Program Executive Committee

Willie Nelson - Program Chair
Technology Enabling Architect
Intel Corp.

With over 22 years of invaluable experience at Intel, Willie Nelson has played a pivotal role in driving the early adoption of diverse storage technologies. As a Technology Enabling Architect, he has dedicated his career to facilitating seamless transitions to cutting-edge interfaces and use cases, encompassing PCIe, CXL, NVMe, SSDs, NVDIMMs, Optane, and various other Persistent Memory devices.

In recent years, Willie has been a key asset to Jim Pappas' Ecosystem Enabling team, actively collaborating with vendors to spearhead early enablement and adoption of crucial new IO technologies. His expertise extends beyond the confines of Intel, as he actively manages and directs multiple successful industry associations and cross-industry initiatives. Willie currently serves as the Treasurer for the SNIA Compute Memory and Storage Initiative (CMSI), and also holds the position of Co-Chair of the CMSI Marketing Working Group.

Willie Nelson's commitment to technological advancement and his leadership in industry associations underscore his reputation as a forward-thinking and influential figure in the ever-evolving landscape of storage technology.

Chuck Sobey - Conference Chair
Chief Scientist
ChannelScience

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.

Camberley Bates - SuperWomen in Flash Organizer
VP and Practice Lead
Futurum Group

Camberley 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.

Stephen Bates
CTO
Eideticom

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.

Brian A. Berg - Conference Technical Chair
President
Berg Software Design

Brian's duties as Technical Chair for Flash Memory Summit include chairing the Architectures track, which has addressed topics including the evolution of the Flash Translation Layer (FTL) since he originated this track in 2009. He also organizes the Software and Artificial Intelligence tracks and the Invited Talks, is a member of the Lifetime Achievement Awards (LAA) committee, and has played an active role in many other aspects of the conference since 2007.

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, and he works extensively with intellectual property and patents. He has participated in over 80 conferences as a speaker, session chair and conference chair. Brian is also active as an IEEE officer and volunteer, and has received IEEE awards for Outstanding Leadership and service. He has initiated and organized the dedications of over a dozen IEEE Milestones, including one for the Floating Gate EEPROM and its importance for the success of flash memory. He holds a Bachelors in Mathematics, and was in the Computer Engineering graduate program at Stanford University before forming a startup company with some associates.

Matias Bjørling
Distinguished Engineer/Senior Director
Western Digital

Matias Bjørling is a Distinguished Engineer/Senior Director at Western Digital, leading its Emerging System Architectures group. His research interests include emerging memory and storage technologies, scaling of computation and storage, and special-purpose accelerators. In addition, he has a passion for driving significant ecosystem changes by bringing people together to solve fundamental challenges in data centers. He co-chairs the NVM Express (NVMe) Zoned Namespace (ZNS) Command Set specification, and leads Western Digital's efforts on its ecosystem enablement. Bjørling earned a Ph.D. degree in database and systems from IT University of Copenhagen, and has published at several high-impact system and storage conferences.

Cameron Brett
Director of Marketing – SSD and Storage Solutions
KIOXIA

Cameron Brett is the Director of Enterprise SSD Marketing at KIOXIA, where he manages a team of product line managers to drive product strategy and revenue growth. Cameron have 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.

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.

Dave Eggleston
Principal
Intuitive Cognition Consulting

Dave Eggleston is the owner and Principal of Intuitive Cognition Consulting, and he provides 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.

Javier González
Principal Software Engineer
Samsung Memory Solutions

Javier Gonzalez is a Principal Software Engineer at Samsung Memory Solutions, where he leads Samsung's first European R&D center. He works on Open-Channel SSDs and their support in Linux. He is a founding member of the Open-Channel SSD community and has worked on all the specifications as well as on the Linux ecosystem. He is the main architect and developer of pblk, the Linux Kernel FTL used by LightNVM. He earned a PhD in computer science at the IT University of Copenhagen. He is the author of several articles on SSDs and has presented at many events, including Flash Memory Summit.

Jim Handy - Sr Program Advisor
Semiconductor Analyst
Objective Analysis

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.

"There has never been a market like flash. In only five years it has replaced film, floppies, and most CDs. Other media formats are threatened!"

Erich Haratsch
Engineering Director
Marvell Semiconductor

Erich 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, he worked at Seagate and LSI, where he worked on Nytro® and SandForce® branded SSD controllers. Earlier in his career, he 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. He 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).

Jonathan Hinkle
Distinguished Member of Technical Staff
Micron

In Micron's Storage Business Unit, Jonathan investigates new technology and products, both internally as well as with customers and partners. He was previously Executive Director and Distinguished Researcher of System Architecture at Lenovo, where he led their research of datacenter computing architecture. Jonathan is an industry leading technical expert in memory, storage devices, and data center systems architecture with over 24 years of experience. In the JEDEC standards organization, Jonathan serves on the Board of Directors as Vice-Chair of Marketing and Chairs the CXL Memory Task Group, standardizing CXL-attached memory devices. He also invented and drove the first development of the EDSFF 1U Short (E1.S) NVMe drive, the VLP DIMM, and NVDIMM Persistent Memory. He has generated more than 34 granted or pending patents, and earned BS and MS degrees in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University.

Jay Kramer - Business Chairperson and Emcee
CEO
Network Storage Advisors

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.

Andy Marken
President
Marken Communications

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.

Tinh Ngo
VP, Business & Technology Development
Virtium

Tinh Ngo has 20 years of experience in the storage (NAND/SSD) and memory (DRAM, MCP, NVDIMM) markets, and has supported these technologies in industrial, aerospace, and satellite applications where size, weight, and power are key requirements. Prior to Virtium, he has held executive positions at Sanmina, Viking Technology, Netlist, and STEC/WD. Tinh has also supported the memory and flash industries by way of the SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative (SSSI), and as a speaker and session chair at events including FMS.

Jim Pappas
Director of Technology Initiatives
Intel

Mr. Pappas 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.

W. David Schwaderer - Communications Director & Conference Videographer
CEO
ShapeShift Ciphers LLC

W. David Schwaderer is CEO of ShapeShift Ciphers LLC and a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur. He has presented Erasure Coding seminars at Usenix™ FAST conferences and at leading Silicon Valley conferences and enterprises. David lectures Silicon Valley companies on innovation and its manifold surprises. His October 2007 MIT joint Sloan School of Management and EE Department conference lecture was selected best in conference. He has 12 issued and pending patents, and has authored six commercial software programs and eleven technical books. David has a Masters in Applied Mathematics from Cal Tech and an MBA from the University of Southern California.