Gartner Customer 360 Summit

Gene Alvarez leads Gartner's research on e-commerce, including topics such as vision, strategy, business models, e-commerce platforms, Cloud, SaaS, and open source e-commerce technologies, social commerce, mobile commerce and context-aware computing, product reviews, recommendations and CRM organizational vision and strategy. He is the chairperson for Gartner's premier Customer 360 Summit and has spoken at many international events. Mr. Alvarez has 29 years of business and IT experience in business impact assessment, vendor management, project management, software development and delivery of complex business applications. He was named in 2011 & 2010 "HITEC" Award - Top 100 most influential IT leaders from The Hispanic IT Executive Council and in 2011 "HE&IT TOP 200" Award - Hispanic Engineer & Information Technology Magazine Top 200 Influential Hispanics in Technology.

Brian Andrews (@loyaltyrocks) is the Vice President, Customer Experience & Business Excellence for Intuit’s Accounting Professionals Division (APD). Among other responsibilities, Brian is responsible for ensuring APD delivers extraordinary customer experiences. He represents Intuit on Bain’s NPS Loyalty Forum and provides customer experience guidance to the CEO staff. He leads the Intuit-wide Net Promoter community. Prior to his current role, Brian led product management, dramatically improving the NPS and achieving the highest ever levels of customer retention. Brian won Intuit’s Scott Cook Innovation Award in 2006 and 2008. He was awarded a CEO Leadership Award in 2007. His innovation work was also recognized in BusinessWeek, Time, Houston Business Journal, and key accounting publications. Brian joined Intuit as the Process Excellence leader, where he was an early champion in the adoption of the Net Promoter System. Before joining Intuit, Brian was a senior leader in Quality & Customer Satisfaction for Compaq/Hewlett-Packard within the Commercial Desktop Division and Global Accounts. A Purdue graduate, Brian also spent 9 years in management consulting, including stints with Coopers & Lybrand, the American Productivity & Quality Center, and his own firm. Brian’s work has been featured in several books on quality, productivity, and customer loyalty – most recently in Fred Reichheld’s “The Ultimate Question 2.0.” He is a frequent customer experience speaker at national conferences, webinars, and podcasts. Brian is on the Board of Directors for the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) and is a founding member.

David Ashton is an expert on the rapidly evolving ways consumers and brands intertwine. Consequently, much of his time is spent helping companies evolve their business model to account for the way cyber-social evolution impacts the way businesses interact with consumers. David is a frequent public speaker and is VP of Consulting Services at SDL, where his team helps customers drive better customer engagement for some of the biggest brands in the world.

Larry Augustin is CEO of SugarCRM, the leading provider of Open Source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. One of the group who coined the term "Open Source", he has written and spoken extensively on Open Source worldwide. Prior to SugarCRM, he spent five years as an angel investor and advisor to early stage technology companies including JBoss (acquired by Red Hat), XenSource (acquired by Citrix), DeviceVM, Fonality, Hyperic, Pentaho, and SpringSource (acquired by VMWare). He currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Appcelerator and DotNetNuke. He is a Director of the industry association The Linux Foundation, and has previously served as a Director of several other industry associations including Linux International (LI), Open Source Development Lab (OSDL), and the Free Standards Group (FSG). Larry holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame.

Jason is a founding member of the Comcast Business Services team holding various sales leadership roles in the organization since 2003. He currently leads Sales Effectiveness and is responsible for the performance initiatives, internal communications, and education needs for the Comcast Business sales teams. Prior to Comcast, Jason developed and led partner programs in the Managed Services industry as well as business development in the colocation and telecommunication industry with Verio and WorldCom in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Adam is Senior Director for Corporate Communications and Digital Strategy at Juniper Networks in Sunnyvale, CA. He joined Juniper in early 2011 to build the company's first digital strategy and social media program. He has also had responsibility for leading the global PR function, where he worked to build a truly integrated PR-digital function. Prior to Juniper, Adam led the global social business strategy and execution for IBM in Armonk, NY. In that role he was responsible for all internal and external social business and social media strategies and activities for IBM’s 400,000 employees worldwide. He also led the social media strategies for the Smarter Planet, Jeopardy-Watson and IBM Centennial campaigns, which collectively have won a host of awards, including the PRSA Silver Anvil, PR News Platinum Awards and the Effie Awards. Prior to his social business position, Adam held a variety of PR, internal communications and executive communication jobs at IBM. Before IBM, Adam ran the financial services team for Brodeur Worldwide in New York City, and also managed the MasterCard account. Adam began his career at Novell, Inc in Provo, Utah. Adam is a graduate of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Though his office is in Sunnyvale, CA, he lives in San Clemente in Southern California with his ever-patient wife and 5 energetic children.

Kimberly Collins, Ph.D., is a Research Vice President in Gartner Research for the CRM team. Her research focuses on marketing strategies, processes and enabling technologies. Areas of primary focus include marketing resource management (MRM), integrated marketing management (IMM) and marketing performance management.

Mila D'Antonio is Editor-in-Chief for 1to1 Media where she leads the editorial direction and operations of the award-winning 1to1 Media.com, 1to1 Weekly Digest, Think Customers: the 1to1® Blog, and online videos and podcasts. Prior to joining 1to1 Media, she worked for a number of trade magazines and daily newspapers in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. Mila is passionate about the customer experience and looks forward to hearing readers' feedback about how 1to1 Media can continue to bring them value.

Jim Davies is a Research Director in Gartner Research and is part of the company's European CRM team. His research focuses on all aspects relating to the voice of the customer (VoC), including technologies such as surveying, speech analytics and social media monitoring. He also covers the contact center workforce optimization (WFO) marketplace, which integrates and optimizes call center agent functions spanning from recruitment, recording, evaluation and training to scheduling, reporting and all associated analytics. Both research areas feed into Gartner's overarching coverage of customer experience management.

Alex Dayon President of Applications and Platform, Salesforce.com Alex Dayon is president of applications and platform at salesforce.com. He is responsible for driving the product vision, sales, and marketing execution of the company’s social, mobile, and open applications, including Salesforce Chatter, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Salesforce Analytics. Dayon joined salesforce.com in September 2008 through the acquisition of InStranet, a leading knowledge base application, where he was a founder and CEO. Prior to InStranet, Dayon was an officer at Business Objects SA where he ran the product group for more than 10 years. He holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering. In his free time, he likes to snow ski and sail.

Industry-known pioneer, executive thought leader and innovator in the customer engagement management space, Dennis DeGregor, has “been there from the beginning” in CRM and its evolution to the social-centric model. He has served as Senior Vice President & Chief Customer Officer for Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Allstate and Qwest Communications. He is currently the Worldwide Customer Executive for HP with oversight of global multi-channel operations including 114 contact centers in 34 countries supporting 30,000 agents and 51 languages. Mr. DeGregor’s expertise is in customer strategy & operations, including segmentation, multi-channel optimization, revenue productivity, customer analytics, intelligent routing, social media integration, mobile integration, Big Data, customer analytics and customer technologies. He is trusted business advisor to C-suite executives globally on the subject of customer-centric business transformation. Mr. DeGregor’s accomplishments in driving superior customer metrics have been the subject of several industry case studies including Gartner, Harvard Business Review and Computerworld Magazine. He is the recipient of the Smithsonian Institute Time Capsule Award for customer-centric innovation at the start of the 21st century. He is author of the breakthrough book The Customer-Transparent Enterprise.

Robert Desisto is a Vice President and Distinguished Analyst in Gartner Research. He is responsible for managing the software as a service (SaaS) research agenda, CRM sales agenda, and business application research community. His research focuses primarily on the use of SaaS as a delivery model for applications. Mr. Desisto has extensive expertise in SaaS and cloud computing models, including architectural, economic, and application implementation and governance issues. Mr. Desisto has drill-down application expertise in sales force automation, partner relationship management, sales configuration, pricing applications, incentive compensation, sales analytics and performance management.

Nicolas Draca has more than 15 years of experience in Sales and in Marketing. Nicolas is Director of Demand Generation at Linkedin, the world's largest professional network. Nicolas manages Field Marketing, Campaign Operations and Marketing Operations for Linkedin Enterprise businesses (Hiring Solutions, Marketing Solutions and Sales Solutions). Prior to Linkedin, he spent 4 years at Infoblox and implemented a data-driven, best practices marketing automation strategy to improve marketing impact on revenue. He joined Infoblox from Ipanto, where, as co-founder and CEO, he led the team to become an innovator in IP Address Management for Microsoft environments. Ipanto was purchased by Infoblox in 2007. Nicolas holds a masters in business from ICN Business School, Metz University in France.

Ian Finley is the Agenda Manager for application development and researches the consumerization of application development, including how mobile applications, app stores, citizen developers and "apptrepreneurs" create new opportunities and challenges for enterprise AD leaders.

Chris Fletcher brings 30 years of industry experience and insight to his role as Research Director of Enterprise Applications at Gartner. He provides client value by focusing on the intersection of strategy, technology and business requirements and by helping clients to build and focus their customer-centric vision. Chris is part of Gartner's Customer Relationship Management (CRM) research organization and has published research on CRM and e-commerce, including specific coverage on CRM Lead Management, digital e-commerce, price optimization, partner management, and related marketing/sales/e-commerce topics. Chris has been quoted in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Information Week, and in several web publications, and speaks frequently at industry and trade events.

Andrew Frank covers marketing and media. As VP Distinguished Analyst with Gartner for Marketing Leaders, Mr. Frank specializes in best practices for data-driven marketing, including how organizations can use data to drive sales, loyalty, innovation, brand value and other business goals. He also specializes in advertising technology and business trends with Gartner's Media Research team. His research focuses on new opportunities in digital advertising and media intelligence leveraging mobile, social, video, and advanced TV platforms and channels, and utilizing advanced targeting, metrics, interactive design, and real-time ad operations.

As President and CEO of ForeSee, Larry is responsible for managing the company's strategy and growth. An expert on web customer satisfaction, Larry speaks extensively on the topic at private and public sector industry events and has been quoted in numerous publications and media, including CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Investor's Business Weekly, Internet Retailer, Multichannel Merchant, DM News, Computerworld, Federal Computer Week and Government Executive, among many others. Larry is the author of a new book on customer satisfaction released in 2011, Managing Forward: How to Move from Measuring the Past to Managing the Future.

Bill Gassman is a Research Director, advising Gartner for Marketing Leaders clients. He directs the Digital Marketing Programs key initiative, focused on program management, analytics-driven optimization and social marketing.

Gareth Herschel is the Lead Analyst on the use of analysis to drive improved business performance in the area of customer relationships. Mr. Herschel covers a wide variety of different types of analysis, including predictive analysis, social analytics, and text and speech analytics, to identify the most appropriate technique for different business situations.

Emily Holohan joined the Cigna team a little over 5 years ago. She started in Call Operations as a customer service associate. Emily has held various roles in the organization both customer and client facing. In Jan 2012, she began managing an Internet Customer Service team which included the budding Social Media Service Team. Under Emily’s leadership, the Social Media Team expanded to provide 24/7/365 service to customers posting to social sites. Emily’s team monitors Cigna's social media sites and performs outreach to any customer who posts comments relating to service delivery. Emily continues to create and improve on current processes and workflows as social media grows with Cigna’s customers. The team’s ultimate goal is to be available to their customers, where their channel of choice and deliver a great customer service experience.

Partha Iyengar is VP and distinguished analyst in Gartner's "CIO Research - Service and Operational Technology Management" team. He is also the Country Manager - Research, India, with responsibility for managing the India research agenda. His research interests cover areas of strategic interest to CIOs and their direct reports, including service management and sourcing issues, and the newly emerging areas of IT-OT integration management. In addition he covers the areas of business and IT strategy, business value of IT, IT measurement (ITScore), CIO leadership issues and the changing role of the CIO in a globalized world. He also researches India and China issues in terms of the business, technology and innovation impact these countries have on the global marketplace, and also on how global enterprises can succeed with their IT and business initiatives in these markets. His recent reports have focused on "On Demand: From Capacity to Capability," "The Entrepreneurial CIO" and "Managing Strategic Partners." Mr. Iyengar is a frequent and sought-after speaker and presenter at numerous Gartner and external forums, as well as for various government organizations in India, China and other countries. He is extensively quoted in the local, national and international press; was interviewed on the U.S. CBS News show "60 Minutes"; was a panelist on a CNN International panel discussion on the future of IT; and also participated in the BBC panel discussion on IT in emerging markets. He is the co-author of a book published by Harvard Business School Press on India and China strategies, titled "IT and the East: How China and India Are Altering the Future of Technology and Innovation." Mr. Iyengar is a non-executive director on the board of directors of State Bank of India, India's largest bank and one of the world's largest financial institutions. He is also on the advisory board of Symbiosis Center for IT, a leading management school in India.

Johan Jacobs is an enterprise application analyst focusing on CRM and ERP and specializing in Web self-service channels, processes and technologies. Mr. Jacobs has held several key roles in IT and financial services companies and is well-known as an authority on CRM Web customer service and ERP competency centers, with a keen focus on all contact center multichannels. As the Gartner lead analyst for Web customer service, Mr. Jacobs focuses on Web chat, knowledge base for self-service, e-mail response management, virtual assistants, collaborative browsing and mobile communication for CRM service. Within ERP, Mr. Jacobs is passionate about competency centers and ERP-related support. He frequently speaks at local and international events and is often quoted in the press.

With more than 20 years of experience in the travel and hospitality industry, Robert King has held marketing, sales and senior management positions at a variety of organizations. Bob works with ClickSquared clients throughout North America and Europe to develop and implement effective cross-channel marketing programs that bring measurable bottom-line results. Prior to joining ClickSquared, King was senior vice president at Intrawest Corporation ULC in Vancouver, BC, where he led the corporate marketing services organization and implemented fully integrated CRM and web marketing programs that were the primary drivers of resort revenue.

Steve is a Senior Director of Product Marketing at Pega, focused on CRM solutions. He brings more than fifteen years of experience marketing, selling, designing and implementing software solutions for some of the world’s largest customer focused enterprises. Prior to joining Pega, Steve held leadership positions in professional services, marketing and sales with Cap Gemini and Chordiant Software.

In his role as Director of the Continuous Improvement (CI) Practice at Contact Solutions, Justin Lemrow oversees the delivery of guaranteed business results to enterprise customers. Blending both business and technical experience, Justin has built an effective approach for matching and evaluating solution improvements for executive business owners. Under his leadership, the CI Practice quantifies recommended improvements to increase revenue (customer experience) and operational savings (increasing self-service). A Six Sigma Black Belt who visits more than a dozen contact centers a year, Justin has more than a decade of process improvement experience in the telecommunications sector.

Linda is a recognized thought leader in global banking and payments. Her thirty year career started in Tier 1 financial institutions where she led enterprise level conversion teams for a decade implementing check processing, core banking and payments platforms. As SVP of Mozido Global Services, Linda’s charter is to establish a world class services organization that leads with industry, product and client knowledge to enable seamless transformation from legacy payments to highly optimized mobile environments. As an avid industry watcher, Linda will continue to assist her global client base in the transformation from legacy payments and enable them to participate effectively in the mobile revolution.

Michael Maoz is a Research Vice President and Distinguished Analyst in Gartner Research. His research focuses on customer strategies and technologies, with an emphasis on the CRM customer service disciplines, collaborative customer strategies, social media strategies, and cloud-based CRM applications and analytics. Mr. Maoz is the research leader for the customer service and support strategies area. He researches social software, software as a service (SaaS), CRM contracts and budget strategies, multichannel contact center applications, social CRM/communities, and field service management. He is also the lead analyst for the Oracle CRM product portfolio.

Mark McDonald, Ph.D., is a Group Vice President, Head of Research in Gartner Executive Programs, and a Gartner Fellow. He is responsible for the research focused on the business application of information technology, working with business executives and CIOs. Mr. McDonald is the lead author of research in the areas of digital technology, social media, the business use of advanced technologies, enterprise architecture and business process transformation. He is the author of "Digitalizing Business" (October 2012). He is the co-author of the "The Social Organization" (2011) with Anthony Bradley and co-author with Peter Keen of "The eProcess Edge" (2000). He appears regularly in the Wall Street Journal, Computerworld, CIO Magazine, the Financial Times, South By Southwest and other publications. He is currently working on the issue of innovation in management.

Jake is a Partner in the Customer Impact Consulting group, responsible for leading the Social Media Consulting practice in PwC’s Austin, Texas office.  He helps clients define and implement integrated social media across organizations and geographies. Jake was the co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Ant’s Eye View, recently acquired by PwC.  He oversaw all company activities related to strategy development, social media training, and lead generation, and helped build the agency to become the leading social business management consulting firm in the industry.  Before co-founding Ant’s Eye view, he was part of the community team at the LEGO Company, where he helped build customer/community interactions with adult LEGO fans.

As Vice President, Product Management, Mike McShea oversees the Contact Solutions product portfolio and product roadmap. He is responsible for bringing new innovations to market that enable enterprises to achieve customer self-service with high levels of automation and improved customer experience. Mike is leading new product introduction efforts for patented voice channel personalization technologies that adapt to individual caller behavior, and new product offerings to expand the Contact Solutions SaaS offering to mobile platforms. Mike has 25 years of global product management and high tech leadership experience with product offerings in healthcare, financial services, commercial aviation and communication satellite industries.

Nick leads Gainsight, the leading Customer Success Management solution that helps B2B companies reduce churn, increase up-sell and maximize lifetime value. Prior to joining Gainsight, Nick was an Executive in Residence at Accel Partners. Nick joined Accel from leading cloud email archiving and E-Discovery provider LiveOffice, where he was CEO from 2008 through 2012. At LiveOffice, Nick's team helped thousands of businesses around the world store and search billions of objects and petabytes of data in the cloud. As CEO, Nick led the company’s profitable growth to $25 MM in archiving revenue and successful sale to Symantec. Along the way, LiveOffice earned recognition as a Visionary by Gartner, as an Inc 5000 company, and as an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist. Prior to LiveOffice, Nick was a Vice President at VERITAS Software (acquired by Symantec) where he held several leadership and product management roles including most notably running the market-leading Enterprise Vault (formerly KVS) email archiving and E-Discovery software business.

Michael Morton is responsible for on-boarding new members, education and training, revenue management, hotel quality inspection and customer experience management. Since joining Best Western in 2009, Morton has led the brand’s training efforts to become one of the best in the industry, cultivating partnerships with eCornell, AH&LA and Rosetta Stone. He was instrumental in the success of the company’s customer-care initiative, Best Western I Care®, for which Best Western won a Fast Company award and Brandon Hall Excellence award. Morton has led the effort to create new breakfast product and presentation standards and has enhanced the customer feedback initiative and reporting tools available to Best Western members. Before joining Best Western, Morton worked with Doubletree, Hilton, Holiday Inn, Hyatt and Marriott. He spent more than ten years with Boykin Management Company, overseeing their full-service hotel portfolio. Morton received his bachelor’s degree in Industrial Management/Industrial Accounting from the University of Akron.

Scott Nelson is a Managing Vice President in Gartner Research. He is responsible for managing research in the area of customer-related research, including CRM and customer experience management. His particular research examines the effect on vision and strategy that results from focusing on the customer. His broader team looks at areas such as the role of social media in relating to customers, e-commerce, sales strategies, marketing strategies and customer service strategies.

Bill O'Kane is a research director in the area of master data management (MDM) on the Information Management team within Gartner Research. He provides expertise and advice to Gartner's clients and staff in regard to MDM program management, MDM vendors and technologies, MDM implementation styles, and MDM's role within an overall enterprise information management (EIM) strategy, including data governance implementations.

Seth Patton has worldwide responsibility for Microsoft Dynamics CRM product marketing. In particular, Seth is responsible for the Sales, Marketing and Customer applications and Cloud strategy, as well as overall business and marketing responsibility for the product. Previously, Patton was Senior Director of Product Management for Microsoft Project and Project Server, where he led the worldwide business and marketing organization. Patton also served as Director of the Microsoft SharePoint Partner Team, where he was responsible for building a worldwide partner and channel ecosystem. Patton also spent four years in Microsoft’s U.S. Subsidiary in various marketing and channel development roles. Prior to Microsoft, Patton spent three years at Corio, an enterprise Cloud services provider for CRM and ERP applications, which was acquired by IBM, and five years as a Managing Consultant with Accenture.

Rik Reppe is a Director with PwC’s Customer Impact Consulting. He has more than ten years of consulting experience. Rik’s industry focus spans airlines, retail, utilities, agri-business, consumer packaged goods (CPG), content creation, publishing, and entertainment. Rik is one of the leaders of PwC’s Customer Impact solution and heads up the Firm's Experience Design practice. Rik has a mix of skills and experience including customer experience design, voice of the customer and user-needs analysis, loyalty program strategy and design, business analysis, strategy development and implementation, and consumer marketing.

As a member of TIBCO Loyalty Lab's leadership team, David leads the company’s strategy, analytics and consumer insights teams. At TIBCO Loyalty Lab, he has designed innovative loyalty programs for dozens of top global brands in the multi-channel retail, CPG, media and travel industries. He has over 20 years’ experience creating consumer-driven strategies using the latest technologies for companies in North America, Asia and Europe.

Carol Rozwell is a Vice President and Distinguished Analyst on Gartner's Content, Collaboration and Social team. Ms. Rozwell explores social business strategy, including social media, social networks and social analytics. Prior to her current assignment, Ms. Rozwell focused her research on technology and standards for R&D productivity in the pharmaceutical industry. She joined Gartner during the e-business frenzy and helped clients electrify their business processes. She brings to her role extensive practical experience as an implementer of buy-side and sell-side e-commerce systems that is augmented by positions in marketing, consulting and strategic alliance management.

Adam Sarner is a Vice President at Gartner, responsible for global coverage of CRM, with a focus on marketing strategy and technology. This includes multichannel campaign management, lead management, marketing analytics, segmentation, loyalty marketing, digital marketing, and social. In addition, Mr. Sarner works with marketers to help them assess and take advantage of innovative and emerging marketing technologies and put them to business use. Before covering marketing applications, Mr. Sarner covered the e-commerce market for Gartner.

Don Scheibenreif is a research VP with Gartner's Industries Research group. He works with Gartner's Consumer Goods Manufacturing and Pharma clients to help them understand the technologies and trends that will drive profitable consumer demand and engagement.

Brian A. Shepherd is responsible for leading and growing TeleTech’s worldwide Customer Strategy Services and Customer Technology Services business segments. Prior to TeleTech, he served as executive vice president and group president of Amdocs, where he held a variety of senior management positions, most recently as group president of the Broadband Cable and Satellite Division, Global Marketing, and Corporate Development. Shepherd also served as president of Amdocs Interactive and division president, North American Communications & Cable Division. He earned his Master’s degree in Business Administration from Harvard Business School and his Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Wabash College.

Michael W. Smith is a VP Distinguished Analyst in Gartner Research, focusing on the value of IT. Mr. Smith's principal responsibilities include the development of business performance frameworks and methodologies to help organizations evaluate IT-enabled business initiatives. Mr. Smith's published research covers topics involving how to use business methodologies such as Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard and Six Sigma to demonstrate the business value of IT. Mr. Smith conducts workshops and assessments for Gartner clients and prospects.

With a deep digital marketing background, Kat is currently the Director, Social Media & Commerce at Petco, where she oversees the social channels at the national pet retailer. Her responsibilities include growing the Petco community, PetcoScoop blog, Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube, as well as social video content and integrations. Prior to joining Petco, she held marketing roles with Microsoft Bing, led marketing strategy for all Microsoft business at a Seattle creative agency and led integrated digital initiatives for Fortune 500 companies in management consulting. Kat went to school for journalism at the University of Missouri (Go Tigers!), is passionate about animal advocacy and a true techie geek and pop culturista who loves pushing boundaries in emerging technology. She is the proud parent of two furry children, Jdog, her 10 year-old foster-failure cat and Sookie, a 2 year-old German Shepherd and dingo mix rescue from Tijuana

Patrick Stakenas' primary focus is on sales performance management (SPM), and mobile technology. Mr. Stakenas has extensive expertise in SPM, customer relationship management (CRM), SaaS and cloud computing models. He also covers multiple sales topics, sales process transformation and management along with cloud computing sales services and emerging mobile trends. With Gartner for 1 year, Mr. Stakenas has more than 25 years of experience in sales and sales management and over 15 years working with IT on CRM and related sales projects. He has application expertise in SPM, incentive compensation, sales force automation (SFA) and performance management analytic tools.

Jenny Sussin is a Principal Research Analyst in the ITL Enterprise Software group of Gartner Research, with her primary focus on social for CRM.

Edmund (Ed) Thompson is a VP and Distinguished Analyst in Gartner Research. His research focuses on CRM, and he is the research leader for the CRM Strategy and Implementation and Customer Experience Management topics. He researches CRM strategy, implementation, CRM service providers, customer experience and SAP CRM, and more generally covers CRM in Europe.

Steve Thompson is Director of Information Technology for AgReliant Genetics, LLC. During his 13 years with the Company, AgReliant Genetics has tripled its sales volume and now it is the 3rd largest seller of corn seed to farmers in the Unites States. Mr. Thompson has lead the implementation of a CRM system for the past 5 years with the Company, but the project struggled in getting the sales force to use it. Two months after the first iPad was released, Mr. Thompson initiated a new project to write a custom iPad CRM app to reinvigorate the project. This new CRM app was deployed to all the AgReliant Genetics sales force in July 2012. The utilization of the CRM system by the sales force is now 100%, and the project succeeded in creating a tool where the sales force understands its value in making them more effective with the sales process.

Ray Valdes is a Gartner Research vice-president, covering web technology, user experience, mobile development, social platforms, and consumer Web competitive landscape.

Erik Wahl is an internationally recognized graffiti artist, author and entrepreneur, Erik redefines the term “keynote speaker.” Pulling from his history as both a businessman and an artist, he has grown to become one of the most sought-after corporate speakers available today. Erik’s on-stage painting seamlessly becomes a visual metaphor to the core of his message, encouraging organizations toward profitability through innovations and superior levels of performance. His list of clients includes AT&T, Disney, London School of Business, Microsoft, FedEx, Exxon Mobil, Ernst & Young, and XPrize; Erik has even been featured as a TED presenter. The responses received have been nothing short of incredible, with standing ovations to prove it. Erik’s understanding of vision was originally born in the school of disappointment. After an eight-year career as a partner in a corporate firm, he became frustrated by the lack of innovative thought and corresponding profits he saw in business. So he set out to challenge companies to change their way of thinking, while simultaneously pursuing his own individual passions. He rediscovered his love for art, and now plays in the business world by working through his art. In the past 10 years, he has shared his incredible message with the largest and most influential companies in the world, leaving behind his prized artwork as a reminder of his passion for breakthrough thinking. He’s the Warhol of Wall Street, the Renoir of ROI, the Picasso of Productivity, the Jobs of… well, having a Job. He is Erik Wahl: graffiti artist, author, entrepreneur and philanthropist.

Ken Wincko is Senior Director of Marketing at Dun & Bradstreet, where he is responsible for leading marketing programs for D&B’s Data-as-a-Service solution portfolio. He has more than 18 years of marketing and business development experience in bringing innovative products and marketing programs to market for both B2B and B2C organizations. Prior to joining Dun & Bradstreet, Ken was a Senior Director of Marketing at ADP, where he successfully managed a portfolio of small business online solutions. Prior to ADP, he held senior-level marketing positions at Citigroup, where he led cross-channel marketing campaigns, and IBM, where he was responsible for strategic alliance planning, campaign management and ISV partner marketing programs. Ken holds an undergraduate degree in Accounting and Business Management from the University of Notre Dame, and an MBA in Marketing and Information Systems from the Stern School of Business at New York University.