As founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of Techstrong Group, Alan manages a broad array of businesses and brands including Techstrong Media, Techstrong Live, Techstrong Research, Devops.com, Security Boulevard, Techstrong TV, and Techstrong Learning. To do so and succeed, Alan has to be attuned to the world of technology, particularly DevOps, cybersecurity, cloud-native and digital transformation.

With almost 30 years of entrepreneurial experience, Alan has been instrumental in the success of several organizations.

Shimel is an often-cited personality in the security and technology community and is a sought-after speaker at conferences and events. In addition to his writing, his DevOps Chat podcast, TechStrong TV and Digital Anarchist audio and video appearances are widely followed.

Alan attributes his success to the combination of a strong business background and a deep knowledge of technology. His legal background, long experience in the field and New York street smarts combine to form a unique personality.

Mr. Shimel is a graduate of St. John's University with a Bachelor of Arts in Government and Politics, and holds a JD degree from NY Law School.

Crystal Morin is a cybersecurity strategist at Sysdig tasked with bridging the gap between business and security through cloud and container-focused webinars and papers for everyone from executives to technical practitioners. She was originally a threat research engineer on the Sysdig Threat Research Team, where Crystal spent her time discovering and analyzing cyber threat actors who took advantage of the cloud. Crystal started her career as a linguist and intelligence analyst in the United States Air Force. Before joining Sysdig, she spent four years as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, researching and reporting on terrorism and cyber threats. Crystal was responsible for helping to develop and mature Booz Allen’s cyber threat intelligence community and threat-hunting capabilities.

Larry Maccherone is a thought leader in DevSecOps, Agile, and Analytics. At Comcast, Larry launched and scaled the DevSecOps Transformation program over five years. In his DevSecOps Transformation role at Contrast, he's now looking to apply what he learned to guide organizations with a framework for safely empowering development teams to take ownership of the security of their products.

Dr. Malini Bhandaru is a cloud native architect focused on AI, confidential compute, security and performance. She has been engaged in open source for over a decade. She started at Intel as a server power and performance architect. Over her career, she has worked on autonomous driving, health care, remote monitoring and management, and telecom applications. Malini is a frequent conference speaker, has served on KubeCon and OSS program committees, has a Ph.D. in Machine Learning and has 25+ patents. She is a STEM coach, passionate DEI advocate and mentor, and avid gardener.

Arpit is a senior partner solution architect working with Global System Integrators to help with Enterprise Transformations and Migrate workloads from on-premise to cloud. Arpit helps large organizations accelerate cloud adoption and build secure, resilient, scalable and high-performance cloud applications. Arpit enjoys cycling, following cricket and spending time with his family.

Ram Iyengar is an engineer by practice and an educator at heart. He was pushed into technology evangelism along his journey as a developer and hasn’t looked back since! He enjoys helping engineering teams around the world discover new and creative ways to work. He is a proponent of product development and engineering teams that put the community first.

Tracy is an expert in software supply chain management and pipeline DevOps practices with a hyper-focus on microservices and cloud-native architecture. She has served on the OpenSSF Governing Board (2022-23) as a General Member Representative, the OpenSSF Governing Board Committee, and the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) Technology Oversite Committee. She previously served as a founding board member of the CDF and the Eclipse Foundation.  She is the Executive Director of the Ortelius Open Source project, an open-source security evidence store.

Tracy is recognized by TechBeacon as one of the top 100 DevOps visionaries and speaks at many professional events such as CDCon, Open Source Summit, and CloudBees DevOps World. She also hosts TechStrong Women TV, where she celebrates amazing technologists who happen to be women.

Mostafa is a consultant at CloudRoads focused on cloud native. He enjoys helping tech leaders in finance and insurance drive better business outcomes using cloud-native technologies. Before CloudRoads, Mostafa worked as Solutions Architect at Docker helping companies build cloud-native applications and platforms.
He has experience in different roles including development, application production support, professional services, and advisory. He writes for InfoQ and Cloud Native Now.
When not serving clients or tinkering with code, Mostafa likes to read, bike, and travel the world with his family.
 

Ashur Kanoon serves as the head of technical product marketing at Aembit. Beginning his career as a software engineer at Cisco, he contributed to the Y2K projects, leveraging his technical acumen in software development. Transitioning from engineering to technical marketing, Ashur excels in articulating the value of sophisticated engineering solutions to both business and technical stakeholders. His career includes pivotal roles in marketing and product management at one spin-out company, later acquired, and two other startup ventures, both of which were also successfully acquired. He holds a bachelor's in computer information systems from DeVry Institute of Technology, where he graduated magna cum laude, and an MBA from San Jose State University, with additional executive education from the University of California, Berkeley.
 

Caroline Wong is the Chief Strategy Officer at Cobalt. She has 15+ years of cybersecurity leadership, including practitioner, product, and consulting roles. Caroline authored the popular textbook, Security Metrics: A Beginner's Guide. She teachers cybersecurity courses on LinkedIn Learning and hosts the Humans of InfoSec podcast.

Lior has over 15 years of experience in cybersecurity, with most of that time as a security architect, product manager and developer for the Israeli government. Lior served in an elite cyber security unit of the Israel Defense Forces (retired with the rank of Major), after which he worked in a cyber security division of Israel's Prime Minister's Office.

After leaving the public sector, Lior worked as an independent consultant, specializing in cloud security and identity management. Lior holds an M.Sc in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University and a B.Sc in Applied Mathematics (cum laude) from Bar Ilan University, Israel.

Hari Kandalam is a Sr. Enterprise Architect at AWS. His specialties are Modernization, Serverless, and Resilience. Hari has led multiple Modernization initiatives at large Fortune 100 companies and is committed to sharing best practices and knowledge with the larger community.

7+ years experience & result-oriented, DevOps Engineer, Proficient in the design & implementation of complex and fully automated Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment pipelines, and DevOps processes for Agile projects across Financial, and healthcare sectors.

Anne Nielsen is head of product marketing at Cobalt. For the past 15+ years, she has held leadership roles in product management and marketing, most recently as head of product at JupiterOne. Anne spent 9 years at Veracode and held positions at other startups including Rapid7 and 451 Research.

I work as a Senior Technical Program Manager at LinkedIn, where I lead the development and enhancement of key platform features that help millions of professionals connect and find job opportunities. My role is crucial as I oversee projects like the recent update to our job recommendation algorithm, which has significantly boosted user engagement and job match accuracy. Collaborating with engineers, designers, and data scientists, I ensure our features are innovative and user-friendly, directly supporting LinkedIn's mission to connect the world's professionals and enhance their productivity and success.

Jorge O. Castro is a community manager, specializing in Open Source. He's basically a cat herder – a combination of engineering, developer relations, and user advocacy.

Jorge graduated with a degree in Telecommunications from Michigan State University and rode with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment for four years. He first entered the technology field at SAIC and then moved to system administration at the School of Engineering and Computer Science at Oakland University in Rochester Hills, Michigan. Jorge then joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu for about 10 years before moving to Heptio/VMware to work on Kubernetes. These days Jorge is a Developer Advocate at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, where he's tasked with a singular goal: help make open source sustainable.

• US Army Veteran and Dynamic C-suite Leader, Strategist, Technologist, and Entrepreneur with a reputation for savvy negotiations, and a track record that includes two successful company launches followed by a 22X multiple acquisition by BMC Software. Skilled at raising funds from and communicating with Venture investors. Key focus is always on revenue growth. 
• Successfully navigated through complex organization corporate organization structures at publicly traded Fortune 500 companies including Amazon Web Services, Oracle, GitLab, and IBM to develop relationships and close deals. 
• Tenacious Sales & Marketing Leader with a laser focus on market opportunity for DevOps, identification of new verticals, product development, and talent recruitment and retention. Skilled at developing product messaging that resonates with prospects and multiple personas. Lead customer success teams that are nimble and able to rapidly offer solutions to challenging customer problems.
• Empathetic and data-driven leader with a track record of effective conflict resolution, deal negotiation, and customer issue resolution. Lean into challenges to identify problems and develop creative and collaborative solutions that turn unhappy stakeholders into enthusiastic evangelists.
• Develop solutions that enable companies to automate manual processes and free up employees to perform higher value tasks instead of focusing on administrative and technology challenges. These solutions help customers increase revenue, streamline operations, and increase customer satisfaction.
• Leadership philosophy is focused on offering goodwill to all stakeholders to generate team buy-in and lasting relationships. Energizing on stage, video, or podcasts. Served as the voice and face of multiple companies to customers, partners, and industry analysts.

Sergio Méndez is a systems engineer and professor of operating systems at USAC Guatemala University. He has experience working on DevOps, and MLOps using open-source technologies at work. About open source communities, he is involved in the CNCF Community, promoting students into the CNCF Ecosystem and hosting a Cloud Native meetup in Guatemala. He has been a speaker at several conferences such as KubeCon, WTFisCloudNative, and Kubernetes Community Days. He is also a CNCF and Linkerd Ambassador and author of the Packt book Edge Computing Systems with Kubernetes.

https://sergiops.xyz

Business Development 
Go to Market Strategy 
Strategic Partnerships / Alliances
Corporate Strategy and Planning 
Project Portfolio Management
Technical Integration Strategy

Presently driving co-marketing with strategic alliance partners including AWS, Google, Microsoft (Azure), Red Hat, IBM, SUSE, HashiCorp, and more.

As a Security Partner Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS), I design and implement secure and scalable cloud solutions for various clients and stakeholders. I have multiple AWS certifications, including Solutions Architect Associate and Professional, that demonstrate my proficiency in a wide range of AWS services and best practices. I also have a strong background in cyber security, having completed a certificate program at Fullstack Academy, where I learned how to use tools such as IDS/IPS, Splunk, Snort, Wireshark, Metasploit, Bash, Linux, Netcat, Nmap, Burp Suite, Nessus, and others. I participated in a CTF where my team and I took on red-team based challenges and came in second place out of four.

I am passionate about cyber security and always eager to learn new skills and technologies. I have a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the University at Albany, SUNY, which gives me a solid foundation in logic, problem-solving, and analytical thinking. I am a hard-working, inquisitive, and collaborative individual who strives to deliver high-quality results and exceed expectations.

Melissa is passionate about Java, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery. She is currently Head of Developer Relations for JFrog, the CNCF Governing Board, the Technical Steering Committee of OPEA, and is a Co-Chair of the Interoperability SIG of the Continuous Delivery Foundation. She loves sharing her knowledge with the community as a developer, speaker, and author. Melissa has been recognized as a Java Champion and Docker Captain, is an international speaker at numerous events including KubeCon and DockerCon, and is co-author of the O'Reilly title, DevOps Tools for Java Developers

I started off as a .NET Developer back in the early days of .NET 1.1 with the goal of converting ASP pages to ASP.NET web applications. During that time my career has progressed from .NET Developer, to Lead Developer, to Architect, to where I am today.

I've been a fan of making it easier to deploy software since the early 2010s, when working for a company the only time to deploy to production was 2 AM Saturday. That has led me down the path of CI/CD, DevOps, TDD, and automating all the things. I was exposed to Redgate tooling and Octopus Deploy while working at Farm Credit Services of America and I have been a fan ever since.

What is great about my role is not only do I get to lead a great group of people and help our customers, but I get to work with a variety of technology every day. That includes all the major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) along with IaC (CloudFormation, ARM Templates, TerraForm) and the corresponding CLIs. But that isn't the half of it, other technologies include .NET, SQL Server, Node.js, Docker, K8s, Redgate, Flyway, DbUp, and more.