Working in IT means always adjusting to change and keeping an eye on emerging trends. For those in infrastructure, the pressure to keep up is intense as companies rapidly shed legacy systems in favor of cloud, automation, and software-defined technologies.
At Interop ITX April 30-May 4 in Las Vegas, you can hear and learn from experts who are on top of the trends and technologies reshaping IT infrastructure. The conference features some of the best and brightest minds in the industry who are leaders in their fields, including networking, data centers, and cloud infrastructure. These experienced and innovative IT practitioners and researchers will speak on topics such as network automation, containers, and hybrid cloud. They'll provide both strategic and practical advice to help you stay current and your businesses to thrive.
This year's roster of infrastructure experts includes veritable rock stars in the industry: networking luminary Radia Perlman, who developed technology that is fundamental to huge networks like the internet, and Martin Casado, a general partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz who is renowned for pioneering software-defined networking.
The high-caliber lineup also includes Peyton Maynard-Koran, a tech leader who is spearheading an effort to transform enterprise networking and empower network engineers, and Leslie Daigle, who has held leadership positions at the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Society. You can also expect to see the ever-popular Mike Pennacchi, a veteran Interop speaker and troubleshooting expert, as well as rising stars such as Courtney Christensen, a software developer and team lead for Linden Lab.
Interop ITX is the only independent IT conference, so you can expect these experts to provide objective insight into critical technologies and issues impacting IT infrastructure.
Guiding the infrastructure track at Interop ITX as Track Chair is Keith Townsend, a highly regarded consultant and strategist who provides keen perspective on the trends most important to infrastructure pros as companies pursue their digital initiatives.
On the following pages, check out some of the infrastructure experts you can catch at the conference this spring. Check out the Interop ITX schedule to see the full roster of top experts scheduled to speak at the conference, which has six other tracks: cloud, data and analytics, DevOps, government, leadership and professional development, and security.
Get live advice on networking, storage, and data center technologies to build the foundation to support software-driven IT and the cloud. Attend the Infrastructure Track at Interop ITX, April 30-May 4, 2018. Register now!
Radia Perlman
Radia Perlman is a networking pioneer whose work has had a tremendous impact on how networks operate today. Large networks like the internet are robust and scalable due to her inventions, and she also transformed Ethernet so it could support hundreds of thousands of nodes. Her work includes the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), which she later improved with the development of Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL). Perlman also has made key contributions to network security. Currently a Fellow at Dell EMC, she holds more than 100 patents, authored books, taught at MIT and Harvard, and has received numerous awards, including induction into the Internet Hall of Fame.
At Interop ITX, Perlman will speak at the Network Transformation Summit Day 1, presented in partnership with IDC.
Martin Casado
Before he became a general partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, Martin Casado led the software-defined networking movement, creating the OpenFlow protocol while a graduate student at Stanford University. He co-founded Nicira, which was acquired by VMware in 2012. Casado, who holds PhD in computer science from Stanford, has won a number of awards, including the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award. His keynote at Interop two years ago about the future of IT infrastructure drew rave reviews from attendees. Catch a clip of it here.
This year at Interop ITX, Casado will speak in a Q&A session at the Network Transformation Summit Day 2, presented in partnership with IDC.
Keith Townsend
Keith Townsend, founder The CTO Advisor, is an enterprise architect with more than 18 years of experience. He spent several years with the "Big 4" as a management consultant, helping set the infrastructure technology strategy for Fortune 500 companies. Here's the story of his interesting career journey and advice for others building an IT career today.
Scott Lowe
Scott Lowe is widely known in the IT community as an author, blogger, and speaker. He hosts a popular podcast, The Full-Stack Journey, and writes about cloud computing, virtualization, networking, open source, and other topics on his blog. Network Computing spoke with Lowe earlier this year about the rise of the full-stack engineer. He currently works as an engineering architect on the cloud services team at VMware, focused on cloud and related open source projects.
Lowe has led popular sessions and workshops at Interop in the past. At this year's conference, he will present "Container Concepts in Plain Language" and "The Full-Stack Journey: A Career Perspective." He'll also lead a half-day session, "Infrastructure as Code for Beginners."
Leslie Daigle
Leslie Daigle has a long track record in helping shape the internet's practical evolution. After working at Cisco, VeriSign, and Bunyip Information Systems in engineering and research roles, she took on leadership positions with the Internet Engineering Task Force and was the Internet Society's first chief internet technology officer. She currently is the principal at ThinkingCat Enterprises, focused on establishing a center for "the creative development of the internet." Daigle will provide her perspective on the future of the internet at the Network Transformation Summit Day 2.
Peyton Maynard-Koran
Peyton Maynard-Koran is an technologist with deep experience in networking and infrastructure. His experience includes building out nationwide transport and access infrastructures at Time Warner Cable. He currently works as senior director of infrastructure at Whole Foods/Amazon. Maynard-Koran is CEO and founder of The Open Enterprise Foundation, which strives to evolve enterprise networking to move away from highly vendor-driven education and deployment models. "We want to fundamentally change the networking ecosystem so that it works in favor of the engineers that support it," reads the organization's website. At Interop ITX, Maynard-Koran will talk about the state of enterprise networking at the Network Transformation Summit Day 2.
Camberley Bates
Camberley Bates is the managing director and analyst at Evaluator Group, an analyst firm specializing in information management and data storage. Bates has more than 30 years of experience, including work at Veritas, EDS, IBM, and her own IT services firm. She leads the research agenda and strategic engagements at Evaluator Group, which covers the all-flash data center and adoption of emerging technologies such as software-defined storage and converged infrastructures. Bates will provide insight at Interop ITX into a hot topic in the enterprise with her session, "Hybrid Cloud Success & Failure: Use Cases and Technology Options."
Rob Hirschfeld
Rob Hirschfeld has been in the cloud and infrastructure space for nearly 15 years, including work with early ESX betas to serving on the OpenStack Foundation Board. He is CEO and co-founder of RackN, a provider of physical and hybrid DevOps software. Hirschfeld also is co-founder of the Digital Rebar project, an open data center provisioning platform designed with a cloud-native architecture. He blogs regularly about cloud, containers, DevOps and other technology trends. At Interop ITX, he will discuss the rise of site reliability engineering in, "DevOps vs. SRE vs. Cloud Native."
Lori MacVittie
Lori MacVittie, principal technology evangelist at F5 Networks, is an expert on cloud computing, security, and application delivery. She is a regular contributor to Network Computing, providing perspective on today's IT infrastructure and the evolving role of the networking pro. She's scheduled to present "Realizing Security and Speed at Scale," at the Network Transformation Summit Day 1.
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