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.
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.
Nariman Aga-Tagiyev is an Application Security Architect with over two decades of experience in software development. Over the course of his career, Nariman has worn multiple hats, serving as a full stack web application developer, backend developer, DevOps engineer, and cloud developer. However, since 2016, his focus has been exclusively dedicated to the realm of Application Security and advancing Software Security Development Life Cycle (SSDLC) maturity.
Gary Gruver is an experienced executive with a proven track record of transforming software development and delivery processes in large organizations. As the R&D director over the HP LaserJet FW team (~800), he led productivity improvements of 2-3X. Then, as VP of QA, Release, and Operations at Macy’s.com, he managed the journey toward continuous delivery. His current passion is helping as many people as possible achieve similar results through consulting, webinars, presentations, and books. Gary’s consulting approach is unique in that he stays engaged with organizations during their journeys to provide guidance when they hit specific challenges and to learn about what is and isn’t working during as many different transformations as possible. This experience enables him to help clients avoid common mistakes and share approaches that have been proven to deliver business results for a variety of companies. He is the author of Engineering the Digital Transformation, Starting and Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise and co-author of Leading the Transformation: Applying Agile and DevOps Principles at Scale and A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware.
Marc Hornbeek, a.k.a., DevOps-the-Gray is CEO and Principal Consultant at Engineering DevOps Consulting, Author of the book Engineering DevOps, Ambassador, Author and instructor for The DevOps Institute, Blogger on DevOps.com, CloudNativeNow.com and SecurityBoulevard.com. Marc is a globally recognized strategic consultant who applies engineering practices, holistically, for Continuous Testing, DevOps, DevSecOps and SRE digital transformations. Marc has led more than 90 transformations for enterprises, manufacturers, service providers and government institutions. He is an IEEE Outstanding Engineer, and an IEEE Life member. His education includes engineering and executive business degrees and multiple certifications from the DevOps Institute.
Mitch Ashley is a technology executive and entrepreneur who is an advisor, analyst, product creator and tech leader, bringing 30+ years in cybersecurity, cloud, AI, product development, software engineering and networking. Mitch is Chief Technology Advisor with The Futurum Group and CTO of Techstrong Group’s tech media platforms covering digital leadership, DevOps, cybersecurity, AI, cloud native, cloud infrastructure, platforms and ITSM.
As a CTO, CIO, and VP of Engineering, Mitch led the creation of award-winning cybersecurity products utilized in the private and public sectors, including the U.S. Department of Defense and all military branches. Mitch also led business and technology for managed PKI services (broadband, Wi-Fi, IoT, energy management and 5G industries), product certification test labs and a service locator SaaS (93m transactions annually). Mitch led the engineering and technology deployments of the first video-on-demand and Internet cable services, a national broadband network and multiple banking and telecom applications.
Mitch hosts multiple award-winning video and podcast series, including DevOps Unbound, CISO Talk and Techstrong Gang available on Techstrong.tv and TechstrongPodcasts.com. Mitch frequently appears as a tech expert, speaker, panelist, moderator and interviewer. He publishes his research on FuturumGroup.com and TechstrongResearch.com and writes for multiple online publications.
Francis Cordon is an observability and cloud-native technologies domain expert and seasoned technology leader. He currently is Chief Customer Officer at Causely. His experience includes customer success leadership at Quantum Metric and IBM Turbonomic, resiliency and performance architecture at BNY Mellon, and sales engineering at Dynatrace.
Born in a small southern Italian village, I was raised near the Italian city of love (Verona) and finally landed in the UK. Here, I developed a pure obsession for Korean dramas while starting my career as a software engineer. I met my now-Pakistani husband, and we live a happy, chilled life with our baby cat, Sprinkle. In the past couple of years, I've been specializing in microfrontends architectures and DevOps as a culture, with a particular focus on DevX and platform engineering. I'm an advocate of the continuous mindset, which pushes me to always learn new things and connect with people in the industry to grow even faster. This helps me mentor and set a direction for my team of FE engineers.
My name is Axel and I'm from Argentina, where I live with my two dog childs, Thor and Poroto (I know, he should've been named Loki, long story!). Love playing with them, go for a walk and grab a coffee or have mate (argentinian drink :D ) in some park and read. Also series, films, friends, tech. Oh almost forgot! I'm an (almost yet) computer engineer who loves to code and automate, nowadays very into Digital Transformation, Cloud and DevSecOps!
Darren House is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at NXT1, empowering Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and other software builders to securely launch and manage SaaS faster and more cost-effectively. Previously, Darren established RockIT Labs and served as CTO of RockITek. There, he led the development of TheKeyosk, a leading-edge security key managed service, and ultimately, NXT1 LaunchIT. Prior to co-founding NXT1, he served as a Senior Security Specialist for Amazon Web Services. Darren is a seasoned technology executive with over 20 years' experience, and has held various leadership roles including CTO, Director of Solutions Management, Technologist, Architect, and network and systems engineering, showcasing his diverse expertise in the technology industry.
Larry Maccherone is a thought leader on 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. Larry was a founding Director at Carnegie Mellon's CyLab, researching cybersecurity and software engineering. While there, he co-led the launch of the DHS-funded Build-Security-In initiative. Larry has also served as Principal Investigator for the NSA's Code Assessment Methodology Project which wrote the book on how to evaluate application security tools, and received the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Labs Fellow award.
A results-focused leader and author with over twenty-eight years of expertise in systems and software engineering. Currently, she serves as the Executive Space Lead at Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, where she focuses on integrating cutting-edge technologies into government space programs. During her tenure as a senior technical fellow at Lockheed Martin, Robin's leadership in Agile transformation drove significant modernization and cost savings across various technical initiatives from submarines to satellites. Her dedication to advancing the field is demonstrated by her role as a visiting professor at the Defense Acquisition University (DAU), teaching DevSecOps applied to safety-critical cyber-physical systems. In addition to her professional roles, Robin is actively involved in several industry groups, serving as co-chair for both the Incose Agile Systems Engineering and the NDIA Systems Engineering Agile Delivery for Agencies, Programs & Teams (ADAPT) group. She is committed to continuous learning, holding numerous certifications such as SAFe Fellow, SPCT, CEC, PMP, PMI-ACP, and CSEP. In addition, she is a Systems Engineering PhD candidate at Colorado State University, with research in delivering large-scale, safety-critical cyber-physical solutions using Agile and DevSecOps.
Mark Callahan is the founder and CEO of Cloud Canaries Inc. He believes deeply that we are at the inflection point of AI's S-Curve. That the application of this technology on cloud operations and service delivery will empower DevOps. An entrepreneur by nature, opportunistic and value-driven. Startups include ProfitLogi, Drawbase Software, Locksmith Security, TEG JAPAN, and MobePlace Mobile Conferencing. Mark is exceptionally good at visioning tomorrow and managing high performance teams to the vision. Senior leadership positions covering Development, Support and Operations, Design Tools, Retail optimization and forecasting.
Master’s degree from the MIT Media Lab.
As VP of Engineering at StackGen, Cesar Rodriguez leads with a wealth of expertise in creating cloud security tools, honed through his previous roles as a software engineer, security architect and engineering leader. Cesar’s experience specializing in architecting, developing, and securing cloud-native environments, informs his dedication to advancing DevOps and security practices in the realm of cloud computing. This dedication is exemplified by his noteworthy contribution to the open-source community through the development of Terrascan, an acclaimed static code analyzer for Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
Currently serving as the VP of Product at StackGen, Lauren Rother brings 15 years of expertise and leadership to product development. With previous roles at Akita and HashiCorp, Lauren has consistently built and led teams dedicated to crafting solutions that address technical challenges while prioritizing seamless workflows for developers. Lauren thrives in the face of ambiguity, driven by the continuous pursuit of building the right things, even in uncertain scenarios. As a leader, innovator, and advocate, she embodies a commitment to excellence in the ever-evolving landscape of developer products.
Sarit is an accomplished VP of Product Management at Palo Alto Networks' Prisma Cloud, where they lead the development and execution of innovative cloud security solutions. With prior leadership roles at Check Point, JFrog Security, and Vdoo, Sarit has a proven track record of driving product strategy, enhancing customer engagement, and delivering cutting-edge security products.
I am a cloud and enterprise architect with over two decades of experience focused on large scale systems deployed using Platform Engineering. I have a solid foundation in cloud computing and software engineering, with expertise in designing and implementing scalable, distributed systems using various technologies such as Kubernetes and microservices.
Pete has more than 15 years of software development experience in open source and games. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo, and an MA in Communication from Carleton University in Ottawa. He is passionate about engaging with communities and dedicated to enhancing developers’ experiences.
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.
Jonathan Singer is a Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Checkmarx, covering the Checkmarx One platform, as well as new business GTM strategy. Prior to his time at Checkmarx Jonathan spent 19 years in both Information Security and Telecommunications with roles at Akamai, the WiMAX Forum, and Yankee Group Research. He’s a father of one child and two chihuahuas, and that keeps him plenty-busy thank you very much.