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The Summit at the Summit – The Lodge at Spruce Peak
March 19 @ 8:00 am - March 21 @ 5:00 pm EDT
Join us at the Summit for the Summit!
This multi-day adventure isn’t just a conference — it’s an experience you’ll never forget!
We’ll be spending time at New England’s premier 5-star ski resort, The Lodge at Spruce Peak, with activities like skiing, snowmobiling, and relaxing at the spa! Our Vegas-themed casino night will help you win raffle prizes throughout the conference, too!
You’ll also be able to connect with top-tier experts in the field, including:
Chris Wright: CTO at Red Hat
Chris Wright is Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Global Engineering at Red Hat. He leads a team that guides Red Hat’s technology vision, co-creates technologies, and collaboratively implements change to ensure the success of Red Hat’s ecosystem of associates, customers, communities, and partners.
Wright’s organization includes: Office of the CTO, Ecosystem Engineering, Product Security, Global Engineering Associate Experience, Product Engineering, Experience Engineering, and CTO Customer-Led Open Innovation.
During his 25+ years as a software engineer, Wright has worked in the telecommunications industry and beyond on high-availability and distributed systems. He also has experience in the Linux® industry on security, virtualization, and networking. Wright has been a Linux developer for more than 15 years, with most of this time spent working deep in the Linux kernel. He is passionate about open source software serving as the foundation for next-generation IT systems.
Jason Gartner: GM & CTO Application Modernization at IBM
Jason Gartner is responsible for leading IBM’s Application and Integration business. IBM’s Application and Integration platforms run many of the world’s most critical applications from Banking, Insurance, Health, Government, Transportation and many others. These foundational technologies have seen many evolutions over time. Today, more than ever, organizations are under pressure to keep up with evolving customer demands and keeping pace with competitors. If existing applications cannot deliver the agility, innovation, or business value necessary for the organization to compete, they need to evolve as they pose a liability to the success of the business. Clients are creating application modernization strategies to meet these demands.
These strategies usually incorporate two major motions: re-platform/refactor and write new. New applications being written are creating event-based architectures and flows to discover events with IBM Event Automation. They also look to create APIs and connect business applications with API Connect and App Connect to automate business and ensure secure connectivity. Applications looking to re-platform or refactor are looking to modernize your application server with Cloud Pak for Apps, re-platform into containers, adopt cloud-native services and APIs to increase standardization, lower operational cost and reduce technical debt. Refactor applications into an optimal, integrated and flexible set of cloud-ready microservices.
Prior to this role, Jason led IBM’s WW Technical Sales organization and led IBM’s transformation of its Technology Experience by introducing an experiential sales approach and creation of its Client Engineering team. He led the transformation of IBM’s technical field talent including skills, learning, certifications and the IBM’s first TechXchange communities and conference designed by technologists for technologists. He’s been with IBM for over 20 years in all areas of the Hybrid Cloud Market from Application Development, Integration to Data Architectures and Business Development (M&A). He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and University of Saskatchewan in Canada.
Mark Sakurada: Principal Business Value Consultant at Confluent
As a Senior Business Consultant, Mark works with our customers to define, secure and improve business value, cost recovery and drive adoption. He has enabled multiple global enterprise teams to establish TCOs, ROIs, KPIs and Business Analytics.
Mark has worked professionally as a developer, engineer, architect and consultant in information technology since 1997. Around 2007, he focused on implementation of open-source software solutions and has been involved in a number of developing initiatives. After joining Confluent in January 2019, he has worked with some of Confluent’s largest enterprise clients to deliver modern robust distributed data platforms. As a Business Consultant, Mark advises and consults on business cases, enterprise adoption, value and strategic planning of event streaming platforms.
Mark grew up in Connecticut and resides in Greater Boston with his loving fiancee and their handsome bulldog. He also gets increasingly infrequent visits from his two grown children. He counts New Hampshire outdoors activities (hiking, skiing, camping, biking, kayaking) his jeep and global adventure travel as his hobbies.
Ric Halsaver
IBM North America Principal FlashSystem Specialist
Ric has been in the storage industry since 1988 and was the Vice-President of Federal Systems for Texas Memory Systems, when they were acquired by IBM in 2012. He is an avid Flash Storage enthusiast and speaker on both storage as a whole and helping organizations understand IBM Flash and how it provides organizations Cyber Resiliency, in addition to their Cyber Security practices.
Reserve your spot quickly before they run out!
Please note there is no fee to attend the event; however, hotel cost is the responsibility of the attendee. A pre-negotiated event rate of $249.00 per night has been pre arranged for all attendees.