Bio

Alec Polnarev is the Managing Director of Information Technology at Harvard Management Company since April 2011. Alec is responsible for all strategic and operational aspects of core technologies to meet the company’s diverse investment needs.

Previously, Alec was the Head of Global Infrastructure at Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co. LLC, one of the oldest Quantitative Trading firms where he was responsible for architecting and leading technology disciplines such as datacenter, server, storage, database, helpdesk, networking, disaster recovery and others.

Prior to GMO, Alec worked at Autonomy, where he was in charge of managing datacenters in US and Europe. He worked on building state of the art enterprise infrastructure to support SaaS based hosted applications.

Alec has a Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in Computer Science from Boston University.

Bio

Will Bowen is the founder of the Complaint FreeⓇ movement with over 12 million followers worldwide.

Will’s been featured on Oprah, Dr. Oz, Forbes, NBC’s Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning, The ABC World News, Fox News, People, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and Chicken Soup for the Soul.

In July 2006, Will Bowen handed out 250 purple rubber bracelets inviting people to use them as a tool to stop complaining.

Will’s idea EXPLODED around the world and, to date, more than 12 million of his purple Complaint Free bracelets have been distributed to people in 106 countries.

Maya Angelou provided the forward for Will’s #1 International Bestselling book A Complaint Free World, which has sold more than 3 million copies in 30 languages and is required reading at many universities and businesses.

Thousands of companies worldwide have used Will’s Complaint FreeⓇ Business program to increase productivity, improve communication, and raise morale.

Will’s clients include The Million Dollar Roundtable, Volvo, and Kimberly Clark.

Will Bowen is a humorous motivational speaker, a #1 International best-selling author, a multi #1 Amazon best-selling author, an award-winning trainer, the 2016 Purdue University Executive in Residence, and he’s the World Authority on Complaining — why people complain, what’s wrong complaining, and how to get ourselves and others to stop.

Bio

Johna Till Johnson is the CEO & Founder of Nemertes Research, an 18-year old research-advisory firm specializing in the business impact of emerging technologies. Ms. Johnson spearheads Nemertes’ security and risk management practice, where she works with Fortune 200 financial services, manufacturing, utility, and other leading organizations.

Ms. Johnson’s career in information security began more than 25 years ago when, as a young engineer, she developed security products for Mosler Security Systems. In the early 1990s, she ran the lab-testing program at Data Communications Magazine, which uncovered vulnerabilities in the then-novel RSA two-factor authentication system. In the mid-1990s, Ms. Johnson ran the Global Networking Strategies Service at the META Group, which included META’s security and risk management offering. Subsequently, she served as the Chief Technology Officer overseeing the security practice for Greenwich Technology Corp., a global consulting and engineering firm that developed and implemented leading-edge security architectures for financial services firms and other global organizations.

Bio

With many years of experience deploying business continuity and risk management platforms globally, Rich Cooper oversees customer success and business development for large, global accounts.

Rich has more than 20 years of experience in the business continuity and risk management marketplace, running programs and implementing software in both Europe and North America for some of the world’s largest organizations. He has an MBCI certification from the Business Continuity Institute.

While not at work, life in the Cooper Household revolves around soccer. This proud father of three sons who all play soccer has a U.S. National Coaching License. Rich also passionately supports Corazon alongside LA Galaxy and Adidas, which is a charity that puts on a soccer tournament for underprivileged kids from seven communities in Tijuana, Mexico.

Bio

Chris Colotti is currently a Principal Architect at Cohesity in what is known as the Technical Advocacy Group. He is the architect of the Cohesity Mobile EBC’s data center.  He also designed the new Cohesity demo infrastructure that is now used at trade shows and for analyst live demos by the Technical Advocacy team and considered “Customer Zero.”  In his role he spends the majority of his time supporting Cohesity events and creating outward facing technical content such as blogs and webinars while also continuing to support the group’s two major labs.  Previously to this he spent close to a decade working for VMware as a Principal Architect and continues to maintain his VMware expertise as a vExpert and stays involved in that community.  Chris is also amongst the first VMware Certified Design Experts in the world (VCDX#37), and author of multiple white papers.

Bio

Paul is a Principal Solutions Architect at Weaveworks, where he provides pre- and post-sales technical expertise. Paul comes from the big data world and machine learning world, having spent seven years at MapR. Paul has served as Senior Operations Engineer for Unami, a startup founded to deliver on the promise of interactive TV for consumers, and was Systems Manager for Spiral Universe, a company providing school administration software as a service. He has also held senior support engineer positions at Sun Microsystems, as well as enterprise account technical management positions for both Netscape and FileNet. Earlier in his career, Paul worked in financial application development for Applix, IBM Service Bureau, and Ticketron.

Bio

Robert Gee serves as our Director of Cloud Infrastructure at Eze Castle Integration. He is focused on Public and Private cloud design and deployment, with 18 years of experience designing and executing disaster recovery environments for hundreds of clients.

Bio

Zak is the CIO of CRISIL, and is responsible for driving the company’s global technology road map, product development, technology infrastructure and alliances. He is driving the implementation of micro-services, cloud and digitally-led technology models while also focusing on digitalization of content and enhancing CRISIL’s automation journey by harnessing machine learning and natural language processing. He is also leading innovation in risk management solutions, AI/ML and Cloud to help CRISIL clients accelerate their digital transformations.

An acknowledged expert in managing large scale technology transformations, he also leads the Technology Lab set-up that aims to partner with external fintechs and technology firms to ccollaborate with businesses on innovation.

Zak has held executive level leadership roles within technology across application engineering, DevOps, Blockchain, technology support/architecture/engineering. Zak maintains a deep background across compute, databases, automation, cloud technology, service management and applications at some of the largest financial institutions.

Before joining CRISIL, Zak was the Global Head of IT Infrastructure and Operations at S&P Global Ratings. Prior to that he was with BNYMellon where he was leading Data Platforms, Distributed Compute / Cloud and Information Life Cycle Management services. Prior to BNYMellon, his experience spans working at large financial institutions such as Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers leading Infrastructure Engineering and various operation services.

Bio

Allison Gorman Nachtigal is a Managing Director in both the Transformation Technology and Enterprise Technology & Services (ETS) divisions in Morgan Stanley’s Technology organization. Allison leads Morgan Stanley’s Cloud Center of Excellence (CoE) and heads the Public Cloud Fleet. In these roles Allison oversees Global Public and Private Cloud-related activities across strategy, governance, and best practice, and drives the delivery for the strategic programs in partnership with Infrastructure and Application Development teams across the Technology organization.

Allison joined Morgan Stanley in 1990 and has held a variety of infrastructure technology positions. Prior to her current role, Allison ran the engineering team in Enterprise Computing where she led major programs transforming the compute environment to support key business investments for areas that included high performance computing and virtualization. In 2014, Allison formed a new function called Enterprise Security Platforms, tasked with the design, engineering, and operation of the Firm’s security controls. In 2017 Allison transitioned into ETS to provide leadership for large programs such as Defense in Depth and Cloud Adoption, which evolved into her current, dedicated Cloud role.