewart covers a broad range of knowledge and information management topics, with an emphasis on innovation. Technologies covered include enterprise content management, search, semantic Web and linked data, expertise management, open innovation, and collaboration.

Thomas Trappler (www.thomastrappler.com) has extensive experience leading enterprise-wide IT procurement and vendor management initiatives and negotiations. He is a nationally recognized expert in cloud computing risk mitigation via contract negotiation and vendor management, and was named a “Cloud Luminary” by CA Technologies alongside such distinguished thought leaders as Vivek Kundra and Nicholas Carr. Dubbed the “Cloud Contract Advisor” by Computerworld, Mr. Trappler has presented at numerous events, including Cloud Expo, CA World, Security Threats Conference, Educause Annual Conference and The Business of Cloud Computing Conference. He writes a monthly column for Computerworld regarding cloud computing contracts, co-authored the book “Contracting for Cloud Services”, and has published articles on cloud contracting and open source software for Educause Quarterly. Mr. Trappler has lectured at UCLA and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, and co-developed and teaches “Contracting for Cloud Computing Services”, the original seminar focused on cloud computing contract issues.

While receiving his MS in industrial engineering at the University of Illinois, Qua experienced the remarkable benefits that meditation and related practices can have on improving both scholastics and personal relationships. His 20+ year career in the high tech industry includes new product introduction roles with industry-leading companies including Shugart Associates and Sun Microsystems during some of their most innovative years. Qua joined Intel Corporation in 1996 and soon moved into the IT organization. In his current role as lead IT Market Research Analyst for the CIO Strategy Office, Qua provides trends and insights in support of IT strategic teams and decision-makers. With deep experience in mindfulness and related practices, he has mentored individuals and inspired grass roots efforts at Intel. In 2012, Qua co-founded a mindfulness training program at Intel that is achieving attention from thought leaders both inside and outside the company.

Heidi Wachs is a Research Director on the GTP Identity and Privacy Strategies team.

Chris Wolf is a Research Vice President for the Gartner for Technical Professionals research team. He covers server and client virtualization and private cloud computing. Mr. Wolf spends considerable time with end-user organizations, advising them on architecture and best practices for both private cloud and desktop transformation initiatives. Mr. Wolf has worked with x86 virtualization technologies since 1999 and has long been recognized as a thought leader in the virtualization space.

Werner Zurcher is Director of Storage Research in the Gartner for Technology Professionals (GTP) group. He covers a variety of enterprise storage hardware and software topics. Topics range from storage efficiency, consolidation, virtualization, replication, backup and recovery, to storage designs for cloud-based implementations.