Chat With The Experts

Shyam Sharma

Senior Software Architect, Cadence

Shyam has done his BS in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and has over 22 years of experiences in EDA working across multiple products, tools and IPs/VIPs. His area of expertise include processor architecture, storage, Low Power/Server DRAMs & DIMMs and memory sub systems. He is currently working as Senior Software Architect responsible for Server and Low Power DRAM VIPs solutions offered by Cadence. He has worked at Mentor Graphics and Denali Design Systems before joining Cadence Design Systems in 2010.

Larrie Carr

VP of Engineering, Rambus

Larrie Carr is the VP of Engineering at the newly formed Interconnect SoC business unit at Rambus Inc. He is leading the development and architecture of Rambus' new product initiatives which are focused on enabling memory connectivity, expansion, pooling, and switching using CXL technology.

Before Rambus, Larrie was a Technical Fellow at Microchip Technology responsible for technical strategy and architectural guidance for Microchip's broad portfolio of datacenter solutions, including serial memory controllers, SSD controllers, RAID solutions, PCIe switches, SAS expanders, and other initiatives not publicly announced. During that time, Microchip provided significant contributions to the CXL 2.0 standard in the areas of memory expander switching and fabric management under Larrie's supervision.

He also served as a private consultant conceiving many of the industry's first-generation non-volatile memory solutions. Larrie is a former board member of both the CXL and Gen-Z consortiums. He is a registered Professional Engineer and earned a bachelor's degree and master's degree in electronic engineering from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.

Rob Davis

Vice President of Storage Technology, NVIDIA

Rob Davis is the Vice President of Storage Technology at the NVIDIA Networking Platform Group where he focuses on ways to apply high-speed interface technology to storage systems. He came to NVIDIA through the Mellanox acquisition. As technology leader and visionary for more than 35 years, he has been a key evaluator and decision maker for the development of storage networking products. He is currently leading the development and marketing of products based on NVMe over fabrics, which will allow for the high-speed networking of PCIe-based storage. Davis was previously Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at QLogic, where for 15 years he drove development and marketing of Fibre Channel, Ethernet and InfiniBand technology into new markets such as blade servers. Prior to QLogic, Davis spent 20 years at Ancor Communications, which QLogic acquired in 2000. At Ancor, Davis served as Vice President of Advanced Development, Director of Technical Marketing, and Director of Engineering. He drove development and marketing of their Fibre Channel products in the early 90s and their InfiniBand products in the late 90s. Davis' in-depth expertise spans Virtualization, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, SCSI, iSCSI, InfiniBand, RoCE, SAS, PCI, PM, SATA, and Flash Storage.

John F. Kim

Director of Storage Marketing, NVIDIA

John F. Kim is Director of Storage Marketing at NVIDIA, where he helps storage customers and vendors benefit from high performance interconnects and smart offloads, including RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access). He is a frequent conference participant, including several past Flash Memory Summits, and a frequent blogger on storage and networking topics. He is also chair of the Ethernet Storage Forum. Before joining NVIDIA, he created storage solutions and alliances at NetApp and EMC. He has a BA from Harvard University.

Stephen Bates

Chief Architect Emerging Storage Systems, Huawei

Stephen Bates is VP and Chief Architect of Emerging Storage Systems at Huawei. He and his team research all aspects of next-generation storage systems from media to programming interfaces to filesystems to virtualized storage to applications. Stephen is an expert in high performance storage, persistent and non-volatile memory, computer networking, signal processing and error correction coding. Prior to Huawei he was the CTO of Eideticom which is a pioneer company in NVMe-based computational storage. Stephen has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Tom Friend

Technical Training Manager, Teledyne LeCroy 

Tom Friend is Technical Training Manager at Teledyne LeCroy. After decades of writing, editing and arguing over many high technology protocol standards, Tom has become a teacher of those same protocols. Those same principles of breaking down complex processes into simple, easy to understand steps are now being used to teach a whole new generation of firmware and hardware engineers about the latest in computer protocols.

Hiroshi Watanabe

Professor Flash Memory & Semiconductor Technologies, National Chiao Tung University

Hiroshi Watanabe, PhD, is a professor teaching flash memory and semiconductor technologies in dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. He has published many journal & conference papers and invented more than 150 granted patents all over the world (including more than 60 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. In 2023, he founded IEEE Taipei Blockchain Group and has been Co-Chair of it. He is a technical advisor of Beyond Blockchain, Inc. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Mark Webb

Principal/Consultant, MKW Ventures

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.

Joe O'Hare

Senior Director of Marketing, Everspin Technologies

Joe O'Hare is Senior Marketing Director at Everspin Technologies, Inc. Joe has had a rewarding career working in the semiconductor industry at companies such as TI, Lucent Microelectronics, Agere Systems and now Everspin Technologies. He has held a variety of engineering, marketing and executive positions with a focus on developing products for the storage industry, both magnetic and solid state. At Everspin Technologies, Joe has held roles in sales and marketing since 2011. Joe is currently leading the effort at Everspin to define and launch a new class of STT-MRAM memory that is targeted at storage and industrial applications where performance and persistence are valued.  He also has led the efforts to build a strong distributor network of our products and has led promotion efforts of the product and company at customers and the industry overall.

Craig Petrie

Vice President, Bittware

Craig Petrie currently serves as Vice President of BittWare which is part of the Molex group of companies. Having programmed his first FPGA in 1997, Craig started his career at Nallatech UK as an FPGA Engineer before going on to lead product management and strategy for the company. Craig holds a Masters degree in Electronics & Electrical Engineering with Business from the University of Strathclyde, UK.

Dick Otte

CEO Promex, Industries

Dick Otte has been President & CEO of Promex Industries Inc. since 1995. Promex is an ISO 9001:2015, ISO 13485:2016 and ITAR registered manufacturing services provided specializing in onshore mixed technology assembly of medical, biotech and semiconductor devices in its facilities in Santa Clara and San Diego California (DBA QP Technologies).

Prior to that Dick was the General Manager of AMP's Kaptron Optic Products Subsidiary and President of Advanced Packaging Systems, a Raychem-Corning Joint Venture. He was an electronic engineer early in his Career.

Dick Chairs the International Photonic Systems Roadmap (IPSR) Assembly TWG, is a member of the MIT Communication Technology Roadmap advisory Board, a member of the IEEE, IPC, Optica and SMTA. Over 75 patents issued throughout the world list Otte as an inventor. He has a BSEE and an MSEE from MIT and an MBA from Harvard University.

Marty Hart

CEO and Founder, TopLine Corporation

Martin Hart is CEO and founder of TopLine Corporation. Martin graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from California State University in Long Beach. He holds 12 patents in the fields of Column Grid Arrays and Vibration Dampers. Martin resides in Orange County, California.

Pichai Balaji

Senior Director, Product Marketing Marvell

Pichai (Pic) Balaji is Senior Director of Product Marketing, Flash BU at Marvell. In this role, Pic is responsible for leading the product marketing initiatives for Marvell's Bravera™ SSD controller product family for cloud, data center and enterprise flash storage applications. Prior to this, he managed Marvell's SSD controller product lines for PC-OEM, client, industrial and edge device applications. Pic joined Marvell from Seagate Technology where he was Senior Manager, Customer Programs for cloud storage and enterprise OEM solutions. Previous to this, Pic was Senior Manager, Marketing at LSI /Avago Technologies (later acquired by Broadcom) and held various roles of increasing responsibility at Seagate Technology, managing SSD and HDD products, and customer engagement. Pic holds a B.E. in Electronics Engineering from MN Regional Engineering College (now renamed National Institute of Technology) in Allahabad, India and two M.S. degrees, one from Tennessee Technological University and the other from Southern Methodist University.

Richard Solomon

Technical Marketing Manager, Synopsys

Richard Solomon is the Technical Marketing Manager for Synopsys' DesignWare PCI Express Controller IP.  He has been involved in the development of PCI chips dating back to the NCR 53C810 and pre-1.0 versions of the PCI spec. Richard architected and led the development of the PCI Express and PCI-X interface cores used in an industry-leading line of storage RAID controller chips. He has served on the PCI-SIG Board of Directors for some 20 years, and continues to represent Synopsys on wide variety of PCI workgroups. Richard holds a BSEE from Rice University and 27 US Patents, many of which relate to PCI technology.

Davide Villa

Chief Revenue Officer, Xinnor

Davide Villa is the Chief Revenue Officer at Xinnor. Xinnor is an Israeli start-up that developed the fastest software RAID engine for NVMe SSD. Davide is a veteran in the storage and flash industries, bringing more than two decades of experience.

Prior to joining Xinnor, Davide served as Director of Business Development in the EMEAI region at Western Digital. In his 9 years at HGST/WD, Davide led the enterprise business in the region, significantly developing the customer portfolio and business for enterprise SSD, HDD and platforms. Davide has been a pioneer in the Flash industry. In the early days of the flash boom, he managed business development for the NAND flash division at STMicroelectronics and later on, he had multiple roles at sTec, including VP of EMEA sales, when the company introduced the first enterprise SSD to the market.

Tod Earhart

Founder and CEO, Burlywood

Tod Earhart is Founder and CTO at Burlywood. He leads the creation of innovative flash storage SSD solutions that can handle the growing complexities of the cloud and data center. Tod created the flexible, adaptable architecture of Burlywood that can deliver better performance and endurance using the most cost effective design.  His focus at burlywood is on SSD controllers optimized for real workloads and challenging the industry to improve the standard benchmarks to fully stress SSDs and provide more accurate estimates of in system performance under demanding workloads.

Cameron Brett

Senior Director of Enterprise and Cloud Storage, KIOXIA

Cameron Brett is the Senior Director of Enterprise and Cloud Storage at Kioxia, where he manages a team of product line managers to drive product strategy and revenue growth. Cameron has over 18 years of product marketing and management experience in storage technology and has previously held managerial positions at QLogic, PMC-Sierra, Broadcom and Adaptec. Throughout his career in high-tech product marketing, he has focused on storage for enterprise and small/medium business servers and worked to bring new generations of storage technology to market. His area of expertise includes Flash/SSD storage, virtualization, convergence and cloud technologies.

Bill Martin

Principal Engineer, SSD IO Standards, Samsung

Bill has been involved in the storage industry for over 35 years, starting in 1983 with the development of a proprietary optical interface for HP storage, architecting the HP Tachyon interface chip for Fibre Channel, serving on industry consortiums and standards bodies for storage including SNIA, INCITS T11, INCITS T10, INCITS T13, SATA-IO, and NVMe. He has demonstrable skills in gaining industry agreement in a variety of technologies and bringing together competitors for the advancement of the industry.

In addition to his role representing Samsung in SSD IO Standards, Bill currently holds the following industry leadership roles: co-chair of the SNIA Technical Council, Board member of the NVMe Board of Directors, Chair of INCITS T10, Secretary of INCITS T13.

Bill has received numerous industry recognitions for his contributions to the storage industry over the past decades including: SNIA Volunteer of the Year award 2021, INCITS Gene Milligan award for effective committee management 2016, INCITS Merit award 2013, FCIA Achievement award 2010, INCITS Outstanding Leadership Team award 2007, INCITS Technical Excellence award 2005, FCIA Lifetime Achievement award 2005, and SNIA Outstanding Theme lead for the interop lab 2004.

Rupin Mohan

Sr Director of Strategic Planning, HPE

Rupin Mohan is a Senior Director of strategic planning at HPE Storage. Rupin has 27+ years' experience in developing storage and networking products and services. Rupin has been granted 19 patents, filed 25+ patents at HPE Storage. He is a Board Member and Technical Marketing Chair for Fibre Channel Industry Association. Rupin completed his MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management as a Sloan Fellow. He also holds a MS in Engineering from Tufts University and BE in Computer Engineering from Delhi Institute of Technology.

Mark Miquelon

Director of Product Alliance Engineering, Data Center Systems, Western Digital

Mark Miquelon is currently Director of Partner Alliances for Western Digital's Platforms business. In this role he seeks out strategic partnerships that provide additional value to customers consuming JBOD/JBOF and servers developed by Western Digital. Prior experience includes leadership roles in both engineering and product line management at Seagate, Avago, LSI, Vitesse, Symbios Logic, At&T, and NCR. Mark resides in Colorado Springs, Colorado, is married, and has two children.

Ray Tsay

VP Engineering, NEO Semiconductor

Ray Tsay is Co-Founder & VP of Engineering at NEO Semiconductor. Ray has over 30 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. Prior to NEO, he worked at many companies including Integrated Silicon Solution (ISSI), ICT, and EG&G Reticon. Ray led engineering teams for testing, product, and manufacturing. He has broad experience in various products such as CCD, CPLD, SRAM, EEPROM, EPROM, and flash memory. Ray holds a MS degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Arizona State University, a MS in Chemical and Material Engineering from the University of Iowa, and a BS in Chemical Engineering from National Central University in Taiwan.

Jeongdong Choe

Senior Technical Fellow, TechInsights

Jeongdong Choe is a trusted consulting engineer professional as a senior technical fellow at TechInsights. He has 26+ year professional on cutting-edge manufacturing technologies for semiconductor products including DRAM, 3D NAND FLASH, SRAM/Logic and emerging memory such as STT-MRAM/PCRAM/ReRAM/FeRAM and 3D XPoint Memory. He is an author of over 100 US filed patents, manufacturing expertise in high technologies including direct experience on semiconductor process flow, unit process and equipment for photo-mask, photo-lithography, plasma/wet etching, CMP, CVD/PVD/ALD deposition, IIP/diffusion and annealing.

Walt Coon

VP NAND & Memory Research, Yole Group

Walt Coon is the VP of NAND & Memory Research at Yole Intelligence, part of Yole Group, working in the Semiconductor, Memory & Computing division. Walt is the primary author of the NAND Market Monitor and is based in the US.

Walt's mission at Yole is to deliver a comprehensive understanding of the entire memory and semiconductor landscape by leading the production of market updates and Market Monitors. Walt is also deeply involved in the business development of these activities. Prior to joining Yole in 2018, Walt spent 16 years at Micron Technology and 2 years at IHS Markit. Walt earned a Master of Business Administration from Boise State University (Idaho, United States) and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Utah (Utah, United States).

Steve Chung

Professor & IEEE Life Fellow, National Yang-Ming Chiao-Tung University

Steve Chung received his Ph. D. from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985, under the supervision of world renowned CMOS co-Inventor C. T. Sah. He is the Chair professor of NYCU (former NCTU) with past administrative position in managing International Office and Executive Director of the school's TOP-University plan funded by the government. He was a visiting prof. to both Stanford and UC-Merced, CA, in 2021 and 2008 respectively. He was also a consultant to the two world giants in foundry- tsmc and UMC. He has more than 300 publications and over 40 patents. He is an IEEE Life Fellow and has been an IEEE EDS BoG member for over 12 years. Among numerous awards, he was awarded outstanding award of Pan-wen Yuan foundation, 3 times outstanding research award (NSC), lifetime-achievement award of National Inventors etc.

Mike Howard

VP DRAM & Memory Research, Yole Group

Mike Howard is a member of the memory team at Yole Intelligence, part of Yole Group, as VP of DRAM & Memory Research. Mike is the primary author of the DRAM Market Monitor and is based in the US. Mike's mission at Yole is to deliver a comprehensive understanding of the entire memory and semiconductor landscape via market updates and Market Monitors. Mike is also deeply involved in the business development of these activities. Prior to Yole, Mike worked at IHS and Micron Technology. Mike earned a Master of Business Administration at The Ohio State University (United-States), a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering and a Bachelor of Arts in Finance at the University of Washington (Washington, United-States).

Andy Hsu

CEO, NEO Semiconductor

Andy Hsu is the Founder and CEO of NEO Semiconductor, a company focused on the development of innovative architectures for NAND flash and DRAM memory. Andy is responsible for the overall company strategy, execution, and technology innovation that fuels the company's growth. He has more than 25 years of experience in the semiconductor industry including positions as VP of Engineering and leader of R&D and Engineering Teams. This resulted in the development of more than 60 products in various non-volatile memories. Andy is an accomplished technology visionary and inventor of more than 120 granted U.S. patents. He performed research in the fields of Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence (AI) while earning a master's degree in Electrical, Computer, and System Engineering (ECSE) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in New York. He earned a bachelor's degree from the National Cheng-Kung University in Taiwan.

Jian Chen

Visiting Scientist, Stanford University

Jian Chen is a visiting scholar at Stanford, conducting research on capacitor-less DRAM and 3D DRAM since 2021.  He was previously at SanDisk/WDC for 25 years, where he was Sr. VP of Technology responsible for the company's overall 3D NAND technology development from 2013 to late 2020. Prior to that, Jian was VP of Memory System Engineering, leading the exploration of emerging memory system architecture and product designs of SD/uSD, and SSD. He was the first device/process engineer to work on the SanDisk-Toshiba joint NAND venture in 1999, worked at the joint fabs in Yokkaichi and led the SanDisk organization from 2005 to 2007. With over 150 granted US patents, Jian invented some of the fundamental patents in NAND device/process and systems that have been used for over 10 generations of NAND products (USP# 5867429 on method to correct cell to cell coupling, USP#5930167 on binary cache, USP# 6522580 &6643188 on GPW, USP# 7043849 on NAND WL airgap).  Prior to SanDisk, he was with AMD. Jian co-authored a book chapter on Flash Memory Reliability and JEDEC flash memory reliability standard. He also published the papers that first discovered and coined the term GIDL. Jian received his MS/Ph.D. in EECS from UC Berkeley, and B.S. in Solid State Physics from University of Electronic Science and Technology, Chengdu, China.

Andy Higginbotham

Sr. Director, Enterprise Marketing and Business Development, Phison

Andy Higginbotham is Sr. Director, Enterprise Marketing and Business Development at Phison. His responsibilities include leading Phison's U.S. Enterprise Controller and SSD sales and marketing and managing industry analyst relations. Prior to joining Phison, Andy held leadership marketing roles for Broadcom's LSI SSD Controller Division, SanDisk's Client SSD division, and Samsung and Western Digital HDD groups. Andy holds a B.S. Computer Science from U.C. Santa Barbara, and a M.B.A. from Santa Clara University.

Erich Haratsch

Senior Director Architecture, Marvell

Dr. Erich F. Haratsch is Senior Director Architecture at Marvell, where he leads the architecture definition for Bravera™ SSD controllers and other memory based products. Prior to joining Marvell, Dr. Haratsch worked at Seagate and LSI, where he worked on Nytro® and SandForce® branded SSD 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 started his career at AT&T and Lucent Bell Labs, where he worked on Gigabit Ethernet over copper, optical communications and the MPEG-4 video standard. Dr. Haratsch is the author of over 40 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, and holds more than 200 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).

Dmitry Livshits

CEO, Xinnor

Dmitry Livshits is the Chief Executive Officer at Xinnor. Xinnor's flagship xiRAID product is the world's first and fastest software RAID for the new generation of storage, that not only protects directly attached drives, but also those connected via NVMe-oF™. Specifically designed to handle the high level of parallelism of NVMe devices, xiRAID eliminates the bottleneck caused by ‘traditional' RAID controllers and delivers more than two times better performance. Dmitrii was deeply involved in mathematical research and product development for last 15 years. Dmitrii received his MS degree in Computer Science in 1998, PhD in mathematics in 2002 and graduated Harvard Business School in General Management Program in 2012.

Willie Nelson

Industry Technology Enabling Manager, SNIA CXL Liaison, Intel

Willie Nelson is the SNIA liaison to the CXL Consortium. At SNIA, he is a member of the SNIA Compute, Memory, and Storage Governing Board. HE has been with Intel Corporation for over 23 years and is currently a Technology Enabling Manager, working with ecosystem partners to ensure new IO technologies are co-developed and ready for deployment by the industry.

Don Jeanette

Vice President, TrendFocus

DON JEANETTE, Vice President, TRENDFOCUS, is leading the NAND/SSD work at Trendfocus. He also contributes to the research for their Cloud & Enterprise Storage Demand Analysis System programs. Prior to joining TRENDFOCUS, Don was Toshiba's Sr. Director of Marketing, responsible for all marketing functions including Strategy, Product Marketing, Analyst Relations, Channel Marketing, and new business development for Toshiba's SSDs and HDDs in the Americas. He brings over 27 years' experience in marketing and product management background, including marketing support for OEM, data center, and distribution sales, product planning and roadmap alignment. Don joined Toshiba in October 2009 with the acquisition of Fujitsu's HDD business. He started at Fujitsu in 1999 and worked in various roles, including business development and marketing, addressing various market segments including mobile, enterprise, desktop storage, as well as various emerging markets. Don has also served as a SCSI Trade Association board member. Prior to joining Toshiba, Don's experience includes marketing positions with Marvell and Infoseek. Don received a Bachelor's Degree from Central Connecticut State University and an MBA from San Jose State University. Don has also taught Management, Communication, and Ethics courses at the University of Phoenix.

Michael Smullen

Strategic Planner, Solidigm

Michael Smullen is a strategic planner at Solidigm, where he plans next-generation solid state drives (SSDs) for the datacenter and enterprise.  Prior to joining Intel in 2021, he was product marketing manager for Samsung's North America datacenter and enterprise SSD business since 2014.  Prior to his roles in SSD marketing, he designed ASICs for enterprise data storage systems, and worked with emerging enterprise applications of NAND flash, such as monolithic all flash arrays and NVDIMMs, using FPGA technology.  Michael is a recognized leader in SSD form factors for the datacenter and has presented on the topics of EDSFF and form factor transition dynamics at OCP Global Summit Storage Engineering Workshop and one on one with customers and market analysts across North America. Michael has an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, an MBA from San Jose State University, and selective coursework in Computer Science at Stanford University

Krishna Maheshwari

Chief Product Officer, NeuroBlade

Krishna Maheshwari the Chief Product Officer at NeuroBlade where he is engaging with customers as they architect next generation analytic platforms that analyze 100s of TB of data while storing 10s-100s of petabytes of storage. Prior to NeuroBlade, he was responsible for Cloudera's hybrid cloud platform offerings as well as the dbPaaS service in the public clouds. He is a thought leader in the space of big data and enterprise storage, with 20 years in the industry including at Cloudera, Dell EMC and Amazon. He holds an MBA from Harvard University, a Masters in Computer Engineering and a Bachelors in Computer Science from Cornell University.

Ron Minkovsky

Sr. Director of Technical Sales , Pliops

Ron Minkovsky is a technology expert with a strong background in R&D development and a focus on Customer Success. With experience in leadership roles, he excels in driving innovation, delivering successful outcomes, and leveraging emerging technologies. Ron has been a valuable member of Pliops since 2020, where he contributes his expertise. Prior to Pliops, he spent 8 years at Samsung Israel Research Center (SIRC) as a Senior Team Manager, leading product integration and customer support. Before that, Ron worked as an R&D HW developer. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as an MBA from Tel Aviv University.

Syed Hussain

Director Global Segment Marketing, GigaDevice

Syed S. Hussain is Director, Global Segment Marketing at GigaDevice: A Global Innovative Memory Architect, where he is responsible for the Automotive and Emerging segment. His key skills increasing market awareness, product/company positioning, and developing Tier1 major OEM and ODM design wins. He has over 25 years of experience in technology marketing, including positions with Infineon Technologies, Winbond Electronics, NEC Electronics, Integrated Device Technology, and National Semiconductor. He has published several magazine articles and has presented at many technical events, including Flash Memory Summit. He earned a BSEE from the University of Miami.

T. Kim Parnell

Fellow, ASME, Parnell Engineering and Consulting (PEC)

Kim Parnell is an automotive and vehicle expert and thought leader. Over 30 years consulting with firms nationally and internationally analyzing a variety of vehicles and heavy trucks. He evaluates the effectiveness and/or failures of complex systems and products to optimize design and manufacturing processes and assists with patent and IP related issues. Kim provides testimony regarding complex technology issues to lay audiences and juries using techniques such as 3D modelling in a compelling and understandable format.

Kim is a Stanford PhD and MSME in Mechanical Engineering, holds a Bachelor of Engineering Science (BES) from Georgia Tech, and is a Registered Professional Mechanical Engineer (California). He is an ASME Fellow (American Society of Mechanical Engineers) and an IEEE Life Senior Member; and SAMPE Chair NorCal Chapter.  He is also a Member of ASM International (the Materials Information Society) and SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers). Other technical society memberships include the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS), IEEE Consumer Technology (CT) Society (formerly Consumer Electronics), IEEE Electronics Packaging Society (EPS), IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology (EMBS) and EDFAS (Electronic Device Failure Analysis Society of ASM International).

Fen Chen

Principal Reliability/Validation Engineer, Cruise LLC

Fen Chen earned his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 1998. From 1997 to 1998, he was with Intel Component Research in Santa Clara, CA as a graduate intern working on IC interconnect reliability. He joined IBM Microelectronics at Essex Junction, VT in 1998 and worked on semiconductor technology reliability issues until 2015. From 2015 to 2019, Fen worked for Apple Inc in Cupertino, CA as a senior reliability engineer focusing on qualifications of various consumer electronic products. He joined GM-owned Cruise LLC in 2019. Currently, Fen is a principal reliability/validation engineer and TLM. In this crucial role, he has been instrumental in validating Cruise silicon, compute, and various electronic modules that form the groundbreaking Cruise AV hardware systems. He holds more than 55 patents and has published over 60 technical papers along with conducting invited talks in various journals and conference proceedings.

Jean Yang-Scharlotta

Microelectronics Specialist, NASA's Jet Porpulsion Laboratory

Jean Yang-Scharlotta received her BS at the University of Texas at Austin in 1990 and Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1996 in Chemical Engineering. She worked in device technology and integration at Advanced Micro Devices specializing in flash memory technologies. Jean is currently a senior microelectronics specialist and group supervisor for the Components Assurance Office of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. She holds more than 70 U. S. patents and authored many publications on memory devices and technologies. Her research and application interests include memory technologies as well as other electronics and materials in extreme environmental radiation.

Raphael (Rafi) Some

Managing Partner, RSCK Consulting LLC

Raphael (Rafi) Some has over 45 years of experience in the military/aerospace electronics industry. He spent the first half of his career at various companies: large, small, and start up, and the second half at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA Federally Funded Research and Development Center. At JPL, Rafi held various positions, ending his tenure there as a Principal Engineer and Chief Technologist for the Autonomous Systems Division. After retiring from JPL, Rafi started a small company, RSCK Consulting LLC, where he spends a few hours a week advising JPL, NASA, and  other clients on technical issues, product strategies and business development. Raphael holds several patents in computer system architecture and advanced packaging and has approximately 100 peer reviewed papers, journal articles and book chapters.

Dave Eggleston

Sr. Business Development Manager, Microchip Licensing Division

Dave Eggleston is Senior Business Development Manager at Microchip Licensing Division. Dave was previously the owner and Principal of Intuitive Cognition Consulting where he provided strategy and business development services to leading NVM and Storage clients. Dave's extensive background in Flash, MRAM, RRAM, and Storage is built on 30+ years of industry experience serving as VP of Embedded Memory at GLOBALFOUNDRIES, CEO of RRAM pioneer start-up Unity Semiconductor (acquired by Rambus), Director of Flash Systems Engineering at Micron, NVM Product Engineering manager at SanDisk, and NVM Engineer at AMD. Dave is frequently invited as a speaker at international conferences as an expert on emerging NVM technologies and their applications. He holds a BSEE degree from Duke University, a MSEE degree from Santa Clara University, and 25+ NVM related granted patents.

Prasad Venkatachar

Sr. Director Products and Solutions, Pliops

Prasad Venkatachar is experienced database and analytics professional with 20 years of combined experience in Product Strategy, Management, Marketing, Solution Architecture, and IT Services. In these 20 years of progressive experiences launched several industry-leading databases, Big Data & analytics solutions collaborating with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Cloudera, and other data ISV partners.  He served several fortune 500 enterprise customers to deliver business value outcomes through multi-database & big Data Solutions on both Cloud & data center environments. Prasad area of focus is on solutions & products at Pliops. Before Joining Pliops, he worked at Lenovo, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, SanDisk, and i2 Technologies.

Tejas Chopra

Sr. Software Engineering, Netflix

Tejas Chopra is an Engineering Leader at Netflix building foundational storage capabilities for Netflix Studios in the Cloud. Tejas is a TedX and an International Keynote speaker and talks about Web3, Blockchain, Storage, Cloud Architectures, etc. Tejas is an advisor to Blockchain startups such as Dorado, Nillion, and an Adjunct Professor at University of Advancing Technology, Arizona.

He has more than a decade of experience building backend and storage infrastructure at companies such ad Apple, Samsung, Cadence, Box, etc. and has a Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Allan Cantle

CEO, Nallasway

Allan Cantle is CEO of Nallasway, consulting on Heterogeneous, High Performance Computing Solutions. He is currently contracting with the OpenCAPI Consortium as the Technical Director and Board Advisor. He also volunteers as the Technical Lead for the OCP HPC SubProject. Previously, Allan was the founder of Nallatech, which, during his 25 year tenure, became widely known as a pioneer in FPGA Accelerated Computing. Before founding Nallatech; Allan was an Electronics Systems Engineer at BAE systems, developing real-time heterogeneous high-performance computers. He holds a BEng degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the University of Plymouth and an MSc in Corporate Leadership.

David McIntyre

Director, Product Planning and Business Enablement, Samsung

David McIntyre is Director of Product Planning and Business Enablement at Samsung Corporation. He focuses on computational storage acceleration solutions development and strategic business enablement for cloud to edge applications including AI inference/video analytics, database processing and blockchain networks. He has held senior management positions with IBM, Samsung, Xilinx, Intel (formerly Altera) and at Silicon Valley startups.  He has consulted for institutional investors including Fidelity, Goldman Sachs and UBS. David is a frequent presenter and chairperson at the Flash Memory Summit and other technical conferences including SNIA.

Kurt Lender

Senior Ecosystem Enabling Manager, Co-Chair CXL Consortium Marketing, Intel

Kurt is an IO Strategist in the IO Technology Solution Team within the Intel Data Center Group.  Kurt works within Intel and with the industry on the successful development / deployment of PCIe based products and recently the development of the CXL ecosystem.  He is co-chair of the CXL Marketing Work Group and recently has helped in the formation of the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) Consortium. Kurt led the publishing of the technology brief “Fostering a Chiplet Ecosystem for the Future of Moore's Law”.

Kurt joined Intel in 1999 and has worked entirely in developing Data Center & Communications board and system solutions, especially around open Industry Specifications.  Before joining Intel, Kurt held various Engineering and Marketing positions at Sequent Computer Systems and RadiSys Corporation.

Kurt holds a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and resides in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two daughters.

Jim Pappas

Director of Technology Initiatives, CXL Chairperson, Intel

Jim Pappas is Director of Technology Initiatives at Intel. He has over 30 years of industry experience with building, running and managing dozens of successful industry associations and cross-industry initiatives. He is currently Chairman of the Compute Express Link (CXL) Consortium, BoD Director of SNIA, and co-Chair of the InfiniBand Trade Association. Jim was also a Founding Director of the PCI Special Interest Group and of The Green Grid, as well as Founding Chairman of the USB Implementers Forum.

Thad Omura

SVP Business and Corporate Development, Astera Labs

Mr. Thad Omura is an accomplished technology business executive that has been instrumental in driving startups to IPO and high-value acquisitions, while also having public company experience as a corporate executive. Since April 2015, Thad has served as EVP of Marketing and Operations for ScaleFlux responsible for all business, marketing, and expanding the growth opportunities for Computational Storage. Prior to ScaleFlux, Thad was VP of Product & Customer Management for Seagate Technology's Flash and SSD business. He stepped into that role through Seagate's acquisition of the LSI Flash products in 2014, including SandForce Flash Processors, and PCIe SSDs. Thad was an early executive at SandForce in 2008 as VP of Marketing, and remained with the organization through the LSI and Seagate acquisitions. Prior to SandForce, Thad was with Mellanox Technologies as VP of Product Marketing, and helped drive the company to an IPO in 2007 based on success of its industry-leading networking solutions. Prior to Mellanox, Thad served in various marketing and sales roles at Motorola SPS, Marvell, Galileo Technology, and Quality Semiconductor. Thad holds a BS degree in EECS from UC Berkeley.

Zuoguo (Joe) Wu

Senior Principal Engineer and Manager of an I/O Circuits, Intel

Zuoguo (Joe) Wu is a Senior Principal Engineer and Manager of an I/O Circuits team at Intel. His responsibilities are in the physical layer link architecture and I/O standards and specifications of client and server CPUs and chipsets, including high speed serial interfaces, in-package memory I/O, and low power multi-chip package interfaces. Prior to Intel, he designed computer disk drive, wireless, and optical communication ICs. He has 30+ external and Intel internal publications and 50+ patent applications. Joe received B.S. Physics from University of Science and Technology of China in 1987, and Ph.D. Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University in 1993.

Axel Kloth

President & CEO Scalable Systems Research Labs Inc.

Axel Kloth has a leadership background as a Founder, CEO, CTO and VP of Engineering with excellent people, time and project management skills for hardware including ASICs and software with a focus on reuse of any IP developed. He has built world-class teams and has recruited and retained all talent required to implement SSRLabs' and Parimics' processor chipset. SSRLabs' engineering team is currently over 70 engineers strong.

Axel has managed many successful projects that came in on time, on budget, at target feature set and with zero defects with the creation of soft and hard libraries. His expertise includes system architect focused on parallel processors, multiprocessor systems, interconnects and switches as well as routers and semiconductors for these systems. Axel has authored or co-authored over 20 patents (8 issued in the US) and 5 books as well as three articles in top-tier magazines. Aside from writing books he has been retained multiple times to peer review articles and books on HPC. Alex has been an invited repeat speaker to the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop, the Flash Memory Summit and multiple IEEE conferences.

Jeff Yang

Director, Silicon Motion

Jeff Yang is a Principle Engineer of Algorithm & Technology team at Silicon Motion. Prior to Silicon Motion, he has worked with Realtek Inc. on several WiFi projects. He holds Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), Hsinchu, Taiwan,   His research in error correcting codes addresses effective encoding/decoding algorithms and VLSI architectures. His current research interests include error correcting codes system for NAND flash applications.

Festus Hategekimana

Security Architect, Solidigm

Festus Hategekimana is an SSD Security Architect at Solidigm Technology and is currently serving in the SNIA TCG storage workgroup as the editor of the TCG Key Per IO SSC specification. Festus holds a PhD in computer engineering from the University of Arkansas where he focused on developing isolation security frameworks for enabling secure FPGA sharing in multi-tenant cloud systems.

John Geldman

Director, SSD Industry Standards, KIOXIA

John Geldman is an industry leader on storage standards, storage interfaces and a storage architect for emerging technical developments. He leads many standards initiatives and provides technical communications within the standards community. John consults on copyright & IP agreements based on his subject matter expertise.

Troy Hegr

Sr. Manager Global Business Development, Ontrack

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.

Robin England

Hardware Research & Development Team Lead, Ontrack

Robin England is the team lead for Ontrack's global Legal Technologies and Data Recovery hardware research and development team. He researches storage technology hardware designs and standards and provides technical guidance in the development of the proprietary hardware and software tools and processes Ontrack uses to recover clients' data when unexpected data loss happens. Robin holds the firm belief that storage technology designs can and should incorporate data recovery “friendly” features and that this can be achieved without compromising performance and data security. Robin has a Higher National Diploma (BTEC, UK) in Electrical and Electronic engineering, and has been hands-on in data recovery engineering since 1995.

Matias Bjørling

Distinguished Engineer Emerging System Architecture Group, Western Digital

Matias Bjørling is a co-chair of the NVMe Zoned Namespace Task Group and a Distinguished Engineer at Western Digital. He leads its Emerging System Architecture group that drives key industry initiatives through long-term research projects, partnerships, and ecosystem enablements.

Dan Helmick

Principal Architect, Samsung

Dan Helmick, PhD is a Principal Architect focusing on future generation NVMe SSDs for Samsung Semiconductor.  Dan attended Carnegie Mellon University for Control Systems in HDDs, and he extended this into a career through various HDD and SSD storage vendors.  Dan has more than 60 patents and patent applications on diverse topics such as Data Center data recovery, Storage and Memory interfaces (NVMe, CXL, and NVDIMM-P), performance SSDs (NAND, ReRam, and PCM), Control Systems (HDD and SSD), and NVMe features (ZNS, FDP, Live Migration, and Multi-Tenancy).  Dan continues to engage in architectural reviews of standardized features in NVMe and other interfaces while he prepares for their integration into Samsung's market leading SSDs.

Javier Gonzalez

Lead Global Open-Source Team, Samsung

I lead Samsung Memory Solutions' Global Open-Source Team (GOST), where I take care of our open-source activities and manage a distributed team of highly talented engineers. This includes defining strategy, internal / external communication, and day-to-day execution. I am also the founder and site manager for Samsung Semiconductor Denmark Research (SSDR) - Samsung's Memory Solutions first R&D center in Europe and fifth worldwide.

I am a Ph.D in operating systems with a strong background in technical leadership, experimental research, and Linux Kernel development. My interests lay primarily in the hardware / software co-design space, where systems, hardware architecture, and open-ecosystem meet. I am dedicated to defining safe environments for motivated software engineers to be creative and get things done. I am a contributor to a wide range of open source projects including the Linux Kernel. I am a regular speaker at several top industry and academic conferences.

Richelle Ahlvers

Storage Technology Enablement Architect, Vice Chair SNIA, Intel

Richelle Ahlvers is a Storage Technology Enablement Architect at Intel, where she promotes and drives enablement of new technologies and standards strategies.

Richelle has spent over 25 years in Enterprise Storage R&D teams in a variety of technical roles, leading the architecture, design and development of storage array software, storage management software user experience projects including mobility, developing new storage industry categories including SAN management, storage grid and cloud, and storage technology portfolio solutions.

Richelle has been engaged with industry standards initiatives with SNIA and DMTF for many years. She served as the SNIA Technical Council Chair and has been engaged across a breadth of technologies ranging from storage management, to solid state storage, cloud, and green storage. She is Co-Chair of the Storage Management Initiative and leads the SSM Technical Work Group developing the Swordfish Scalable Storage Management API.

Michael Allison

Senior Director, Samsung

Mike Allison is a Sr. Director in the Samsung DSA Product Planning and Business Enablement team focusing on standards for existing and future products. He has been a participating member of NVM Express® (NVMe) since 2016, chair of the new NVMe Errata Task Group, co-author of many technical proposals, author of many ECNs, and the principle editor for NVM Express Base Specification 1.4 initial release. For over 38 years, Mike has been an embedded firmware engineer and architect working on systems and simulations for laser beam recorders, fighter aircraft, graphics cards, high end servers, and is now focusing on Solid State Drives. He holds 32 patents in graphics, servers, and storage. He has earned a BSEE/CS at University of Colorado, Boulder.

Xinde Hu

System Architect, Cohesity

Dr. Xinde Hu is currently a system architect at Cohesity. His responsibilities include performance engineering for Cohesity's data management software systems. Before joining Cohesity, Dr. Hu held the Director of engineering position at WD/SanDisk 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.

Rich Gadomski

Head of Tape Evangelism, FUJIFILM Recording Media U.S.A., Inc

Rich Gadomski is Head of Tape Evangelism for FUJIFILM Recording Media U.S.A., Inc., the leading manufacturer of commercial data tape products for enterprise and midrange backup and archival applications. He is responsible for driving industry awareness and end user understanding of the purpose and value proposition of modern tape technology. Rich joined Fujifilm in 2003 as Director of Product Management, Computer Products Division, where he oversaw marketing of optical, magnetic, and flash storage products. Previously Rich held the position of Vice President of Marketing, Commercial Products, where he was responsible for the marketing of data storage products, value added services and solutions.

Rich has more than 30 years of experience in the data storage industry. Before joining Fujifilm, Rich was Director of Marketing for Maxell Corp. of America where he was responsible for the marketing of data storage products. Prior to that, he worked for the Recording Media Products Division of Sony Electronics. Rich participates in several industry trade associations including the Active Archive Alliance, the Linear Tape-Open Consortium (LTO) and the Tape Storage Council.  He also manages Fujifilm's annual Global IT Executive Summit. Rich holds a BA from the University of Richmond and an MBA from Fordham University.

Dave Nicholson

CTO, INFINIDAT

David Nicholson is Field CTO at Infinidat. David has over 30 years of experience in the cloud computing and enterprise software industry, I am a Field CTO at Infinidat, a leading provider of multi-petabyte data storage solutions. I am also a guest lecturer at Cambridge Judge Business School, where I share my insights and knowledge on emerging technologies and digital strategies with aspiring CTOs. In addition, I am a program leader and a success coach at Wharton Executive Education, where I support students in Wharton's CTO Program and Wharton's Digital Transformation for CxO Program. I have a strong background in strategic cloud development, business development, and product management, having worked at Maven Wave, Virtustream, Oracle, and EMC in various leadership roles. I have also been a host, analyst, and contributor at SiliconANGLE and theCUBE, where I discuss the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry. I am passionate about empowering organizations and individuals to leverage the power of cloud computing and data analytics to drive business growth, value creation, and social impact. I am always eager to learn new skills, collaborate with diverse teams, and contribute to the advancement of the field.

Eric Herzog

CMO, INFINIDAT

Eric Herzog is the Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat. Prior to joining Infinidat, Herzog was CMO and VP of Global Storage Channels at IBM Storage Solutions. His executive leadership experience also includes: CMO and Senior VP of Alliances for all-flash storage provider Violin Memory, and Senior Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing for EMC's Enterprise & Mid-range Systems Division.

Richard Fetik

CEO and Founder, Data Confidential

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.

Boyan Ivanov

CEO, StorPool

Boyan Ivanov is CEO and Co-founder of StorPool Storage, a leading global storage software provider. Boyan is an official member of Forbes Technology Council.

Scott Hamilton

Sr Director Product Management & Marketing, Western Digital

Scott Hamilton, Senior Director, Product Management & Marketing at Western Digital, is leader of product management and marketing for the Platforms Business Unit that offers a diverse product portfolio spanning external storage, specialized storage servers, and composable disaggregated infrastructure.

Scott has more than 30 years of experience the in storage, IT and communications technologies. Prior to joining Western Digital, Scott was Vice President, Product Management & Advanced Solutions at Quantum. He has held various leadership positions in product and business line management, product marketing, technical sales, and engineering at Quantum, Emulex, Raytheon, General Electric, and other companies.

Scott holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University and a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Kelley Osburn

Senior Director of OEM and Channel Business Development , GRAID Technology

Kelley Osburn is the Senior Director of OEM and Channel Business Development at Graid Technology Inc.  He has over 25 years of experience in IT and Technical sales.  Armed with Computer Science and MIS degrees, Kelley started out as a Programmer/Analyst for a Fortune 500 company, then became a Network Administrator for a large insurance company. Ultimately Kelley settled into IT sales, specializing in technology startups and emerging growth companies in the storage, cloud, and HPC space. He has subsequently worked for several data storage companies including LeftHand Networks, Hewlett Packard, CommVault, Tegile Systems and Liqid.  Throughout his career, Kelley has presented to technical audiences across the country at various tech forums, roadshows, user groups (Such as VMUG), meetups, and professional associations such as AITPA.

Dave Landsman

Director of Industry Standards, Western Digital

Dave Landsman is Director of Industry Standards at Western Digital, where he manages storage standards across Western Digital's businesses.   Dave has been an active technical member in storage standards since 2008, representing SanDisk and, post-merger, Western Digital, making contributions to NVMe, PCI-SIG, JEDEC, SATA-IO, T10, T13, SNIA, SFF, and others.  He is currently WD's board representative for NVMe, SATA-IO, and the Compact Flash Association.  Dave has over 35 years of experience in the technology/semiconductor industry, having spent his “first career” at Intel, and “second career” in storage, at msystems/SanDisk/WD, with brief hiatus at a startup in between.  He earned a BA in computer science from the University of California, San Diego.

Scott Shadley

Long Term Strategic Planner, Solidigm

Scott Shadley is Strategic Planner at Solidigm. He was most recently VP of Marketing at NGD Systems. Scott has spent over 20 years in the semiconductor and storage space in manufacturing design and marketing. His experience spans over 15 years at Micron and time at STEC. His efforts have helped lead to products in the market with over $300M in revenue. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA).

Tahmid Rahman

Director, Product Marketing , Solidigm

Tahmid Rahman is Director, Product Marketing at Solidigm. He is a Product/Technical Marketing professional with experience in disruptive technology driven innovation. Tahmid is a key member of the technical marketing/product development team with strong subject matter expertise to meet customer and end user demands with strong customer orientation, strategic planning and leadership skills.

Mike McKean

President, Encore Semi, Inc.

Mike McKean is currently President 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.

At 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).

Wayne Adams

Storage Industry Consultant, Chair Emeritus, SNIA, SNIA

Wayne Adams has over 35 years of IT industry experience spanning business development, technical product/solution management, and partner ecosystems. Wayne has been involved in SNIA leadership roles since 2002. Wayne has served on the SNIA Board of Directors since 2003 including roles as Chair, Chair Emeritus, Treasurer in addition to a number of leadership roles for forums and initiatives, conferences, and strategic alliances. He has spoken at numerous industry forums and events.

Over his career, Wayne M. Adams was a Senior Technologist and Director of Standards within the Office of the CTO at EMC, technical alliances partner manager, and a manager of product managers for its portfolio of SRM products. Prior to EMC, Wayne was responsible for product marketing and business development for several strategic software and hardware products at Digital Equipment Corporation. He started his high-tech career at Eastman Kodak as a system designer of real-time control systems.

Wayne has been involved in many industry associations including serving on the DMTF Board of Directors, serving as Advisory Committee member of W3C, contributing to the Industrial Internet Consortium for IoT/big data test-beds, leadership of the Fibre Alliance, and participating with various committees within INCITS, OASIS, Cloud Security Alliance, and TheGreenGrid.

Wayne holds a Bachelor of Science degree with a dual major in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh.

Eden Kim

CEO, Calypso Systems

Eden Kim is CEO of Calypso Systems, a leading SSD test vendor. He has been the unquestioned leader in developing test specifications for SNIA and has lectured on the subject around the world. He is chair of the SNIA SSS Technical Working Group. Eden has published several papers on SSD performance testing and SSD product architectures. He has presented frequently at past Flash Memory Summits, at SNIA Storage Developer Conferences, Storage Visions, and many other events. He has also published whitepapers on SSD workloads.

Sue Ryan

VP Marketing, Frore Systems

Sue Ryan is Vice President of Marketing for Frore Systems, the Silicon Valley startup manufacturing AirJet - the world's first solid-state active cooling chip. With a passion for innovation, business and marketing, Sue is motivated by finding innovative solutions to complex problems ranging from unleashing SSD performance constrained by heat, to aerospace and unlocking future urban air mobility, to environmentally friendly ocean data collection at scale. Sue has extensive experience, across a broad range of industries, in companies ranging from global Fortune 50 corporations, to small consulting agencies and start-up ventures. Sue holds a Masters in International Marketing from the University of Technology Sydney Australia and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Thomas Coughlin

Storage Analyst, Coughlin Associates

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates is a digital storage analyst as well as a business and technology consultant. He has over 40 years in the data storage industry with engineering and management positions at several companies.

Dr. Coughlin has many publications and six patents to his credit. Tom is also the author of Digital Storage in Consumer Electronics: The Essential Guide, which is now in its second edition with Springer. Coughlin Associates provides market and technology analysis as well as Data Storage Technical and Business Consulting services. Tom publishes the Digital Storage Technology Newsletter, the Media and Entertainment Storage Report, the Emerging Non-Volatile Memory Report and other industry reports. Tom is also a regular contributor on digital storage for Forbes.com and other blogs.

Tom is active with SMPTE (Journal article writer and Conference Program Committee), SNIA (including a founder of the SNIA SSSI, now CMSI), the IEEE, (he is an IEEE President Elect Candidate in 2021, Past Director for IEEE Region 6, Past President of IEEE USA, Past Chair of the IEEE New Initiatives and Public Visibility Committees and active in the Consumer Electronics Society) and other professional organizations. Tom is the founder and organizer of the Storage Visions Conference (www.storagevisions.com) as well as the Creative Storage Conference (www.creativestorage.org). He was the general chairman of the annual Flash Memory Summit for 10 years. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a board member of the Consultants Network of Silicon Valley (CNSV)

Jean Bozman

VP and Principal Analyst, Cloud Architects Advisors

Jean S. Bozman is President of Cloud Architects Advisors llc, a market research and consulting firm focused on enterprise and hybrid multi-cloud computing. She analyzes the worldwide markets for servers, storage, and software related to data centers and cloud infrastructure. A highly respected IT professional, she often writes for business publications, including eWeek and IDG publications. She was a Research VP at IDC, where she managed research about the worldwide markets for servers and server operating systems. Starting in 2015, Ms. Bozman was Senior Product Marketing Manager at SanDisk, and then VP/Principal Analyst at Hurwitz and Associates. She is a frequent conference participant as a speaker, chairperson, and organizer at such events as Flash Memory Summit, OpenStack, and Container World. She earned a bachelor's degree at SUNY/Stony Brook; a master's degree from Stanford; and she graduated from the Stanford GSB's LEAD business certificate program in 2021 as a Distinguished Scholar.

Beth Caltagirone

Head of Marketing, StorPool

Beth Caltagirone is Head of Marketing at StorPool Storage, which offers a block storage platform with ultra-fast performance for mission critical applications and is built to optimize the entire data center. Beth has more than 20 years of experience in enterprise marketing leadership roles with data solution technology companies building brand awareness and go-to-market initiatives. She previously held Director of Marketing roles at SanDisk and Western Digital, along with several smaller technology start-ups. She earned her bachelor's degree in communications from St. Mary's College.

Molly Presley

SVP Marketing, Hammerspace

Molly Presley is Senior Vice President Marketing at Hammerspace. She is a product leader with a career history of producing profitable business lines and innovative go-to-market strategies to meet the needs of innovative Enterprises and a wide variety of data driven vertically focused businesses. Molly has deep experience in cloud applications and infrastructure, SaaS, and Enterprise applications.

Federica (Fred) Monsone

Founder and CEO, A3 Communications

Federica Monsone is Founder and CEO of A3 Communications, the data storage industry PR agency, and Advisor to the board of directors of SNIA EMEA. She has over 25 years' experience helping vendors in the data storage and data protection industry build winning brands. To date Fred has helped more than 150 companies in this space including : Acronis, ATTO, CA, Ctera, Cohesity, DDN, Fujitsu, Hammerspace, HPE, Infinidat, Lightbits Labs, Micron, Nebulon, Nutanix, Quantum, Scality, Seagate, Spectra Logic, Zadara Storage, and many more. Fred founded A3 Communications back in 2003, and today the agency also runs the number one event for IT influencers ‘Technology Live!' As of 2023, Fred is also the host of the influencer and CMO podcast ‘Who do you think you are?'

Georgiana Comsa

Founder, Silicon Valley PR

Georgiana Comsa has more than 20 years of experience in tech public relations and journalism, with the past 18 years spent managing her own firm, Silicon Valley PR. She founded the company based on her experience as a corporate PR professional when she realized that there was a need for an agency with a special focus on the data infrastructure market. Since then, she has worked with more than 60 companies in this space; some of them have been acquired by larger companies such as Arista, Cisco, Microsoft, NetApp, NVIDIA, OVHcloud, Palo Alto Networks, Red Hat, VMware, and Western Digital. This year, Georgiana was named one of the most influential startup PR professionals in the world, and, previously, she made a list of the Top 10 Tech Communicators in the United States based on survey responses from tech journalists and analysts. Other than her tech PR work, Georgiana is often invited by accelerators and VCs to host PR training sessions for startup founders and executives.

Fred Moore

President, Horison Information Strategies

Fred Moore began a 21-year career with StorageTek as the company's first systems engineer and concluded as Corporate Vice President of Strategic Planning and Marketing. In 1998, Fred founded Horison Information Strategies in Boulder, Colorado, a data storage industry analyst and consulting firm specializing in executive briefings, business strategy development, and identifying key and emerging data storage trends and opportunities for end-users, storage industry providers, and startup ventures.

A data scientist, sought-after motivator and frequent keynote speaker at data storage conferences and IT events worldwide, Fred completed the Berkeley Executive Program in 1997. Fred also served as Editor of Storage for Computer Technology Review magazine for six years and has produced numerous books, articles, research reports, whitepapers, analysis, blogs, infomercials and webcasts for the storage industry, analyst groups, and financial groups. He currently serves on a few select boards in the storage industry.

He is a 1989 recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award and a 2004 recipient of the Arts and Science Scholar-In-Residence Award at the University of Missouri, Columbia where he received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in computer applications in physical geography.

Henry Baltazar

Research Director, S&P Global Market Intelligence

Henry Baltazar is a Research Director for the Storage Practice at 451 Research, a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Henry returned to 451 Research after spending nearly three years at Forrester Research as a senior analyst serving infrastructure and operations professionals and advising Forrester clients on datacenter infrastructure technologies. Henry has evaluated and tested storage hardware and software offerings for more than 15 years as an industry analyst and as a journalist.

Carol Sliwa

Research Director for Storage Systems, IDC

Carol Sliwa is a Research Director for Storage Systems in IDC's Enterprise Infrastructure Practice. Her core research area spans block, file, and object storage, with a special focus on the storage of unstructured data. With more than 25 years of experience as a technology journalist, including 13 years covering enterprise storage, Carol gained extensive insight into the ways in which the industry has adapted systems over time to address the evolving needs of IT customers.

Prior to joining IDC, Carol was a senior staff journalist at TechTarget tracking storage systems and drives, NAND flash and other memory technologies, and enterprise architecture. Carol previously worked as a senior editor and national correspondent at IDG's Computerworld, where she wrote on a wide range of topics, including Microsoft software and strategies, server operating systems, virtualization, application development, and open-source software. Before shifting to technology journalism, Carol was the Boston-based State House Bureau Chief for a daily newspaper in western Massachusetts. Carol has a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and received more than a dozen national and regional writing awards from the American Society of Business Publication Editors.

Harry Fu

Director Research & Development, Sage-Micro

Harry Fu has over 20 years of experience in the high-tech industry, mainly with the semiconductor industry. He had different roles with Altera, XIlinx and Micron in engineering, application and marketing. Lately, after several years as an entrepreneur, he joined Sage-Microelectronics, in charge of the Product Development for SOC design Center in North America. Harry holds a BSEE from Tsinghua University and a MSEE from UNLV.

Marc Staimer

President, Storage Industry Consultant, Dragon Slayer Consulting

Marc Staimer, as President, Industry Analyst and Chief Dragon Slayer of the 23-year-old Dragon Slayer Consulting in Beaverton, OR, is well known for his in-depth and keen understanding of user problems, especially with storage, networking, applications, cloud services, data protection, and virtualization. His consulting practice focuses on strategic planning, product development and market development. Marc has published thousands of technology articles and tips from the user perspective for internationally renowned online trades including many of TechTarget's Searchxxx.com websites and Network Computing and GigaOM.

Camberley Bates

VP and Practice Lead, Futurum Group

Camberley Bates serves as the VP and Practice Lead at The Futurum Group bringing over 25 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at VERITAS, GE Access, and EDS. Her unique 360-degree view of addressing challenges and delivering solutions was achieved from crossing the boundary of sales and channel engagement with large enterprise vendors and her own 100-person IT services firm. She joined The Futurum Group through their acquisition of Evaluator Group in 2023.

As the Managing Director at Evaluator Group from 2009 until 2023 she built a highly respected team, known for its deep technical expertise delivering competitive and market knowledge backed by data based economic and hands-on experience with the technology and IT consulting services. Camberley began her career at IBM in sales and management. She holds a BS degree in International Business from California State University - Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business.

Anna Gradie

Confidence Coach, Anna Gradie

Anna Gradie is a Confidence Coach for women in tech. Using science-backed tools, she helps her clients 10X their confidence, accelerate their performance, and build strong relationships. In 2010, she co-founded and scaled an edtech company into a multi-million-dollar business. She was the COO and head of HR but noticed a huge gender gap in the industry. After a successful exit in 2020, she created her coaching business. Anna's purpose is to help close the gender confidence gap and to accelerate equality in the tech industry by empowering women.

Caecilia Gotama

CEO and Founder, BRDG (Bridge to Connect)

Caecilia Gotama earned her Bachelor and Master Degrees in Mechanical Engineering from California State University, Fullerton and a Master in Business Administration from the Graziadio School at Pepperdine University. She is also an LEED accredited professional due to her passion for sustainable engineering.

She is a licensed Mechanical Engineer who is a Fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineers, where she served on the Board of Governors. Ms. Gotama was awarded the “Vision and Visionary” award from California State University, Fullerton, signifying her achievements as a successful business owner in the engineering field, as well as her contribution to her community.

The world needs more engineers, and she realized that the engineering profession can be much more inclusive in its admittance and design approach. Her drive to contribute to her community and her entrepreneurial nature has led her to start BRDG - bridge to connect, a social non-profit organization that provides a bridge program for first generation STEM college students. With the contribution of highly qualified volunteers, this program benefits these young students, as well as the people they will serve in their professional lives. (bridge-to-connect.org)

“The ability to solve problems and create knows no boundaries, class, race or gender. And yet, the training to be able to effectively invent and solve problems is still mostly available to those who know someone in this field. As the world needs more people with critical thinking ability, it becomes the duty of all of us in the technical fields to reach out and open doors for this next generation.” Caecilia Gotama

Natasha Beckley

CMO, Quantum

Natasha Beckley is the Chief Marketing Officer for Quantum. In this role, Natasha is directly responsible for Quantum's brand and marketing strategy, partnering with teams across the organization to drive awareness, demand and growth. Natasha has extensive experience in the industry, leading transformation with an emphasis on data-driven marketing, customer experience and integrated planning. Natasha joined Quantum in 2004, and previously held marketing roles at Sony, AppliedMicro, JNI Corp as well as agency-side positions serving Fortune 500 companies, such as Charles Schwab and Symantec, through to startups. Natasha holds an MBA from San Diego State University and a Bachelor of Science in Management from the University of Wales.

Larry Rosenthal

CEO and Founder, Larry Rosenthal & Associates, Inc.

Larry Rosenthal is a technical and executive recruiter with Larry Rosenthal and Associates addressing the technology industry with a focus on the data storage industry. Before creating his own firm, he worked for Dunhill Agency and was previously a partner at Orion Technical Recruiting. His expertise includes recruiting and career planning concentrating on engineering, sales, marketing, and management. He has expertise conducting searches on a national level with a large presence in Orange County and the Bay Area for recruitment. Larry holds a Bachelor of Science from San Diego State.

Philippe Nicolas

Data Storage Market Observer & Analyst, Storage Newsletter

Observer of the storage industry for more than 30 years, Philippe Nicolas contributed to StorageNewsletter (StorageNewsletter.com) for 10+ years. He's also the lead analyst at Coldago Research (Coldago.com) and he's recognized for his market expertise and independence capitalizing on several experiences at Scality, Brocade, Symantec, Veritas Software, SGI and Compaq.

He owns The French Storage Podcast (tfsp.fr) where he interviews CEOs, organizes round-tables and shares his opinions. In addition to these 3 key responsibilities, he launched The IT Press Tour (ITPressTour.com) in 2009 and since then he introduced more than 300 brands to the European market. He also initiated a dispersed data storage project named KerStor in 2009 that anticipated the p2p and blockchain-based storage wave appearing a few years later. In parallel, he drove the SNIA in France for almost 10 years, being a European board member for 4 years and he's the author of 4 reference tutorials for the association.

Finally he shares his comments and views on his 2 famous storage blogs (filestorage.blogspot.com and continuousdataprotection.blogspot.com) launched in 2005 with more than 2000 posts as of today. He holds a master degree in computer science from ESI, a French computer science engineering school. His twitter handle is @CDP_FST and his LinkedIn page is https://www.linkedin.com/in/phnicolas/.

Stephen Foskett

Publisher, Gestalt IT

Stephen Foskett is an active participant in the world of enterprise information technology, currently focusing on enterprise storage, server virtualization, networking, and cloud computing. He organizes the popular Tech Field Day event series for Gestalt IT and runs Foskett Services. A long-time voice in the storage industry, Stephen has authored numerous articles for industry publications, and is a popular presenter at industry events. He can be found online at TechFieldDay.com, blog.FoskettS.net, and on Twitter at @SFoskett.

Rohan Puri

Graduate Research Assistant, Penn State University

Rohan Puri has more than 13 years of software development experience building storage systems. Some of the projects he has worked on are, porting ZFS file systems from Solaris to Linux, Veritas file systems, Oracle's Pillar Data Flash file systems, Seagate's distributed object storage, Tintri's VMstore file systems. He is a Graduate Research Assistant and pursuing his Masters degree from Penn State while researching computational storage. He has an interest in key-value stores and has spoken at SNIA's SDC conference about LSM trees. He is also one of the delegate members of Storage Field Day 2023.

Jim Ballingall

Executive Director, Industry-Academia Partnership (IAP)

Jim Ballingall is President of Ballingall Consulting, a consultancy serving industry and academia. He is founder and Executive Director of the Industry-Academia Partnership (IAP), an 11-year old association that brings together industry and university experts to pursue research in Web 2.0 and 3.0 applications and infrastructure, including AI and machine learning, hardware acceleration, networking, security, and storage. Jim is Executive Director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3), the leading industry-academic initiative in the blockchain space. He also developed and led the Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture, an interdisciplinary, multi-college effort within Cornell that was awarded $25M(US) by the National Science Foundation.

Jim held senior executive roles in the silicon CMOS industry for 15 years, and led a Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) provider of supply chain solutions that merged with E2open (ETWO – NYSE). He earned a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell University and a B.S. in Engineering Physics from U.C. Berkeley.

Chuck Sobey

FMS General Chair, Channel Science

Chuck Sobey is Conference Chair of Flash Memory Summit (FMS). Under his leadership, FMS has increased its size, scope, and influence worldwide, while navigating the unprecedented effects the pandemic has had on the global events industry. Chuck is a respected memory and storage technology strategist, researcher, and lecturer. As Chief Scientist of ChannelScience, he guides clients in evaluating emerging memory and storage technologies and in maximizing their reliability and performance. He uses probability analysis to match a technology's projected capabilities to an application's requirements. His team has won SBIR awards from the US Department of Energy to advance the field of magnetic tape recording, on which practically all of the hyperscale and cloud services rely.

Chuck's clarity of explanation and extensive experience and industry network make him a sought-after technical and business development consultant. He has taught storage/memory technology seminars around the world. Chuck is also General Chair of SmartNICs Summit, which he is co-developing to support the hyperscale and cloud data center ecosystem. He earned an MS ECE from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a BS ECE from Carnegie Mellon University. He holds 7 US patents.