Global IT Executive Summit

Raymond Blum leads a team of site reliability engineers charged with keeping Google’s and its users’ data safe and durable. Prior to his current mission, he worked on teams supporting several Google user services and led the production integration of several Google acquisitions. Before Google, Raymond ran an application hosting company and taught Computer Science after working for two decades in the financial services and media industries. In his meager spare time he indulges his interests in robotics and STEM education and reads too much science fiction.

Ken Boudreau is the Senior Director, Media Technologies and Engineering at ESPN. He oversees the team responsible for media management operations that collect, protect, archive and duplicate the content that supports all of ESPN’s business units. His department manages a vast collection of videotape, film and digital files that have been utilized by ESPN over the past 35 years.

Boudreau is one of the original ESPN employee team, joining the company in October 1979 when he was hired as a studio technician with multiple studio duties. He also has ten years remote engineering experience before assuming the management of ESPN’s archives in 1992.

Dr. Richard L. Bradshaw has 29 years R&D and Research with IBM Corporation, and is the author of sixteen issued US Patents and over 25 published papers. The first Distinguished Engineer (DE) in the Tucson Tape Development Lab as well as the only member from that team to be elected to the IBM Academy of Technology, Dr. Bradshaw is a leader in collaborative tape research efforts, and has been involved with archival storage strategies and best practices since the early 90s. He is a recognized expert in tape formulation design, tape and component characterization, failure analysis and life prediction, data recovery and tape manufacturing process design and control. Dr. Bradshaw was a primary member of the data recovery effort that successfully recovered data from the space shuttle Challenger flight recorder tapes in 1986 and numerous other data recovery efforts for both government and commercial incidents that continue to this day, such as the data recovery efforts underway as a result of the extensive damage from Hurricane Sandy along the East Coast of the United States.

Tab Butler joined the MLB Network in June of 2008 as part of the Engineering and IT Department, chartered with the facility build-out and the January 1, 2009 MLB Network launch. Currently, Tab manages the Media Management team and Post Production engineering and operations for the MLB Network. He is overseeing the rebuilding of the Post Production editing and archiving environment, refreshing the original 2008 technology with the latest cutting edge advancements.

Tab presents his unique approach to problem solving and convergence within the broadcast media space, with over 24 years of experience in Network TV Broadcast Operations, and 11 years of Sales and Marketing Management with IT and Broadcast manufactures. He specialized in sales to Broadcast Networks, Station Groups, Government, and Global 2000 clients. Tab spent 18 years at the NBC Network. He worked for NBC News, NBC Sports, and NBC Operations and Technical Services, and received two Emmy Awards while at NBC, and six Emmy Awards while at MLB Network. In June of 2012, the DIAMOND System, which is an in-house developed enterprise wide media assent management system, led by Tab, was nominated for a Sports Technology Emmy.

While in manufacturing, Tab has worked in various capacities for Tektronix (Grass Valley), EMC, VideoBank, SeaChange International, and IBRIX.

George Crump is President and Founder of Storage Switzerland. An IT analyst firm focused on the storage and virtualization segments. With 25 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS and SAN. Prior to founding Storage Switzerland he was CTO at one the nations largest storage integrators where he was in charge of technology testing, integration and product selection.

George is responsible for the storage blog on Information Week’s web site and is a regular contributor to publications such as Byte and Switch, SearchStorage, eWeek, SearchServerVirtualizaiton and SearchDataBackup.

Richard is a recognized Disaster Recovery SME and world renowned speaker specializing in Backup & Recovery Program Design, Cloud Computing Architecture for Business Resiliency, and Disaster Recovery Planning.

Richard has invested 30 years in IT and has practical experience supporting numerous computer room and FEMA region disasters while authoring Recovery Plans for many Fortune companies. He is a frequent technical contributor to industry publications and book author on Disaster Recovery Planning. Richard is President and CEO of iTinuum, a Managed Service Provider specializing in Business Continuity and Resiliency Architecture solutions. He has held positions of board member, Advisory Committee panelist for IBM Business Resiliency, and is one of the most decorated award winning speakers at International conferences.

Brad Johns is President of Brad Johns Consulting LLC. He specializes in computer storage technology and strategies; helping suppliers communicate the value of modern data storage systems and users effectively deploy them. He retired from IBM in July, 2010 after a 32 year career that included management and project leadership in Information Technology marketing, consulting and sales. In his last position he was Manager of IBM’s Storage Market Management organization where he led an international team responsible for worldwide marketing of IBM’s midrange disk storage, storage virtualization, de-duplication and tape storage offerings. He first joined the Storage Systems Division in 1997 as Manager of Marketing for IBM’s tape storage offerings. He subsequently led a number of storage marketing, strategy and product management teams in IBM’s Storage Systems that launched many storage offerings into the marketplace including: the second generation Virtual Tape Server, LTO tape drives and libraries, TS1120 Tape Drive with Encryption and recently IBM’s ProtecTIER De-duplication offerings. He joined IBM as a sales trainee in the Data Processing Division of IBM in 1978 and subsequently held a number of sales and sales management positions in the Southwest. He went on to join the IBM Consulting Group and worked with a number of clients in the design and implementation of engineering change management solutions. Brad is currently the President of the Tucson chapter of the American Marketing Association. He holds a Master in Business Administration and Bachelors degree in Economics from the University of Arizona.

Steve has been a storage industry professional for over 20 years. Steve made his mark at the Enterprise Storage Group (now Enterprise Strategy Group) covering topics such as next generation file systems, next generation data protection as well as disaster recovery and high availability. Over the course of the last decade, Steve has helped companies such as Connected Corporation, Avamar and Storwize all become acquired by, Iron Mountain, EMC and IBM. In Steve’s last role at IBM he ran the Data Protection Division where he spent a great deal of time helping to expose and grow the business of tape solutions. Steve is a professional blogger (www.thestoragealchemist.com) and noted industry speaker.

A Silicon Valley native, Liz has always enjoyed technology. Although originally trained as an archaeologist, Liz has been involved with laser scanning since 2004 when she began scanning with a Cyrax 2500. Her archaeological interests centered on Neolithic sites, spending two seasons as an excavator and photographer at Çatalhöyük, Turkey. Prior to joining CyArk, Liz founded the UC Berkeley/CyArk Visualization Lab and served as instructor for the UC Berkeley/CyArk Internship Program. She has also been published in The American Surveyor, the Leica Reporter and Professional Surveyor Magazine and is a regular contributor to LiDAR News.

An avid photographer and a former Division I athlete, Liz enjoys sports photography and staying active with running, yoga and golf. Her photos have been featured in Sports Illustrated, Rowing News and Pocock Racing Shells advertisements.

She holds a degree in Anthropology with honors from the University of California at Berkeley.

Fred Moore began a 21-year career with StorageTek as the 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, market success strategy development, and identifying key and emerging technology trends for end-users, storage industry suppliers, and startup ventures.

A sought-after motivator and frequent keynote speaker at storage conferences and IT events worldwide, Fred completed the Berkeley Executive Program in 1997. He currently serves on a few select boards in the storage networking industry.

Fred also served as Editor of Storage for Computer Technology Review magazine and has produced numerous books, articles, research reports, whitepapers, analysis, infomercials and webcasts for the storage industry, analyst groups, and financial groups.

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.

Mr. Henry Newman has over 30 years of advanced systems architecture and performance analysis expertise in solving the most complex challenges for customers in government, scientific research and industry around the world. This comprehensive experience includes hardware and software requirements analysis and design; file system and HSM design and optimization; system performance analysis and optimization; storage system architecting; high-performance networking; capacity planning; and hierarchical storage management with the focus on high performance computing and complex Linux, UNIX and Windows environments. Prior to joining Instrumental, Mr. Newman worked at Cray Research in a variety of capacities for over 11 years. His last position was International Technical Support responsible for performance and tuning issues. Mr. Newman has been with Instrumental, which he helped found, since 1992 and is the CEO/CTO for the company.

Mark Peters is an ESG senior analyst focused on storage systems. His particular areas of emphasis are block and unified storage systems; virtualized storage; all types of solid-state storage; and the emerging opportunities represented by “software-defined storage”. Mark has more than 25 years of data storage industry experience and has held senior management roles in sales, marketing, product management, business development, and customer intimacy in the U.S. and internationally.

Before joining ESG, Mark ran his own corporate communications consulting business focusing on storage and IT. He has enjoyed a varied career in high-tech commerce, working at Xerox, Memorex-Telex, StorageTek, Sun Microsystems, and a software startup. Hailing from the U.K., Mark has a Masters degree from Oxford University and has been based in Colorado since 1997. In 2012, Mark, his wife, and his daughter were naturalized as U.S. citizens.

His youngest son was born an American, and Mark is very happy that everyone in his immediate family has now achieved that status.

Michael Steinhart has more than 25 years of IT experience developing infrastructures and digital workflows for a variety of industries.

Currently he is director of broadcast technology solutions at CBS Sports Network. He is responsible for the integration of digital technologies ranging from streaming of contribution video content to internal MAM / DAM workflows.

In 2002 Michael was vice president, chief technical officer and co-founder of Digital Soundboard, a pioneer in high quality long format online music sales. Digital Soundboard was among the first to make DVD-A content available for download utilizing lossless audio compression technology.

Michael founded PMH Network Services in 1995 and served as its president. PMH was an early full service internet service provider.

Nathan C. Thompson is the chief executive officer of Spectra Logic Corporation. He founded Western Automation, which manufactured memory boards, peripheral test equipment and storage systems, in 1979, while enrolled at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Nathan continued the business while in school, graduating in 1983 with a bachelor’s of science degree in electrical engineering and computer science. Under Nathan’s direction, Western Automation acquired the assets of the interface company Spectra Logic in 1988 and renamed the combined company Spectra Logic Corporation in 1996. Today, Spectra Logic continues as a manufacturer of innovative tape and disk-based data backup and archive solutions—with products installed globally in over 40 countries.

Nathan has served as a member and chapter chairman of the Rocky Mountain Young President’s Organization (YPO) since 1994, the Colorado 30 Group since 2004, the University of Colorado’s Electrical Engineering advisory board since 2006, and recently joined the Wells Fargo Community board. He also serves on the finance and investment committees for the Alexander Dawson School of Lafayette, Colo. Additionally, Nathan is a licensed commercial instrument pilot with more than 2,100 flight hours logged.In 1996, Ernst & Young and USA Today named Nathan Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2003, he was awarded the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award (DEAA) from the University of Colorado. In April 2012, he was inducted into the Boulder County Business Hall of Fame.

Read his Colorado Engineering magazine article to learn more about how Nathan started the company as a college undergraduate.

On May 11, 2011, Nathan gave the commencement speech at the University of Colorado Leeds School of Business. You can read the speech transcript here.

Jon Toigo is an outspoken technology consumer advocate and vendor watchdog whose articles, columns and blogs are enjoyed by over a million readers per month. He is CEO and Managing Principal of Toigo Partners International LLC, an independent consultancy and technical research/analysis firm and Chairman of the Data Management Institute LLC, a professional development organization for those who design, plan, manage and administer storage infrastructure and data assets. Toigo is a 30-year IT veteran who has worked both as an operative and manager within corporate information systems departments and as a senior consultant with two international systems integrators. He has supported the development of over 150 disaster recovery plans for a broad range of businesses and non-profit organizations. He is also a prolific writer with 15 books (five covering disaster recovery planning) and thousands of articles in the technology trade press to his credit. In 2014, Toigo introduced IT-SENSE.org, a quarterly web publication focused on common sense IT strategy to rave reviews. The first issue focused on the renaissance of tape technology.