Jason is a storage hardware architect with expertise spanning hyperscale & cloud storage to enterprise storage systems. He has designed high-performance flash systems to archival storage systems, and everything in between. From schematics and PCB design to system architecture and media technologies, he has experienced the tradeoffs and optimizations that can be made when building storage systems. In Azure Storage, he is currently focused on system architecture and long term strategy for one of the world’s largest cloud deployments.

Jason has 28 patents spanning electrical, mechanical, and media technologies.

Chris Bontempo is Vice President of Security Marketing, Routes and Offerings for North America. He is responsible for demand generation and product marketing for IBM Security in the U.S. and Canada. Chris also focuses on route optimization and new offering launches for prospects, partners and IBM Digital. He joined IBM in 2005 and has led marketing teams in Market Intelligence, Cloud and joined the IBM Security business unit in 2014.

Brian Bramlett is the Director of Technology Strategy for DNA Memory at Twist and has spent over thirty years in the semiconductors, computing, and biotech industries. Brian has extensive experience developing strategy for a broad range of platforms and markets. He is responsible for planning Twist’s technology roadmap for DNA memory. Brian joined Twist after a long career at Intel, where he held various positions in research, development, product architecture, strategic planning, and managing external relationships in areas ranging from design of industry-leading microprocessors to full-lifecycle product and service development. He was Intel’s Technical Advisory Board member for the Semiconductor Research Corporation on efforts including DNA Memory since 2013.

Shawn has been involved in technology at all levels for more than 25 years. He has nearly 20 years of experience in magnetic tape; from testing to managing the P&L for IBM tape storage. Shawn has also been an I&O leader in the financial industry, which brings him a unique view of the needs of the customer. Shawn is currently the Global Hypergrowth Storage Offering Manager for IBM’s Data Retention Infrastructures team.

As a professional involved in content management and storage workflows for 25 years, Floyd has focused on methods and technologies needed to manage massive volumes of data across many different storage types and use cases.

Prior to joining SBDS, Floyd worked with software and hardware companies in this space, including over 10 years at SGI, where he managed storage and data management products. In that role, he was part of the team that provided data solutions used in some of the largest data environments around the world.

Floyd’s background includes work at CBS Television Distribution, where he helped implement file-based content management and syndicated content distribution platform, and Pathfire (now ExtremeReach), where he led the team that developed and implemented a satellite-based IP-multicast content distribution platform to nearly 1,000 TV stations throughout the US.

Earlier in his career, he ran Potomac Television, a news syndication and production service in Washington DC, and Manhattan Center Studios, an audio, video, graphics, and performance facility in New York City.

George Crump is the Founder of Storage Switzerland, the leading storage analyst focused on the subjects of big data, solid state storage, virtualization, cloud computing and data protection. He is widely recognized for his articles, white papers, and videos on such current approaches as all-flash arrays, deduplication, SSDs, software-defined storage, backup appliances, and storage networking. He has over 25 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the U.S.

Rob is a principal product manager for Amazon Simple Storage Service’s S3 archive storage classes, S3 Glacier and S3 Glacier Deep Archive. S3 Glacier and Deep Archive provide low cost cloud storage with industry leading scalability, data availability (99.9%), and security. They are designed for 99.999999999% (11 9s) of durability. Rob joined Amazon in 2014 and before he joined the storage team he worked with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and other Amazon teams, including Amazon Music, Amazon Video, and Amazon Advertising. Rob has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Lafayette College.

Alan wrote his first program in 1976 as a freshman in high school where his first tape was a paper punch tape to save programs on. After a brief career in medicine, Alan finally gave in to the geek/nerd/loser and made computers (as it was called then) his career. With an undergrad of Computer Science, he began a Federal Information Technology career in 1985 working on a large complex distributed mini-computer system spread to the furthest rural communities of the Southern United States. Baud rates were horrifically slow but cutting edge compared to the microwave system used to reach wildly remote areas where phones were barely workable. Real to real to tapes were the order of the day and every system used them for backups and uCode updates. Because most of the systems were so remote and with little onsite expertise, he wrote automation software for national release to keep the systems up as much as possible within questionable environments. He was awarded the highest awards in the civilian agency numerous times for the accomplishments that helped bring the agency into the modern computing era.

In 1997 Alan changed agencies to return to programming and started with writing new ingest capabilities for many data streams. This work evolved into an Enterprise Ingest and Archive System (IAS) that is still in use today and is responsible for 95% of the data stewarded by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. As the Team Lead for Data Operations, he developed the systems and processes to migrate 95,000 8mm tapes containing NEXt Generation RADar (NEXRAD) into an IBM robotic tape library. This migration opened timely access (from days to hours) to critical data in predicting severe weather of all kinds for the protection of life and property. Alan’s work with the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to equip ocean ships with climate quality instruments culminated into a new class of observations.

Currently he is the Operations Manager and System Owner for NOAA’s Comprehensive Large Array Storage System (CLASS). The program stewards almost 15PB of data in two geographic locations (30PB total) on Spectra Logic’s T-Finity series robotics. The team just completed a migration at one facility from LTO-6 technology to LTO-8 opening up higher density storage for the near future. The next migration for the second facility will be from LTO-6 to a Cloud provider. Many projects and accomplishments over the years have resulted in agency and Department level awards.

Brad Johns is President of Brad Johns Consulting LLC, an information technology consulting firm which specializes in storage technology economics, marketing, and strategy. He began a 32-year career with IBM in 1978 as a sales trainee in the Data Processing Division. He went on to hold a variety of positions that included marketing and sales management, consulting, and project leadership. While with the Storage Products Division, he managed an international team of professionals that developed and implemented worldwide marketing plans for IBM’s storage products. His teams also conducted market research and produced business plans for IBM tape products and hosted international tape customer councils.

Brad founded his consulting company after retiring from IBM in 2010. He has published numerous white papers and presented on the economic and technical benefits of tape storage for inactive data. Brad is active in the community and is a past President of the Tucson chapter of the American Marketing Association and Chairman of the Pima County Planning and Zoning Commission. He holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Arizona.

Brad is a Sr. Data Scientist at AWS; as part of the Amazon ML Solutions Lab program, he helps AWS customers leverage machine and deep learning for their own business use cases and processes. He has experience applying deep learning in a number of industry verticals, including healthcare and sports, with an emphasis on computer vision techniques and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Brad has been with AWS since 2017, and before that interned with fast.ai where he contributed to educational material on machine and deep learning. Brad has an MS in Data Science and a BS in Mathematics from USF.

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 analysis 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 start-up 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, white papers, 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 BA in mathematics and an MS in computer applications in physical geography.

At Quantum Mark has held a variety of leadership positions in Marketing and Product Management and has defined and led growth initiatives in a variety of area including Al, Autonomous Vehicles, HPC and Archive solutions. In his current role he leads Quantum’s businesses associated with tape and removable storage solutions.

Mark represents Quantum in the LTO Consortium and the Active Archive Alliance. Prior to joining Quantum Mark led a team responsible for planning and market development at Seagate.

Chris Powers is Vice President of the Collaborative Platforms Development Unit for the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Storage and Big Data Division.

A seasoned technology executive with over 25 years of experience leading large global teams in the design, development, and marketing of storage technology products. Proven track record managing growth and profitability across all phases of the technology life cycle using various business and product development models. Demonstrated passion and ability to motivate and energize teams toward definable engineering and go to market goals. The Collaborative Platform Development objective is to execute a world class partnership life cycle model across a variety of technologies at different stages in their respective technology life cycles. This includes providing a route to market/fulfillment model for incubating start ups, product management and engineering integration of mature technologies undergoing continuous refreshes, and executing industry consolidation plays for technologies enduring secular declines

Chris has experience in a broad range of roles spanning finance, strategy development, operations, product development, product management and P&L responsibilities. Chris’s experience has spanned across a broad range of technologies including disk and tape drives, high end and entry disk arrays, storage networking, and tape automation and library products. Chris has extensive experience in successfully developing and managing complex global development and operational partnerships across the value chain.

Chris holds several technical undergraduate degrees in technology and business and has an MBA from the University of Arizona.

Chris is based in Ft. Collins, CO

Nathan Thompson is chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Spectra Logic, an industry leader in delivering innovative data storage systems and solutions that help organizations protect and preserve their digital assets forever.
Nathan founded Spectra Logic in October 1979 at the age of 19, while attending the University of Colorado College of Engineering in Boulder, CO. Originally called Western Automation, the company later acquired the assets of an interface firm known as Spectra Logic and, in 1993, the combined company was renamed Spectra Logic Corporation.
For 40 years, Spectra Logic, a privately held corporation, has served the needs of data-intensive industries, global corporations and government agencies by providing them with a continuous stream of advanced data storage and archive solutions based on ever-evolving deep storage requirements.
In 1996, Nathan’s business achievements were recognized when Ernst & Young and USA Today named him Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2003, he received the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award (DEAA) from the University of Colorado. In 2011, Nathan was invited to deliver the commencement speech at the University of Colorado Boulder for the Leeds School of Business, and in 2012, he was inducted into the prestigious Boulder County Business Hall of Fame.
In 2016, Nathan authored a book, along with Spectra colleagues Bob Cone and John Kranz, titled, “Society’s Genome: Genetic Diversity’s Role in Data Preservation.” In the book, Nathan draws on the lessons of history and nature in addressing civilization’s unquenchable thirst for information and our need to find genetically diverse methods to preserve this collective knowledge base – society’s genome – for future generations.
Active in local business and civic communities, Nathan is a member and former chairman of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO). He is also a member of the YPO Gold and the Colorado Thirty Group, and serves on the University of Colorado’s Electrical Engineering Advisory Board.
Nathan is a licensed commercial instrument pilot with approximately 2,500 flight hours logged. He also collects and restores vintage pinball machines, some of which are on display in Spectra’s headquarters.
Nathan holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Colorado Boulder.

As a storage expert and director of global strategic alliances for HGST’s Datacenter business unit, Stefaan Vervaet heads up market development strategy in vertical markets such as Media & Entertainment, LifeSciences, Finance and horizontal enterprise workloads such as backup and archive. He also heads the partner ecosystem driving innovation and business growth for HGST’s scale-out cloud and storage solutions.

Stefaan brings 15 years of experience in the data storage and backup industry. As a business-focused technologist with an extensive start-up background, he brings a unique perspective to HGST. His background includes product management and go-to-market positions in the backup space (Veritas), as well as technical sales and support executive positions in the object storage world (AmpliData).

As an innovator with a proven track record, Stefaan successfully helped build startup companies like DataCenter Technologies, a dedupe technology (acquired by Veritas in 2005) and Amplidata, a leading object storage vendor (acquired by HGST in 2015, a Western Digital Company). Immediately before joining HGST, he established and built the US office running operations, technical sales and support world-wide.

Vervaet holds a master’s degree in Applied Informatics from the University of Ghent, Belgium and is currently based out of HGST’s San Jose headquarters.