Chairs/Advisors
Chuck Sobey is an internationally-respected technology advisor, researcher, and lecturer, as well as the General Chairperson of the Flash Memory Summit. He is the founder of the R&D services firm ChannelScience, which develops new capabilities in data storage. Currently, he is advising on such major trends as STT-MRAM, ReRAM, memory manufacturing in China, computational storage, 5G, AI/ML acceleration, and standards for personal AI agents. He has also provided strategic storage technology advice to government agencies worldwide. He has presented at many conferences, including Flash Memory Summit, and has given courses on storage-related topics around the world. He earned electrical and computer engineering degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Through his Berg Software Design consultancy, Brian provides hardware and software design and development services for storage and interface technologies in consumer electronics, including flash memory, NVMe and USB.
Brian has been a developer, project lead, industry analyst, seminar leader, technical marketer and technical writer. He has participated in over 80 conferences as a speaker, session chair and conference chair. He has also worked extensively with intellectual property and patents, particularly in the storage arena.
Jay Kramer, founder at Network Storage Advisors?, is a dynamic results-oriented strategic marketing leader and creator of world-class marketing teams with a proven track record of building company brand and demand generation initiatives that accelerate sales.
He has over 25 years of repeated marketing success with industry leading Fortune 500 companies (Unisys, Seagate) as well as early and late stage emerging companies. His industry knowledge spans cloud, virtualization, software defined storage (SDS), hyper convergence, data protection, SAN, NAS, and object storage solutions plus network storage technologies including Fibre Channel, iSCSI, VTL, dedup, backup, and replication.
He has served as board member to technology industry associations and event development/professional conference companies.
Jim Handy, a widely recognized semiconductor analyst, comes to Objective Analysis with over 30 years in the electronics industry including 14 years as an industry analyst for Dataquest (now Gartner) and Semico Research.
His background includes marketing and design positions at market-leading suppliers including Intel, National Semiconductor, and Infineon.
A frequent presenter at trade shows, Mr. Handy is known for his widespread industry presence and volume of publication. He has written hundreds of articles for trade journals, Dataquest, Semico, and other prior employers, and is frequently interviewed and quoted in the electronics trade press and other media.
Mr. Handy has a strong technical leaning, with a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech, and is a patent holder in the field of cache memory design. He is the author of "The Cache Memory Book" (Harcourt Brace, 1993), the leading reference in the field. Handy also holds an MBA degree from the University of Phoenix. He has performed rigorous technical analysis on the economics of memory manufacturing and sales, discrediting some widely held theories while unveiling other true motivators of market behavior.
Mr. Handy is on the Advisory Board of the Flash Memory Summit , a member of the Mass Storage Technical Working Group of the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative, and is a Leader in the Gerson Lehrman Group Councils of Advisors.
FMS China Liaison
Jianjun ("Jerome") Luo, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of Sage Microelectronics Corp., a fabless integrated circuit (IC) design house providing bridge and SSD controller ICs, as well as customized storage products.
In addition, Jianjun Luo is the director of the Microelectronics Research Institute of Hangzhou Dianzi University, China, where he is also a professor active in IC design.
Jerome began his career in Hangzhou Eastern Communication Corp, designing SDH/SONET ASICs and GSM baseband chips. After moving to San Jose, California in 2001, he cofounded Baleen Systems Inc., where he designed SD/MMC controller ICs for storage applications. Then he became the director of R&D for Initio Corp., a leading IDE/SATA/USB controller supplier.
Prof. Luo holds a B.S. degree in Electronic Engineering from Shanghai Jiaotong University, and an M.S degree in Microelectronic CAE Center in Hangzhou Dianzi University, China. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Zhengjiang University, China.
Camberley Bates is Managing Director/Analyst at Evaluator Group, a leading analyst firm covering IT infrastructure and Information Management. She has dedicated Evaluator Group to delivering unbiased in-depth research - serving the Global 2000 IT organizations through education and consulting for making solid IT purchase decisions. In past years they have impacted over $2B in purchase decisions. She is responsible for corporate leadership and coverage of go-to-market and channel strategies. She has over 20 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at VERITAS, GE-Access, EDS, and IBM. Her achievements include developing a new market category at Copan Systems, restructuring channel programs at Veritas, and growing a new division of GE Access from $14 million to $500 million in revenue through a solution-practice methodology. Camberley is a frequent panelist and chairperson at such events as Interop and Flash Memory Summit, as well as being frequently quoted in the trade and technical press. She holds a BS degree in International Business from California State University Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business.
Members
Dr. d'Abreu is the co-founder, Sr VP, and Chief Scientist at Smart IOPS, a developer of high-performance SSDs, and appliances. At Smart IOPS, he drives technology roadmap, development of new products, and innovation. Before co-founding Smart IOPS, Dr. d'Abreu was a Fellow at SanDisk, where he worked on error correction codes, flash technology, and reliability, and managed efforts in NAND, SSDs, controllers, and test. Dr. d'Abreu has over 35 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. His expertise spans system-on-chip and system-in-package design, test and manufacturing, signal processing, flash storage technology, and coding theory. He also has extensive experience in business development, raising capital, developing business plans, building teams, and technology management. An active member of the professional high technology community, he has been an advisor to the National Science Foundation and an Adjunct Professor at Santa Clara University. He is an IEEE Life Fellow, and his work has been published in or presented at more than 50 technical conferences and journals. He has been granted over 60 patents with many more pending. He holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.
Product Marketing professional with an MBA and 15+ years of marketing, product development, and strategic planning experience. Strong ability to establish relationships of trust with cross functional teams to develop and lead product strategy and go-to-market initiatives for hardware and software product portfolios. Worldwide experience in both domestic and international markets (Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pacific) along with a broad range of vertical markets segments including Enterprise IT, Healthcare, Government, and Finance. Proven talent to bridge the gap between sales and marketing.
Efficient and dynamic senior executive with marketing and strategic planning experience. Well rounded experience in segment and product marketing, customer management, partnerships and ecosystem development. Extensive strategic planning experience from setting goals to operational task creation and monitoring progress. Manager of marketing groups in matrixed environments requiring coordination across sales, product and process development, quality assurance, manufacturing, supply chain, and field personnel. Strategic point of view in daily operations as well as long term planning. Excellent senior management interaction and presentation skills.
Mr. Amidi, has over 25 years of experience in semiconductor and technology industry where he spent the last 20 years in Solid State Storage where he held various management and executive positions in companies such as STEC, SMART, Netlist, and Western Digital. Mike held several executive level responsibilities to manage business units with over $130M P&L where he has successfully managed several groups across geographically dispersed areas such as U.S., China, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Brazil.
Mike has vast knowledge of storage, Flash, and DRAM design, development, and product marketing where he managed to develop, a series of successful product portfolio that revolutionized these industries. Mike has over 15 years of design and development expertise. He held many hands-on positions such as Hardware Engineering, Software and Firmware Engineering, ASIC and FPGA design, PCB layout engineering, and test engineering. Mike has 18 granted Patents through US Patent office. Mike has several publications in storage and semiconductor industries as well.
Stephen Bates is the CTO of Eideticom and is a renowned expert on topics like NVMe, RDMA, TCP/IP and NVM. He has worked on a range of complex storage and communication systems including NVMe controllers and PCIe switches developed by his former employer Microsemi (formerly PMC-Sierra). He enjoys working at the interface between hardware and software and is an active contributor to the Linux kernel. Before Eideticom he worked in the CTO office at PMC-Sierra and before that he was an Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering at The University of Alberta. He holds a PhD degree from The University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Walker Blount is responsible for the Storage Systems Service, which includes analysis of flash storage systems (SSDs, EFD, and Flash cards), small form factor hard disk drives, and alternative storage technologies such as micro mechanical probe storage. One of the reports authored is the Solid State Drive Markets and Applications study that has been published by WFR since 2002.
Mr. Blount comes to Web-Feet Research after an extensive career at IBM. Hired as a design engineer in test engineering, he held a number of key engineering positions within IBM, including several years in key management positions. These included project management of manufacturing and test processes; managing 20 employees to support the manufacturing and testing of IBM's storage subsystems. Support included establishing new processes, managing manufacturing and test costs through process improvements and selecting component and sub- assembly vendors.
From 1993 - 2004, Mr. Blount was the principal HDD industry analyst within IBM and later with Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. In this position he identified market opportunities and company strategies for hard disk drives including consumer electronics markets with the (1") Microdrive at its introduction.
Mr. Blount has published a number of internal reports and analytical assessments on the HDD industry and industry product offerings within Hitachi including several external whitepapers; "Fluid Dynamic Bearing Motors in Hard Disk Drives", "Voice Coil Motor Dampening" and "Why 7200 RPM Mobile Drives."
Jean S. Bozman is a well-respected IT professional with more than 20 years of experience covering the worldwide markets for operating environments, servers and the workloads that run on servers. Ms. Bozman began her career at IDC in 1996, focusing on the worldwide market for server operating systems. In her current role as research vice president in IDC's Enterprise Server Group, she analyzes the worldwide server market and she manages the Clustering and Availability Software (CLAS) market research for IDC.
Ms. Bozman is widely quoted in business publications, including BusinessWeek and Investors Business Daily; in daily newspapers, including the San Jose Mercury News and Los Angeles Times; and in online publications, such as CNET (news.com), Bloomberg and Reuters. Pior to joining IDC, Ms. Bozman was an editor at Computerworld.
Tom Burniece is an independent business consultant, with over 30 years of senior management experience in the networking and storage markets. He specializes in working with startups and small companies to build a strong strategic plan that is executable and can lead to a successful company.
Chairman of the FC-NVMe Standards Committee
Krishna Chander is the Principal Analyst at Chander Consulting where he focuses on storage systems marketing and analysis. He was previously a Senior Storage Analyst at iSuppli. He also has extensive experiences at IBM and Hitachi in storage systems analysis, thin film manufacturing, product development, and market positioning. He has an MS in Chemical Engineering from Lehigh University and an MBA from SUNY- Binghamton.
Ken Clipperton is a Managing Analyst at DCIG, a group of analysts with IT industry expertise who provide informed, insightful, third party analysis and commentary on IT hardware, software and services. Within the data center, DCIG has a special focus on the enterprise data storage and electronically stored information (ESI) industries.
Ken joined DCIG in August 2012, bringing more than 20 years of information technology experience to the team. Prior roles include server administrator, systems analyst, and then IT director at a series of three private universities. Ken has served on multiple corporate advisory boards, state-wide technology commissions and national user group boards; and presented at many national and regional technology conferences.
Throughout his career, Ken has specialized in evaluating and implementing innovative technologies to address operational, tactical and strategic business priorities. For example, Ken was a key leader in the creation of the world’s first comprehensive wireless community at Buena Vista University, a project called eBVyou that became a national model and drew visiting teams from hundreds of colleges, universities and K-12 school districts.
Dr. Allon Cohen is Elastifile’s Vice President of Product and Business Development. Prior to joining Elastifile, Dr. Cohen was the VP Software and Solutions for Toshiba\OCZ, which he joined through the acquisition of SANRAD, a storage industry flash acceleration trailblazer, where he served as VP of Marketing and Product Management.
Allon holds a B. Sc. (Physics and Mathematics Cum Laude) from the Talpiot Project, which recognizes excellence in technical and scientific military service, an MBA., and a Ph.D. Summa Cum Laude from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Celeste serves as the senior manager of product marketing at Brocade. With over 15 years of experience in technology strategy, competitive intelligence, and product marketing, Celeste has positively impacted the growth trajectory of some of the leading brands in consumer electronics and semiconductors. As a strategic planner and market analyst, she has worked in-house or as a management consultant tasked to help C-level executives understand the impact of disruptive technologies. Celeste earned an MBA from the University of California, Davis and a BA at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Deepankar Das is the CTO of Sureline Systems, driving the leading edge in application mobility to allow data & applications move seamlessly between physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. He was Head of Eng for the EMC Data Domain file system where he worked on nextgen Data Protection in the Cloud and PBBA products. He was VP of Software and Chief Software Architect at Avalanche Technology, where he architected and built a state of the art All Flash Storage Array. As VP of Software at Violin Memory, he worked on high performance Flash software storage stack. He has also worked on Distributed Filesystems and OS at Panasas and Sun Microsystems. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Andhra University (India).
Rob Davis is Vice President of Storage Technology at Mellanox Technologies and was formerly Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at QLogic. As a key evaluator and decision-maker, Davis takes responsibility for keeping Mellanox at the forefront of emerging technologies, products, and relevant markets. Prior to Mellanox, Mr. Davis spent over 25 years as a technology leader and visionary at Ancor Corporation and then at QLogic, which acquired Ancor in 2000. At Ancor Mr. Davis served as Vice President of Advanced Technology, Director of Technical Marketing, and Director of Engineering. At QLogic, Mr. Davis was responsible for keeping the company at the forefront of emerging technologies, products, and relevant markets. Davis’ in-depth expertise spans Virtualization, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SCSI, iSCSI, InfiniBand, RoCE, SAS, PCI, SATA, and Flash Storage.
Dave is the Vice President of Embedded Memory at GLOBALFOUNDRIES where he has responsibility for the embedded volatile and non-volatile memory businesses as well as the related strategic direction and initiatives. Dave is the former CEO and President of Unity Semiconductor, a RRAM industry pioneer acquired by Rambus. He has held technical and executive management roles at Rambus, Micron, SanDisk, and AMD. Dave has 30 years of engineering, marketing and strategy leadership in the semiconductor, memory and storage industries. He has deep knowledge of flash memory technology licensing and is well regarded in the technical and industry standardization community. He holds patents in NAND flash and next-generation ReRAM memory, storage system usage and high volume manufacturing.
Richard Fetik, CISSP, is CEO and founder of Data Confidential, a security consultancy focusing on data confidentiality, system reliability, and reductions in operating costs. He is an expert at designing security into the real world, including embedded systems and devices as well as traditional IT systems. Rich has broad product experience from design and development through market introduction and evangelism. He is also the inventor of a new security model that includes the patented storage firewall and other technologies; this approach provides protection for device integrity (anti-tamper), information assurance, and data confidentiality, while enhancing operational adaptability and preserving functionality while under cyber-attack.
Mr. Finke, has been a key contributor in the computer, semiconductor, and storage industry for over 30 years. Prior to Xitore, Doug was at HGST (a subsidiary of Western Digital) where he was responsible for business management of large petabyte scale storage systems. Before that Doug served as Senior Director of Product Marketing at sTec (acquired by HGST) which pioneered the concept of solid state drives (SSDs) for use in enterprise computing applications.
Previously he served as the Chief Operating Officer of startup company IntelliSense Corporation where he was instrumental in the acquisition of the company by Corning Inc. for a valuation of $750 million. As Vice-President of Marketing and Business Development at Boston-based semiconductor startup ChipWrights, Doug helped raise $25 million in venture capital funding. Prior to that he was the Vice-President of Marketing at Standard Microsystems Corporation (SMSC), a key supplier to major computer OEMs of IO and networking ASICs for use on PC motherboards. Doug worked at Intel Corporation in memory and ASIC marketing and started his career at IBM as a design engineer working on cache memory design of mainframe computers. Doug has 8 granted patents with US Patent Office related to NVDIMM and Storage designs.
Tom Friend is a methodical and resourceful standards executive with professional experience in electronic, software and mechanical design. Fluent in strategic and tactical use of standards to benefit engineering, marketing and sales, Tom has experience working with teams across the globe.
John Geldman leads the SSD Industry Standards team at Toshiba Memory. He has worked in NAND & Spinning Storage, Linux & VxWorks internals, Networking, Security, & IC development.
John serves as an NVMe Board of Directors member. John is currently active in NVMe, T13, T10, PCI-SIG, JEDEC, and SATA-IO.
John has also actively participated in IEEE 1667, IEEE 1619, TCG, USB, CF, SD, & UFSA committees. John began working in storage in ’84 with a dream of enabling $50 shrink wrapped 20 MB spinning drives through controller design (one dream accomplished).
John holds an MSCS from Santa Clara Univ., a BSECE from Clarkson Univ., and has been awarded multiple patents.
Dr. Kiran Gunnam is an innovative technology leader with vision and passion who effectively connects with individuals and groups. Dr. Gunnam's breakthrough contributions are in the areas of advanced error correction systems, storage class memory systems and vision based navigation systems. He has helped drive organizations to become industry leaders through ground-breaking technologies. Dr. Gunnam has 70 issued patents and 100+ patent applications/invention disclosures on algorithms, computing and storage systems. He is the lead inventor/sole inventor for 90% of them. Dr. Gunnam’s patented work has been already incorporated in more than 2 billion data storage and WiFi chips and is set to continue to be incorporated in more than 500 million chips per year.
Dr. Gunnam served as IEEE Distinguished Speaker and Plenary Speaker for 25+ events and international conferences and more than 3000 attendees in USA, Canada and Asia benefited from his lecture talks. He also teaches graduate level course focused on machine learning systems at Santa Clara University.
Dr. Erich F. Haratsch is Director of Engineering, Flash Channel Architecture at Seagate Technology. He leads the development of advanced signal processing, error correction coding and NAND management features for solid-state drive controllers. Prior to joining Seagate, Dr. Haratsch was Director of Engineering at LSI Corp., where he worked on Sandforce branded solid-state drive controllers. Earlier in his career, Dr. Haratsch developed signal processing and error correction technologies for multiple generations of HDD controllers at LSI and Agere Systems. He previously worked at Bell Labs, where he invented new equalizer and decoder architectures for Gigabit Ethernet over copper and optical communications. Dr. Haratsch regularly speaks at many industry events, is the author of over 40 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, and holds 77 U.S. patents. He also is a Senior Member of IEEE, and earned his MS and PhD degrees from the Technical University of Munich (Germany).
My focus is on emerging technologies and products in the marketplace. Honed by 3 decades of experience in storage, servers and networks, my work combines architecture, engineering, marketing and psychology to analyze and predict market evolution. I envision a digital storage infrastructure that is safer and more reliable than paper – with far greater density, economy and accessibility.
Educated at Yale University and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, I live in Sedona, Arizona with over 20 TB of data storage.
Troy Hegr is a Sr. Manager at Ontrack, the world leader in data recovery, data erasure, and data protection. Mr. Hegr helps facilitate discussion and fosters partnerships in the technical community with leading data storage and computer system designers, SSD manufacturers and industry groups. Mr. Hegr benefits from over 25 years of experience in the data recovery and digital forensics industries and has been a Flash Memory Summit CAB member, session organizer, and presenter for several years. Mr. Hegr is based in the Tampa Bay, Fl. area and has an Electronics Technician degree from DeVry Institute of Technology and holds a certification in project management from the University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management.
Jonathan Hinkle is Executive Director and Distinguished Researcher of System Architecture at Lenovo, where he creates and helps foster adoption of new data center systems architectures and technologies. Jonathan is an industry leading technical expert in memory, storage devices, and data center systems architecture with over 20 years of experience. In the JEDEC standards organization, Jonathan serves on the Board of Directors, is Vice-Chair of Marketing and Chairs the Hybrid DIMM Task Group standardizing NVDIMMs. He also invented and drove first development of the EDSFF 1U Short (E1.S) NVMe drive, VLP DIMM and the NVDIMM Persistent Memory. He has over 30 patents granted or pending and earned BS and MS degrees in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University.
Xinde Hu is currently Director of System Architecture @eSSD in Western Digital. His responsibility includes creating, designing, and evaluating innovative system architecture concepts and implementations for the next generations of non-volatile memory based storage systems. Before joining Western Digital, Dr. Hu held architectural leader positions in STEC and STMicroelectronics. Dr. Hu has authored more than a dozen technical papers on data storage systems and has 38 patents issued. He received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
I have been in the semiconductor and systems industry for last 20 years with emphasis in business development and Marketing.
Worked at companies like Silicon Storage Technology Inc, Paxcelnet Inc, Infineon Technologies, LSI Logic, NEC Electronics, Integrated Device Technology and National Semiconductor.
My expertise is also utilized by market analysts in NOR Flash business so they can understand the market trends.
Considering my background in Marketing and Business development, well suited for start-ups, multinationals corporation and enterprises that is establishing a brand, product preference, major revenue stream by developing strategic customer-base and partnerships.
Specialties:My key skills are in market awareness and product/company positioning.
Managing, developing major OEM and ODM Design-Win for growth phase of business plan.
Adrian Jackson is a Research Architect at EPCC where he works with a wide range of academic and industry partners to provide HPC and parallel computing expertise. Currently he is leading EPCC’s Intel Parallel Computing Centre (IPCC), and is the technical architect for the NEXTGenIO project, where he is leading the design of the innovative software and hardware infrastructure that will integrate Intel’s Storage Class Memory (3D Xpoint) into a prototype HPC system.
Jeff Janukowicz is a Research Director at IDC where he provides insight and analysis on the SSD and HDD components markets. In this role, Jeff provides expert opinion, in-depth market research, and strategic analysis on the dynamics, trends, and opportunities facing the industry. His research includes market forecasts, market share reports, and technology trends for clients, investors, suppliers, and manufacturers.
Mr. Janukowicz brings more than 15 years of experience within the technology industry to IDC, including more than 10 years in storage and 13 years in the semiconductor industry. Prior to joining IDC, Jeff was in strategic marketing for Agere Systems where he was responsible for market research, business planning, and marketing activities. In addition, he has held various marketing and engineering positions during his career.
Pedram Khalili-Amiri works on developing the computing systems of the future, starting from novel nano-scale devices/materials that enable systems with unprecedented performance and energy efficiency. Much of his work involves devices that use both the spin and charge of electrons, also referred to as spintronics. Previously Pedram was an adjunct assistant professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at UCLA from 2013-2017, where he co-led the memory program within the NSF TANMS center, focusing on development of electric-field-controlled magnetic memory with unprecedented energy efficiency. During 2009-2014, at UCLA he was project manager of two DARPA multi-institution programs, focusing on the development of spin-transfer-torque magnetic random access memory (STT-MRAM) and non-volatile logic (NVL), working with several major industry and university partners. These programs resulted in the world’s fastest and lowest-power magnetic memory technologies at the time. In addition, since 2012 he has been co-founder of Inston Inc., a startup company pioneering voltage-controlled MRAM for high-performance computing applications, where he also served as board member and chief technology officer for five years. His professional activities have included serving as a guest editor for Spin, and serving on the technical program committee of the Joint MMM/Intermag Conference.
Axel is the Founder, President & CEO of Scalable Systems Research Labs Inc. Prior to SSRLabs, he was tasked with implementing a private cloud for a highly customized CAD Design System with the goal to unify mechanical, thermal and electrical design for probe cards at FormFactor. This tool set was supposed to be driven by a work flow process, and once fully implemented, it was intended to feed into a BI System such that all work effort can be monitored in real-time. Preceding FormFactor, he was a founder, CTO and member of the executive management team of a Silicon Valley startup focused on real-time image and video analysis. For that startup, Parimics, he created the underlying architecture for and supervised the implementation of a massively parallel chipset targeted at image and video analysis in real-time. This was achieved by deploying parallel processors before Intel or even Google had discovered the need to go parallel. Other prior successes include the turnaround of a company that was considered a $36M loss to investors into a $394M acquisition target within less than a year. Axel convinced the Technical Advisory Board and subsequently the Board of Directors to strategically reorient the company. He was instrumental in designing, implementing and marketing the first CML-type transceivers designed for bulk CMOS, and the first fully functioning combined virtually output queued switch fabric.
He has over 20 years of experience in high performance computing, networking, fault tolerance, High Availability and low latency switching, as well as experience in architecting, designing and implementing large ASICs. He has been granted 8 U.S. patents in processor architectures, real-time image and video processing and analysis, in communications protocols and device architecture.
Management and Technology consultant with a passion for helping organizations understand how to take advantage of the rapidly expanding options and transformative capabilities of cloud computing. Working with firms ranging from large enterprises to small organizations in the private or public sector, the challenges are similar, and the potential benefits are significant.
Chris Lyon, a 12 year storage veteran is currently the executive director of the FCIA and has held that position for over eight years. Prior to FCIA, Chris has held various marketing positions at Vixel, McDATA, Connex and SAN Navigator.
In 2005, Chris achieved the title of Certified Association Executive (CAE) – the highest professional recognition available from the American Society of Association Executives. A CAE must meet a rigorous set of requirements to be eligible to take the examination covering Governance & Structure; Leadership Processes; Management & Administration; Internal & External Relations; and Programs & Services.
President of Marken Communications, Andy has been involved in the strategic marketing and promotion of hardware and software storage technology for more than 20 years. His experience includes work with many of the early hard drive firms in Silicon Valley as well as optical firms involved in CD, MO and DVD technologies. He has been involved in mainframe, PC, CE and game systems promotion with firms including Amdahl, Control Data, Atari, Panasonic, Philips, Verbatim and others. In the application side of the industry he has worked with ancient firms like MicroPro as well as today's advanced technologies with firms such as FAST, Dazzle, Pinnacle, InterVideo, Ulead and others
Thomas McCormick is currently Chief Engineer/Technologist at Swissbit, where he leads market focused R&D for product development and full life cycle support. He has over twenty years experience designing PC and embedded computer systems, including over fifteen years focused on flash memory product research and development. He holds a PhD in Computer Engineering from Northeastern University. His on-going research is focused on flash memory and next generation non-volatile memory systems for highly reliable storage in embedded applications. He has presented at Flash Memory Summit, the Non-Volatile Memory Workshop, and has published an article on embedded flash in EE Times. He also holds an MBA and an MS in Computing Engineer from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and an MSME and BSME (summa cum laude) from Drexel University.
Mike McKean is currently Director of Sales at Encore Semi, a design services firm focused on ASIC and firmware/software design and development. At Encore Semi, he leverages his ASIC and firmware background to grow key accounts and support projects with technical skills. He is currently leading firmware development for projects using multiple SSD controller architectures. Before joining Encore, Mike was VP Product Solutions at cybersecurity startup FHOOSH and General Manager for the Colorado Design Center of Synapse Design Automation.
AtAt Synapse, Mike led the successful execution of multiple HDD, SDD, and consumer electronics projects. He has 30 years experience in the semiconductor and systems industries. Mike is a regular presenter, chairperson, and organizer at Flash Memory Summit. He earned an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin and a BS in Engineering Science from Trinity University (TX).
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Mari Mineta Clapp has over 20 years of experience in high tech developing new markets, creating powerful brands and highly differentiated marketing platforms for innovative start-ups focused on data center or carrier networks. She works closely with IT leaders to drive thought leadership and network transformation as large corporations take greater control of their network infrastructure and deploy open networking solutions.
Mari was VP of Corporate Relations at Big Switch Networks and led the company’s corporate and Open SDN product launch and worked with Jayshree Ullal and Andy Bechtolsheim on the launch of Arista Networks and the industry-changing Arista 7500. She was also on the launch team at Avici Systems, the first start-up to make it into the core of AT&T’s network- subsequently she was hired as a direct report to the CTO of AT&T. Mari was VP of Corporate Relations at Vidyo, Inc. the winner of the 2010 Wall Street Journal Innovation Award, VP of Marketing at BitGravity, a next generation CDN, and VP of Corporate Relations at UB Networks, the pioneer in Ethernet networking, founded as Ungermann-Bass.
KRS Murthy is an experienced venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur. He is currently focused on mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, and competitive strategy. He has led many companies at many different stages and has grown companies to sales of over $500 million. He is a popular speaker at conferences around the world and a leader in many technical societies, including IEEE Nanotechnology Council, IEEE Engineering Management Society, IEEE Computer Society, Silicon Valley Engineering Council, and IEEE Standards Board.
Enterprise Strategic Marketing and Communications Director with over 10 years experience with brand development and marketing to the storage industry with specialization in Solid State technologies.
Seasoned in both corporate and marketing communications with the ability to developed unique go-to-market strategies that enhances alignment with customer needs, creating strategic marketing plans that leveraged multiple channels and mediums to drive lead generation, product demand and brand development.
bio
Mr. Pappas brings more than 30 years of industry experience with building, running and managing dozens of successful industry associations and cross–industry initiatives. He is currently the Chair of the Solid State Disk Form Factor Working Group and co–Chair of the InfiniBand Trade Association and was also a Founding Director of the PCI Special Interest Group and The Green Grid as well as Founding Chairman of the USB Special Interest Group.
Uma Parepalli is a senior level architecture and engineering, product and program management leader in enterprise, cloud and data center servers, storage, and networking, real-time embedded systems, consumer electronics, automotive, locomotive and aerospace domains with Marvell, SK hynix, Broadcom, Dell EMC, Intel, and India’s Department of Space etc. He is the first FMS diversity & inclusion chair starting in 2019. Uma is a computer engineering graduate from University of Mysore.
Rob Peglar is the Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Symbolic IO. Rob is a seasoned technology executive and published author with 39 years of data storage, network and compute-related experience. Rob serves on the Board of Directors for the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and an advisor for the Flash Memory Summit.
Prior to joining Symbolic IO, Rob was the Vice President, Advanced Storage at Micron Technology. Prior to Micron, he was the CTO, Americas for EMC Isilon. He has also held senior level positions at Xiotech Corporation, StorageTek and ETA Systems.
He is responsible for the strategic direction of the Computer and Storage Product line, development of advanced system and IP for the market segment. He works with strategic customers to enable new capabilities to improve cost, power and performance. He also develops emerging market segments to expand the capabilities of FPGAs and improve current solutions. Prior to Intel PSG/Altera, he has worked at a variety of industry leading semiconductor companies including Cadence and Infineon.
Accomplished executive in the Semiconductor (infrastructure and consumer) and Platform hardware and Software with over 24 years of executive management, engineering, technology marketing, bootstrapping business as well as venture investment experience.
Prior to taking on the role of V.P. of Business Development, Wayne was Radian’s first advisor and helped build out the company’s extended leadership team and strategic initiatives. Wayne has been a pioneer in storage networking, working hands on with the early versions of fibre channel and initiating standardization efforts through industry consortiums such as SNIA and FCIA. He was Co-Founder and held V.P. of Engineering and CTO roles at Gadzoox Networks, an early leader in fibre channel SAN switches. As a Director of Engineering at Emulex, Wayne led an Advanced Technology group that developed the industry’s first fibre channel HBA. He has held V.P. and division Chief Technologist positions at Seagate and been an Advisory Board member at PMC Sierra.
Gil Russell is Principal Analyst at Semiscape, an IT consulting firm he founded in July 2005. Mr. Russell specializes in dynamic and non-volatile memory technologies and their application in memory storage systems. He has participated in JEDEC standards committees since 1992 and is the architect of Reduced Latency DRAM. Previously, he managed new product definition activities; participated as a team member of new product development engineering groups; technical lead of new product introductions; technical interface and technical liaison to external partnerships at Infineon Technologies, Siemens Microelectronics, Samsung Semiconductor & NEC.
Greg Schulz is founder and a Sr. Advisory Consulting with the independent IT industry analyst firm Server and StorageIO (aka StorageIO). Greg is a noted and accomplished IT professional and data infrastructure thought-leader having real-world experience as a customer, vendor, analyst as well as consultant, not to mention being a four-time VMware vExpert. With a career spanning over 30 years in the industry ranging from operations to business systems applications development, system architecture and admin. This real-world experience from data protection (HA, BC, DRY, backup/archive) to performance and capacity planning across servers, storage, networking, hardware, software and services is the heart of this blog. Greg’s StorageIOblog leverages and builds off of those experiences while extending from physical to virtual and cloud, not to mention Big Data, Software Defined, DCIM, SSD, Green IT and other Buzzword Bingo topics covering trends pertaining to data infrastructure topics and themes.
Kent Smith is responsible for outbound marketing of all Seagate Flash and SSD Products. Prior to Seagate, in 2008, Kent joined SandForce as the Sr. Director of Marketing, which was acquired by LSI in 2012, which was acquired by Avago in 2014, and finally sold to Seagate that same year. Through the last eight years, He has written dozens of articles, blogs and presentations on helping users understand how flash technology is different from HDDs.
Marc Staimer is the founder, senior analyst and CDS at Dragon Slayer Consulting in Beaverton, Ore. The consulting practice has focused on the areas of strategic planning, product development and market development. With more than 30 years of marketing, sales and business experience in infrastructure, storage, server, software and virtualization, Marc is considered one of the industry's leading experts.
During his extensive marketing career, Lee Stein has applied innovative and unique marketing and sales approaches to grow business for his broad range of clients. His first client, Seiko Instruments, launched his career-long love of advanced technologies. He has since served clients in a wide variety of semiconductor, electronics, software, IT, Internet security, and advanced engineering fields.
He delights in helping clients overcome their biggest marketing challenges. In support of accelerating a client’s growth, he has written and published over 300 contributed articles, white papers, and case studies for client companies. Recently, he optimized multiple email campaigns for a client with a 20-40% increase in clicks. He also has developed and applied innovative survey methods designed to rapidly identify and grade the top 20% of prospects in a client’s target market. In addition, he has helped clients by creatively licensing IP to raise funds.
Dr. Robert Thibadeau pioneered self-encrypting drives during his tenure as Chief Technologist of Seagate Technology, LLC from 2002-2009. He has also served as the Chair of the Storage Workgroup in the Trusted Computing Group. Dr. Thibadeau was also the founding director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University from 1980-2008. He is the inventor on over 25 US patents, and he holds degrees from Emory University and the University of Virginia.
Gary is the Solid State Technology Development technical lead in IBM's Systems & Technology Group, where he has been focused on driving system integration of SSD and NAND Flash technology as part of IBM's Flash exploitation initiative. Gary previously managed Memory Subsystems Development for Power-based server products, and led a Memory Procurement Engineering team responsible for technology qualification and convergence between IBM Development and Memory suppliers. He has been with IBM for 21 years.
Hiroshi Watanabe, PhD, is a professor teaching flash memory and semiconductor technologies in dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He serves as a Fellow Technical Committee at Foremay, Inc., U.S.A. He has published many journal & conference papers and invented 145 granted patents all over the world (including 62 US granted). Until 2010, he had worked for Toshiba’s Headquarter RD Center and been engaged in the reliability study of several electron devices including NAND Flash. He received PhD in theoretical physics in 1994 from U. Tsukuba, Japan. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.
Mark Webb is Principal/Consultant at MKW Ventures Consulting LLC. He is currently working in the areas of SSD and semiconductor technology and competitive analysis as well as SSD business and market development. Mark works with SSD OEM and ODM companies, storage providers, controller companies, and semiconductor manufacturers.
David Woolf currently leads Data Center initiatives at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL). While at UNH-IOL, David has led development of dozens of industry-reviewed test programs and procedures as part of the team that has grown the UNH-IOL into a world-class center for interoperability and conformance testing. David has been an active participant in a number industry forums and committee’s addressing conformance and interoperability. Currently he's active in coordinating the NVMe Integrators List and plugfests and Open Networking Integrators List and plugfests.
Chuck Sobey - Conference Chair
Brian A. Berg - Conference Technical Chair
Jay Kramer - Business Chairperson and Emcee
Jim Handy - Sr Program Advisor
Jianjun ("Jerome") Luo
Camberley Bates
Manuel d'Abreu
Shawn Adams
Rahul Advani
Mike Amidi
Stephen Bates
Walker Blount
Jean Bozman
Tom Burniece
Craig Carlson
Krishna Chander
Ken Clipperton
Allon Cohen
Celeste Crystal
Deepankar Das
Rob Davis
Dave Eggleston
Rich Fetik
Doug Finke
Tom Friend
John Geldman
Kiran Gunnam
Erich Haratsch
Robin Harris
Troy Hegr
Jonathan Hinkle
Xinde Hu
Syed Hussain
Adrian Jackson
Jeff Janukowicz
Pedram Khalili
Axel Kloth
Steve Knipple
Chris Lyon
Andy Marken
Tom McCormick
Mike McKean
Mari Mineta Clapp
KRS Murthy
Tinh Ngo
Sunhom Steve Paak
Jim Pappas
Uma Parepalli
Rob Peglar
Robert Pierce
Renu Raman
Wayne Rickard
Gil Russell
Greg Schulz
Kent Smith
Marc Staimer
Lee Stein
Robert Thibadeau
Gary Tressler
Hiroshi Watanabe
Mark Webb
David Woolf
