Gartner Outsourcing & Strategic Partnerships Summit

David Ackerman is a Director in Gartner Research, where he is part of the IT Sourcing team. Mr. Ackerman currently conducts research associated with IT infrastructure sourcing in all four phases of the sourcing life cycle. In this capacity, he ensures integrated, high-quality analyses across all outsource services, along with the continued development of new research to meet the needs of Gartner clients. His responsibilities include working with clients to resolve sourcing issues in infrastructure, along with developing research to drive improved performance.

Rob Addy is a Research Director in Gartner's Technology & Service Provider Research division, focusing on software and hardware support services across EMEA. In addition to being the Agenda Manager for Infrastructure Services, Mr. Addy also covers the provision of service desk and workspace services in an outsourcing context within the region.

Chris Ambrose specializes in helping clients develop a vendor management discipline and manage their most strategic IT vendor relationships. His coverage extends into application outsourcing, guiding clients across the entire process from building their sourcing strategy to managing their externally sourced environment. He specializes in the outsourcing of enterprise packaged applications (e.g., Oracle and SAP), covering the management and maintenance of the applications. Additionally, Mr. Ambrose is the Gartner Lead Analyst on IBM and has responsibility for covering the broad strategy and capabilities of IBM globally.

Ed Anderson focuses his research on cloud services, including market trends, forecasts, the cloud vendor landscape and cloud sourcing scenarios. Mr. Anderson splits his time between end-user clients and service providers to deliver a balanced perspective. His passion is mapping the right technologies to the right operating scenarios, and cloud services represent a good opportunity for many organizations to do just that. He helps both end-user organizations and service provider vendors to outline their strategy for leveraging cloud services to ensure the successful use of this breakthrough technology.

As Director of Business Development, John is responsible for new client revenue growth, existing client satisfaction and recruiting for CrossUSA. John came to CrossUSA in September of 2009 after over 20 years of sales, service and marketing leadership in the technology industry. His professional experience includes tenures at large companies such as Oracle, AT&T, and MCI as well as several start-up companies such as Ovation Communications and Focal where he lead sales and service teams through a successful market entry. John’s commitment to his customers and passion for creating IT Jobs in the rural US makes him a perfect fit for CrossUSA.

Ken has 32 years of experience in the application software and service industry. Ken joined Eagle Creek in 1999. Prior to joining Eagle Creek, he was President of a Silicon Valley Front Office service company. And formerly had been President of an Indian offshore services company that provided resources to the Fortune 2000. Ken’s previous experience also included being CFO and Managing Director of International Operations for Lawson Software, one of the leading ERP applications company. While at Eagle Creek, Ken developed the first U.S.-based onshore CRM services model that competes against offshore on price while offering the same quality of services as onsite consulting. This model is financially supported by the State of North Dakota and the local community. Ken resides near Minneapolis, MN and holds an MIS degree from Western Illinois University.

Warren Bell is a Principal Research Analyst in the IT Outsourcing and Support Services team. Mr. Bell focuses primarily on infrastructure consulting and integration services.

Sunil Bhargava is the Global Portfolio Executive for CSC’s Cloud and Hosting Services. He brings 25 years of IT management, application architecture and product packaging experience to bear in defining and building cloud services for CSC’s global customer base. Under Bhargava’s direction, CSC has launched BizCloud, the only on-premise cloud with a unique cloud economic model, and is finishing the development of 12 cloud data centers around the world to provide on-demand elastic services such as infrastructure, platform, and systems and software applications. Bhargava has a master’s in software systems and a bachelor’s in computer engineering; both from the George Washington University.

Alexa Bona is a vice president and distinguished analyst in Gartner Research, where her research currently focuses on IT management. As part of the IT asset management research practice, Mrs. Bona is responsible for coverage of future trends in software licensing and pricing practices, as well as maintenance and support models for business applications. She is also a generalist for software asset management trends and issues. In addition to looking at how models will evolve, Mrs. Bona advises organizations on deal negotiation strategies to help them achieve best-in-class, sustainable and flexible deals with major business application software vendors and SaaS providers, such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, salesforce.com, Workday and SAP.

Kenneth Brant covers the manufacturing industries within Gartner's Vertical Industries service for technology and service providers. He analyzes IT market structure and competition, forecasts IT spending, and tracks key IT user and provider trends in manufacturing industries through primary and secondary research sources. Mr. Brant advises technology and service providers targeting manufacturing markets by drawing on his experience and skill sets in strategic planning, marketing management, market research and competitive intelligence in the industry.

Bryan Britz is a Research Vice President in the ITO and Support Services group within Gartner's Technology and Service Provider Research organization. Mr. Britz helps service providers understand buyer behavior and opportunities for market differentiation. Currently, he is highly focused on understanding the full impact of cloud services on the ITO marketplace. His research focuses on the ongoing transition, timing and techniques for incorporating cloud-based services into established ITO markets, accounts and client environments. Mr. Britz also helps end-user organizations identify and evaluate ITO providers in support of their sourcing strategies. He is presently focused on understanding how to ensure more innovation is delivered in ITO relationships.

Steven Buckley is a member of Gartner Consulting’s Sourcing practice.

Chris Campbell is a member of the Gartner Consulting Strategic Sourcing practice in North America. His IT experience includes advisory roles on very large outsourcing programs and contracts, such as General Motors and the U.S. Navy.

A veteran instigator and maker of change in IT governance, Mark has spent much of his nearly 25 years in industry leading and implementing sweeping changes for numerous leading-edge companies. During his tenure with Accenture, Mark led transformational program and portfolio process change for several of the Fortune 500, bringing rapid returns across several industries. While at Northern California AAA, Mark helped lead an audacious re-engineering of the organization’s enterprise portfolio and governance process, creating top-to-bottom visibility alignment to the 100-year old company’s strategy-to-investment linkage. Mark has since spent his time with Varian Medical Systems, leading the entrenchment of new IT process architecture grounded in change management and sourcing. Through Varian’s strategic "right-sourcing" initiative, Mark has led the re-architecting of how Varian collaborates with its offshore partners, opening a new chapter in how the company sources projects and does AMS.

As Global Portfolio Executive, Data Center Services for CSC, Mr. Clark holds worldwide responsibility for the development of long-term data center strategies and go-to-market planning for CSC's global portfolio of data center services and solutions. Mr. Clark joined CSC in 2005 as Director of Operations for the company’s North America flagship data center before becoming Director of Global Facilities and DC Planning in April 2006 and subsequently Global Portfolio Executive, Data Center Services in 2007.

Linda Cohen is a vice president and chief of research in Gartner Research, where she leads the worldwide focus and development of Gartner's sourcing research, providing life cycle advice to clients procuring or delivering strategic sourcing services. Ms. Cohen co-authored the book "Multisourcing: Moving Beyond Outsourcing to Achieve Growth and Agility," published November 2005 by Harvard Business School Press.

Mike Colvin heads the IT Supplier Performance Management team at Chevron. In his 25+ year career, Mike has held positions of increasing responsibility delivering IT solutions on a variety of platforms, managing projects, global IT teams, and partners. Most recently he led implementation of a common ERP system, developed and implemented an Application Sourcing Strategy, co-developed the corporations IT Sourcing Strategy, before taking on his current assignment. He is a graduate of Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo where he received his B.S. in Management Information Systems. Chevron is one of the world's leading integrated energy companies, with subsidiaries that conduct business worldwide. The company is involved in virtually every facet of the energy industry. Chevron explores for, produces and transports crude oil and natural gas; refines, markets and distributes transportation fuels and lubricants; manufactures and sells petrochemical products; generates power and produces geothermal energy; provides energy efficiency solutions; and develops the energy resources of the future, including biofuels. Chevron is based in San Ramon, Calif. More information about Chevron is available at www.chevron.com

Graham Crisp is the IT Supplier and Asset Management Director for Baker Hughes Inc. He is responsible for the deployment and rollout of the IT Assets Management program. Graham leverages his experience in systems deployment and sourcing, to implement and stabilize the Baker Hughes systems environment. This experience includes large scale international projects, multi-cultural awareness, and global vendor management.

Claudio Da Rold is a vice president and distinguished analyst in Gartner Research. His coverage includes two related areas: sourcing strategies within client organizations (how to achieve business objectives by leveraging on outsourcing and external services) and outsourcing and services market industrialization (how the service market evolves and how this impacts service providers and their business and delivery models). In the first area, Mr. Da Rold is an expert on sourcing models including joint ventures and consortia; has developed approaches for building a sourcing strategy encompassing IT and business process services; and has supported the decision-making process for sourcing strategies in major organizations across Europe and internationally. Currently its focus is on cloud-enabled sourcing strategies. In the second area, Mr. Da Rold did forecast since 2000 the outsourcing and service market industrialization trend, anticipating most of the current major trends. Since 2003 he drives the research on Infrastructure Utility Services (IUS) and more recently he is leading the research on Industrialized Low-Cost Services (ILCS). From a European research perspective, he has a leading role in the European Magic Quadrants for data center outsourcing and infrastructure utility service, help desk outsourcing, and desktop outsourcing.

Senior Director Kris Doering is part of the Manufacturing Industry and Outsourcing practice (Sourcing) in Gartner Consulting. He is responsible for client deliverables, solution development and business development.

Doug Hahn has been in the IT space for 17 years, 10 as a consultant for large organizations like IBM and Oracle, and is currently the Global ERP Production Operations Manager for Amway. With global IT experience in Business Intelligence and Oracle ERP, as well as infrastructure experience including data center management, he has a broad knowledge base to draw from. Doug has AMS experience with several companies centered in Argentina, Vietnam and India. Doug has had speaking engagements at Collaborate and Openworld and currently is serving in the OAUG as Chair of the Board Nominating Committee as well as a member of the Customer Support Council.

Rural Sourcing Inc. (RSI) provides a competitive onshore alternative to the traditional answers of IT outsourcing. Mr. Hamilton is the CEO responsible for leading the strategic direction and the growth of RSI to launch 30 new high-tech hubs across the US. He is a sought after speaker on the outsourcing topic having recently been featured on CNBC, NPR radio and at various industry conferences. In addition, recent articles depicting RSI’s innovative outsourcing model have appeared in Business Week, CNN Money magazine, CFO magazine, and CIO magazine. Hamilton began his IT career in 1988 with Accenture. In 1995 he joined four other colleagues to build their own consulting firm – Clarkston Consulting. He was instrumental in growing Clarkston into a global strategic and systems integration firm with offices across the US and Europe. After Clarkston’s acquisition of RSI he became the CEO in 2009. Mr. Hamilton holds an M.B.A. from the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University and a B.B.A. in business from Millsaps College.

Kimberly Harris-Ferrante is a vice president and distinguished analyst in Gartner Research, where she is responsible for monitoring the business and technology trends within the property and casualty and life insurance industries. She specializes in strategies and technologies in the global insurance sector for distribution, customer relationship management, exception-based underwriting, policy administration, claims management and administration, business process management, business intelligence, and infrastructure management and optimization. She is an active participant in Gartner's outsourcing research and chief of research for the industries practice within Gartner.

Jay Heiser is a Research Vice President specializing in the areas of IT risk assessment and management, collaboration security, security policy and security organization. Current research areas include cloud and SaaS computing risk and control, technologies and processes for the secure sharing of data with external partners, security program management, and the writing and enforcement of corporate policies.

Helen Huntley is a vice president in Gartner Research and currently provides analysis on global (offshore), nearshore, domestic and rural outsourcing, sourcing strategy, assessing outsourcing readiness, contract terms and conditions, evaluation and selection of service providers, negotiations and renegotiations with service providers, transitions, IT vendor management, vendor risk management and delivery using single, multiple, domestic or global outsourcing providers.

David provides application deployment leadership and strategic direction to multiple, globally diverse teams for Kimberly-Clark’s $21BN business. He is responsible for engaging all IT Services teams (infrastructure, applications teams, business partners, architecture, business clients, external vendors, and service delivery partners) and executive leadership to define, prototype, and implement new technologies in support of business objectives and projects. David is also responsible for the day-to-day operational support of IT applications and includes supplier management activities, business continuity, and overall service delivery support. Prior to David’s current applications leadership role, he held an international role at K-C and was responsible for rolling out SAP to all countries outside of North America and Western Europe. David’s 21 years of experience in the consumer packaged goods industry has provided many opportunities to lead business transformation initiatives that have delivered quantifiable benefits to the organization. The foundational systems and IT initiatives led by David have contributed in making ITS a value provider for K-C.

Ruby Jivan is a Research Director in Gartner Research and Advisory Services. Ms. Jivan focuses on the IT services and outsourcing market and is also an Analyst for global sourcing research in North America.

Frances Karamouzis is a Vice President and Distinguished Analyst in Gartner's Research Advisory Group, focusing on strategic sourcing of IT services. With 25 years of experience in the industry, Ms. Karamouzis is the lead North American research analyst for enterprise sourcing strategies and Gartner's Globalization of IT Sourcing (offshore) research team. She focuses on market trends and directions, financial modeling of business cases, and service delivery capabilities of the consulting and outsourcing providers. She also focuses on country-specific research (including but not limited to India, China, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Central Eastern Europe, the Philippines and Vietnam). Beyond her own published research for Gartner, she has appeared in or contributed to reports showcased on 60 Minutes, CNN, CNBC, PBS, Business Week, Forbes, and the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as providing research directly to Tom Friedman's "The World Is Flat."

Arun is responsible for Global Strategic Sales for the Application Services Strategic Business Unit for Capgemini. Arun has over 18 years of professional experience across multiple vertical domains and geographies, with the last 13 years being in the Business and IT Services industry. He previously led the Global Life Sciences practice and also co-founded and ran worldwide sales for the Strategic Global Sourcing unit at Infosys Ltd. Arun has been an acknowledged thought leader in the Sourcing industry and a speaker at some of the previous Gartner events: in 2008 on the topic “Leveraging Outsourcing in Times of Economic Uncertainty” and in 2006 on “Business Transformation through Modular Global Sourcing”.

Magnus Lindkvist is a trendspotter and futurologist who weaves together the most important and exciting current trends to forecast what life, society and business might look like in the future. With a uniquely energetic speaking style, his talks are a multimedia-infused boost of intellectual inspiration about topics ranging from trendspotting and innovation to future-living and the business world of tomorrow.

Jim Longwood is a Research Vice President in Gartner Research, where he is part of both the Asia/Pacific and global IT services teams. He is responsible for undertaking research on sourcing best practices, trends and market positioning of external service providers in the Asia/Pacific IT services market, as well as for providing industry analysis and strategic advice for regional Gartner clients and IT sourcing policymakers. Mr. Longwood is a regular presenter at various Gartner events in the region on the outsourcing life cycle, sourcing strategies, evaluation and selection, SLAs and OLAs, contract negotiations, and transition and management of service deals. He focuses on the multisourcing service integration (MSI) role, infrastructure outsourcing, system integration and cloud services, and also assists clients with consulting, BPO, shared services and offshore outsourcing deals. He has experience in a range of verticals, including health providers, government, utilities and resources.

Mark Margevicius is a vice president and research director in Gartner Research, where his research covers end-user computing with a primary focus on desktop virtualization, hosted virtual desktops, PC hardware, and server-based computing. In addition, Mr. Margevicius covers client-side computing policies, procedures and best practices, and assists organizations in the justification and planning of technology deployments.

Ian Marriott is a Vice President in Gartner Research. His focus is on outsourcing and IT services, with a particular emphasis on strategic sourcing and offshore outsourcing. Mr. Marriott leads Gartner's offshore research community, which focuses on IT and business process outsourcing, global sourcing and delivery models, emerging supply markets, and best practices. He is a frequent speaker and presenter at numerous Gartner and external forums and events around the world, and he is extensively quoted in the national and international press.

Robert Mason currently covers network services for Gartner, where he specializes in network architectures, provider selection and contract optimization. Mr. Mason also covers conferencing services and leads Gartner research on video telepresence solutions. He has more than 20 years of experience as a network architect, communications vendor and a network engineer.

Bill Maurer is a Vice President and Research Director in Gartner Research. Mr. Maurer covers IT infrastructure outsourcing across the sourcing life cycle. He is a leading author on performance measurement, including business outcome measures, performance dashboards, outsource deal pricing and all phases of outsourcing contracts. He provides guidance for clients with vendor evaluation and selection, contract deal pricing, contract structure and negotiations. Mr. Maurer covers the financial and manufacturing vertical industries for outsourcing.

Shane Mayes is a gulf war veteran, a passionate American, and the founder of Onshore Outsourcing. Shane's purpose is to help people see beyond their current situation toward a better way of life...personally and professionally. This purpose extends to employees, customers, business partners and communities. To fulfill this purpose, Shane started Onshore Outsourcing, a nationally recognized rural outsourcing firm that provides outsourcing and software development solutions to Fortune 500 and mid-sized companies, as well as government agencies. Onshore's strength is its ability to create Information Technology jobs in rural America, which has historically been "overshot" by the economic and social advances enabled by the IT economy. Using an innovative rural delivery model, Onshore provides high quality, RURAL technology services at a price-point that is competitive to offshore providers. Shane's audacious dream is to revitalize rural America, to restore the hope and dignity that comes from having an honorable profession, to thousands of people in small, rural towns across America. Shane makes his home in Macon, Missouri with his wife Lisa, and their two young children. Active in his church and his community, Shane fills his personal life in the same way he fills his work life, striving to make the world a better place.

In December 2009, Everything Channel’s CRM announced Andrew McAfee as one of the “Top 25 Most Innovative Leaders in the Technology Industry.” The list recognizes the executives who have changed the way the channel does business today and in the future. As one of the top 25 “Mavericks” on the list, McAfee’s brash and bold thinking is changing the rules of the channel. In 2008, McAfee was named by the editors of the technical publishing house Ziff-Davis number 38 in their list of the “100 Most Influential People in IT.” He was also recently recognized by Baseline magazine as one of 50 most influential people in business IT. McAfee was also a well-received speaker at a meeting of the world economic forum. McAfee coined the phrase “Enterprise 2.0” in a Spring 2006 Sloan Management Review article to describe the use of Web 2.0 tools and approaches by businesses. McAfee’s book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, was published in November 2009 by Harvard Business School Press. His blog, andrewmcafee.org/blog/, is widely read, becoming at times one of the 10,000 most popular in the world (according to Technorati). In the July/August 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review, McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson published “Investing in the IT that Makes a Competitive Difference,” a summary of their research investigating IT’s links to changes in competition. This work was the first to reveal that competition began to heat up in the US in the mid 1990s –to become faster paced, more turbulent, and more winner-take-all – and that this acceleration was greater in industries that spent more on IT. This research continues, and continues to highlight that technology appears to be significantly reshaping the landscape of competition. McAfee is the author or co-author of more than fifteen scholarly articles and ninety case studies and other materials for students and teachers of technology. This work has convinced him that modern information technology is the most powerful tool available to business leaders, yet also the most misunderstood and under-appreciated resource at their disposal. His research investigates how IT changes the way companies perform, organize themselves, and compete. At a higher level, his work also investigates how computerization affects competition itself – the struggle among rivals for dominance and survival within an industry. McAfee joined the faculty of the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School in 1998. He is currently Principal Research Scientist, Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management and Fellow, Harvard Law School, Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He received his Doctorate from Harvard Business School, and completed two Master of Science and two Bachelor of Science degrees at MIT.

Naureen Meraj is the global leader for employee engagement and gamification with the American arm of NTT DATA, 6th largest IT Services Company in the world. Naureen’s research and application of gamification techniques to further enhance employee engagement led to the creation of NTT DATA’s Gamification Center of Excellence, an industry first. Naureen Meraj has a B.A. in Sociology from University of Washington and an M.Ed. from UMass Boston School of Education and Human Development. Prior to joining NTT DATA, Naureen worked as a school Guidance Counselor where she created and developed significant curricula essential to students’ social development.

Rajan is Vice President, Business Process Excellence at Kraft Foods. In this role he is responsible for driving strategic process transformation at Kraft towards achieving and sustaining operational excellence. Prior to joining Kraft, Rajan spent almost three decades in leadership roles at Ford, Kellogg, Philips Medical, JBS Swift, and Mahindra Satyam. He also founded and grew a consulting business involved in change management,continuous improvement for operational excellence, and leadership engagement. During his 30 year career, he has led several initiatives in the areas of business process transformation, knowledge management and best practices proliferation. Rajan holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering, an MBA, and an MS in Computer and Information Science.

Cassandra “Sandy” Pullin is the Director of IT Performance & Issue Management at NiSource, where she leads the outsourcing contract management team for IT managed service providers. Ms. Pullin has 32 years of IT experience in delivery of infrastructure and application services. She has led major IT project deployments, including enterprise document management, customer relationship management, and technologies for multiple customer contact centers. Ms. Pullin, a certified Project Management Professional, has served on the board for the Northwest Indiana Chapter of PMI, and is a committee chair for a NiSource employee affinity group. NiSource is a Fortune 500 company engaged in transmission & distribution of natural gas and electric generation, spanning area from the Gulf Coast through the Midwest to New England.

Frank Ridder is a Research Vice President in Gartner Research in the area of IT services and sourcing. He mainly helps organizations through their complete sourcing activities for infrastructure services, including the data center and the end-user side. He is a leading author on multisourcing competencies, infrastructure utilities and cloud sourcing (for that, he won the Gartner Thought Leadership Award, 2012). Mr. Ridder manages the global IT services sourcing agenda. Prior to his work in the IT industry, he spent five years in the telecommunications industry. In addition to his work at Gartner, Mr. Ridder has lectured on IT services at the University of Applied Science in Neu-Ulm, Germany, since 2009.

Eric Rocco is a managing vice president in Gartner's Technology & Service Provider (T&SP) Research division. He is the group team manager for the T&SP Services group and Invest analyst team. Day to day, he manages the business, operations, client interactions and research quality. He also advises companies on their overall IT services strategies and go-to-market initiatives.

As Senior VP and CTO of the American arm of NTT DATA, the world’s 6th largest IT Services Company; Imran leads a team of 6000 technology professionals. Imran came to NTT DATA through its acquisition of netNumina, a technology firm he founded and grew to one of Computerwold’s Top 100 emerging companies and Inc. 500’s fastest growing businesses. Imran is a Sr. Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management where he teaches in the MBA program on entrepreneurship and innovation. He majored in Engineering at Brown University and attended Harvard University for post-graduate work in business, marketing and product development.

Dr. Serack has over 25 years of diverse leadership, engineering, and business experience in large corporations. Currently he is the Global Director of CSC Business Systems Applications Portfolio for CSC, Prior to working at CSC Jim’s career included R&D management positions, technical and commercial positions in Supply Management and as a Vice President of Information Services (CIO) for the R&D divisions of a multinational corporation.

Alex Soejarto is a vice president in Gartner Research and covers the consulting and systems integration market. He focuses on service providers offering business application and business intelligence solutions. This includes professional services offered to buyers and competitive strategies undertaken by service providers.

Walt Strubbe has over 15 years of IT professional services experience. He has held a variety of leadership roles with P&L responsibility, driving aggressive revenue growth through partnerships with the sales organizations. He has led significant outsourcing and merger and acquisition engagements with a variety of large companies, and has proven experience in designing project life cycles using PMBOK, developing accurate budgets, preparing/drafting contracts, and implementing complex projects that provide the highest quality to the client while meeting time and cost budgets. He has led large professional services organizations with more than 100 project managers and architects.

As a practitioner, consultant and manager, Patrick Sullivan has more than 25 years of experience implementing processes and applications to solve business problems. He has focused on IT services, application development processes, information architectures and software marketing while working for several consulting and software firms. At Gartner, Mr. Sullivan focuses on CRM-related services to integrate and deploy CRM solutions for sales, marketing and customer services. He is also the agenda manager for the Application Services research team addressing consulting, system integration and application management services. He supports application service providers in refining market strategies, competitive positioning and go-to-market models. Mr. Sullivan joined Gartner in 1999 and is based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Susan Tan is a Research Director with Gartner's consulting and system integration (C&SI) services team. Her research focuses on enterprise application services, in particular, SAP implementation and mobility C&SI services. Ms. Tan advises buyers of these services on issues pertaining to vendor evaluation and selection, and service providers on competitive positioning. In addition, she leads the quarterly forecast for the consulting and implementation services market segment. She has been chosen as one of the top 10 analysts for EXP members in Latin America. Ms. Tan has been quoted in CIO, CFO magazine, InformationWeek, TechTarget and SAPinsider, as well as other industry journals.

Cathy Tornbohm is a Gartner vice president responsible for business process outsourcing (BPO) research. She specializes in BPO for administrative purposes, specifically finance and accounting BPO, which includes accounts payable BPO, accounts receivable BPO, order to cash BPO, source to pay BPO and procurement BPO. Her research includes analysis of end-user requirements, BPO companies' market offerings, end-user sourcing and market sizing of BPO adoption. She also covers cloud, business process as a service and is the agenda manager for all BPO.

Gianluca Tramacere is a Vice President in Gartner Technology & Service Provider Research. His focus is on the IT infrastructure outsourcing market in Europe, including topics such as sourcing strategies and market industrialization. In these areas, Mr. Tramacere is responsible for analyzing major trends in the market and for managing Gartner's forecasts for IT management services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He has considerable experience in providing advice to service providers to assist them in the design of their optimum go-to-market strategy. In addition, he is responsible for advising end-user organizations on sourcing strategy, focusing on the evaluation and selection criteria needed to identify the ideal provider to establish a successful, long-term relationship.

Gilbert van der Heiden covers the sourcing life cycle - from strategy, to selection and contracting, to transition and transformation, to management in general. In detail, he addresses application development and maintenance, inclusive of SAP and Oracle, testing, (multi)sourcing organization and vendor management. He handles about 800 client interactions yearly on the above.

Graham Waller is a vice president and executive partner with Gartner Executive Programs. He supports CIO clients across variety of industries, assisting them in business-IT alignment and maximizing IT value.

Edward Wilson-Smythe leads Gartner Consulting's Sourcing Practice in Canada, and provides sourcing advisory services to clients across North America. He has extensive experience with the full range of outsourcing/offshoring advisory services, ranging from strategy and business cases to procurement, contracting, negotiation, governance, transition management, and ongoing contract and performance management. Mr. Wilson-Smythe has deep insights into emerging trends such as technology-driven innovation, globalization strategies, global delivery models, global service provider trends, ITO/BPO convergence, platform and business-capability-based sourcing models, contract and service optimization, and productivity-driven cost reduction. He is also an expert on emerging markets and delivery locations.

G. Morgan Yeates is Gartner's Research Director for the global HR business process outsourcing market. He serves as Gartner's lead contact regarding all HR BPO topics, and he directs research benefiting end users, providers and investors. Mr. Yeates advises HR end users on service delivery alternatives, emerging delivery models, provider capabilities and assessments, HR BPO pricing, and contracting. For HR BPO providers, he relays market and end user intelligence to drive their product and offering strategies, branding, sales, and competitiveness. Mr. Yeates' clients include Fortune 50 companies and other global organizations around the world.

Allie Young is a Research vice president and distinguished analyst in Gartner's Technology and Service Provider Research group. Her focus is on IT services and outsourcing, specifically for Latin America as an emerging market, offshore/global trends and scenarios, competitive market dynamics, application services, and offshore/global delivery. She has contributed to IT services research for the past 15 years, monitoring competitive dynamics, new delivery models, provider strategies, user requirements, contract analysis and competitive issues. She has written extensively on such topics as the evolution of outsourcing, emerging countries in Latin America, new services development, and future scenarios of outsourcing. Ms. Young co-authored the book "Multisourcing: Moving Beyond Outsourcing to Achieve Growth and Agility." She participates regularly in speaking engagements at Gartner Events, as well as industry conferences.

Bob leads Southwest's Technology Infrastructure Teams including: Change, Test and Deployment; Application and Data Architecture; IT Operations Support, and Tech Services Field Support and Technology Engineering. Bob joined Southwest in August 2008. Before joining Southwest Airlines, Bob held executive positions at several Fortune 500 companies including Motorola, Harrah's Entertainment, and Qwest Communications (formerly US West) in technology. His experiences include IT strategy, applications development, program management, Operations, Architecture & Integration for companies with revenues in the $15-40 billion. In addition to his IT experience, Bob successfully led new product development and marketing departments. Bob also served for almost 11 years in the US Navy as Officer and Naval Aviator