Throughout his career spanning over 25 years in the IT industry, Alan Shimel has been at the forefront of leading technology change. From hosting and infrastructure, to security and now DevOps, Shimel is an industry leader whose opinions and views are widely sought after.

Alan’s entrepreneurial ventures have seen him found or co-found several technology related companies including TriStar Web, StillSecure, The CISO Group, MediaOps, Inc., DevOps.com and the DevOps Institute. He has also helped several companies grow from startup to public entities and beyond. He has held a variety of executive roles around Business and Corporate Development, Sales, Marketing, Product and Strategy.

Alan is also the founder of the Security Bloggers Network, the Security Bloggers Meetups and awards which run at various Security conferences and Security Boulevard.

Most recently Shimel saw the impact that DevOps and related technologies were going to have on the Software Development Lifecycle and the entire IT stack. He founded DevOps.com and then the DevOps Institute. DevOps.com is the leading destination for all things DevOps, as well as the producers of multiple DevOps events called DevOps Connect. DevOps Connect produces DevSecOps and Rugged DevOps tracks and events at leading security conferences such as RSA Conference, InfoSec Europe and InfoSec World. The DevOps Institute is the leading provider of DevOps education, training and certification.

Alan has a BA in Government and Politics from St Johns University, a JD from New York Law School and a lifetime of business experience. His legal education, long experience in the field, and New York street smarts combine to form a unique personality that is always in demand to appear at conferences and events.

I began my career as an engineer at Motorola working on the push to talk Nextal product. I Moved to Orbitz.com, where I deploy call centers and led projects that provided a consistent digital experience. I also played a few roles in Quality Engineering and Product Development. I then, joined Cigna to lead their DevOps journey.

Caroline was featured as an Influencer in the 2017 Women in IT Security issue of SC Magazine and has been named one of the Top Women in Cloud by CloudNOW. She received a 2010 Women of Influence Award in the One to Watch category and authored the popular textbook Security Metrics: A Beginner’s Guide, published by McGraw-Hill in 2011. Caroline graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and holds a certificate in Finance and Accounting from Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Chenxi is the 2016 & 2017 program co-chair for Security & Privacy at the Grace Hopper Conference and was named by SC Magazine as a 2016 Women of Influence. Prior to Twistlock, Chenxi built an illustrious career at Forrester Research, Intel Security and CipherCloud. At Forrester, Chenxi covered mobile, cloud and enterprise security, and wrote many hard-hitting research papers. At Intel Security, she led the ubiquity strategy that spans both hardware and software platforms.

Chenxi started her career as a faculty member of Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Chenxi is a sought-after public speaker and a trusted adviser for IT executives. She has been quoted/featured by New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes.com, Fox Business News, Bloomberg, Dark Reading and many other media outlets. Chenxi holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia

Chitra was a driving force in aligning software security and business needs by empowering and enabling developers to identify software security vulnerabilities during active development cycles.

Colin is also a frequent speaker at various industry events. Previously Colin was a partner in TRG, a boutique consulting firm in New Jersey, focused on delivering solutions to a variety of businesses based in the tri-state area. He started his career at Hewlett-Packard in the UK. Originally from Scotland, Colin holds a B.S in Computing Science from the University of Glasgow.

Prior to that, Courtney was the VP of Retail Technology at Starbucks. She was accountable for the global POS and retail store technology experiences. Prior to Starbucks, Courtney spent 14 years at Nordstrom with her last role being the Vice President of E-Commerce and Store technologies where she drove a technological transformation essential for outpacing the demands of today’s Omnichannel consumers. She was accountable for program management, delivery, and support for all customer facing technologies including in-store, Web, and mobile touch points. Courtney joined Nordstrom as a security engineer in 2002 and held a variety of leadership roles across the technology organization.

Courtney is a graduate of Eastern Washington University with a B.S. in Computer Information Systems and worked at two startups, CyberSafe and WorldStream Communications, prior to joining Nordstrom.

Derek is the co-founder of All Day DevOps — an online community of 40,000 IT professionals, and the lead researcher behind the annual State of the Software Supply Chain report for the DevOps industry. In 2018, Derek was recognized by DevOps.com as the “Best DevOps Evangelist” for his work in the community.

As an expert in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and ITIL, DJ has worked to streamline development pipelines for many Fortune 100 organizations He is active on the speaker circuit and most recently gave a talk at RSAC 2017 in San Francisco that focused on security automation and the advantages of continuous delivery.

Prior to founding SocketPlane in Fall 2014, John was the Chief DevOps Evangelist at Dell, which he joined following the Enstratius acquisition in May 2013. He has also held past executive roles at Opscode/Chef and Canonical/Ubuntu. John is the author of 7 IBM Redbooks and is co-author of the “Devops Handbook” along with authors Gene Kim, Patrick Dubois and Jez Humble.

The best way to reach John is through his Twitter handle @botchagalupe.

Malcom Gladwell would call me “A Connector”. Wherever I go, one of the things I am most happy with is the ability to introduce people to each other, making connections where they didn’t previously exist. I’ve done this on every continent in the world as part of an ongoing desire to see connections where other people see differences.

My main expertise is in developing and supporting live online communities built around specific market verticals. These online communities bleed over into the real world, where relationships are strengthened and expanded. I look forward to becoming a part of your network.

Improvements experienced on Ms. Thrasher’s current program include increasing quantity of deployments by 220%, completing 18 months of backlog in 12 weeks, increasing quantity of features delivered by 30%, and using increasing automation around test and verification to accomplish 6 FTE worth of testing effort per 1 FTE. Last year she co-authored the paper Tactics for Leading Change with other industry leaders for IT Revolution and the DevOps Enterprise Forum.

Paula holds a B.S. in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University and is a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and a Project Management Professional (PMP), but prefers learning new things through experience and working with smart people.

Ms. Lietz is currently the Director of DevSecOps for Intuit where she is responsible for setting and driving the company’s Cloud Security Strategy, Roadmap, and full-scale Program in support of corporate innovation. She has previous experience as a Master Security Architect, an Entrepreneur, and often volunteers to educate on security topics. Ms. Lietz is a passionate DevSecOps and Rugged evangelist.