Ethan Banks, CCIE #20655, is a hands-on networking practitioner who has designed, built and maintained networks for higher education, state government, financial institutions, and technology corporations.

Since April 2010, Ethan has also been a host of the Packet Pushers Podcast. The technical program covers practical network design, as well as cutting edge topics like virtualization, OpenFlow, software defined networking, and overlay protocols. The podcast has seen over one million unique downloads, and today reaches a global audience of over 10,000 listeners. Also a writer, Ethan covers network engineering and the networking industry for a variety of IT publications. He is the editor for the independent community of bloggers at PacketPushers.net.

Shawn Bass, an independent consultant based in the Chicago area, is a “Citrix Technology Professional” and a “Microsoft Most Valuable Professional.” He’s been working with Citrix technologies since the WinView product days, and today, most of his clients are Fortune 500 companies (primarily in the financial services and insurance markets).

Shawn got involved in trying to help the server-based computing community around February 2005. Back then, he’d spent long hours lurking on a variety of forums and learning from others, so he decided it was finally time to give back to assist others. Since that time, he’s become an active poster on the support forums on BrianMadden.com, the official Citrix Support Forums, and Softgridguru.com.

Shawn is a 10-time (and top rated) presenter at BriForum, and has spoken at other worldwide events including Citrix Synergy, PubForum, and various Citrix user groups. He also continues to teach the independent desktop virtualization 5-day master class that he and Brian developed back in 2004.

Shawn Bass has been a member of the TechTarget Speaker Bureau since its formation in 2012.

You can follow him on Twitter @shawnbass. 

Kris Bliesner is CEO and Co-Founder of 2nd Watch, Inc. In his position, Kris oversees strategic development of 2nd Watch’s cloud based software solutions, the technology development and customer technology solutions, the technology group, and the technology trends for the company.

Prior to co-founding 2nd Watch in 2010, Kris has held many top IT positions with such companies as Microsoft and Ambassadors Group, Inc. As the CIO for Ambassadors Group, Inc. (EPAX), Kris spearheaded a 360 degree turnaround in IT infrastructure including massive legacy software replacement, a tier 1 ERP platform and a business first CRM implementation. As part of the core executive team he helped drive strategic partnerships and was part of the mergers and acquisition team. Prior to Ambassadors Kris led several high performance engineering teams at Microsoft including Sales Operations and MSN Operations.

Kris has led educational seminars nationwide on topics from Building Bulletproof Infrastructure to Optimizing Your Amazon Web Services Account. He has spoken twice to the Conference Board on Technology and has led various executive briefings at Microsoft for SharePoint and other technologies.

John Burke is a Principal Research Analyst with Nemertes Research where he advises key enterprise and vendor clients, conducts and analyzes primary research, and writes thought-leadership pieces across a wide variety of topics. John’s expertise lies within the realm of virtual networks and software-defined networking (SDN) technologies, standards and implementations. John also leads research on other IT movements and technologies, and is knowledgeable in areas including big data, information stewardship, desktop and server virtualization, cloud and security—to name a few.

John’s background includes high-level IT management positions in higher education. He directed the staff in the voice and data network, desktop support, and systems management groups at the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, Minn.). John also worked in IT management, systems and network administration posts at The College of St. Catherine (St. Paul). He worked on technology application at Johns Hopkins University, where he supported the engineering faculty using IT in research and teaching. His experience has given him broad and deep knowledge in computing, communications and IT management.

As an established speaker, John has been a presenter and moderator at Interop, IDG’s IT Roadmap and Tech Target events, as well as private events for Cisco, AT&T and other vendors, on subjects that include optimization, desktop and server virtualization, and information stewardship. John writes frequently for TechTarget, Network World, and other media sources.

Tom Coughlin is a widely respected storage analyst and consultant.  He has over 30 years in the data storage industry with multiple engineering and management positions at high profile companies. Dr. Coughlin has many publications and six patents to his credit. Coughlin Associates provides market and technology analysis (including reports on several digital storage technologies and applications and a newsletter) as well as Data Storage Technical Consulting services. Tom publishes the Digital Storage Technology Newsletter, the Media and Entertainment Storage Report, and the Capital Equipment and Technology for the Hard Disk Drive Industry Report. Tom is active with SMPTE, SNIA, the IEEE Magnetics Society , IEEE CE Society,and other professional organizations. 

With over 13 years in the industry, Steve Damadeo possesses both theoretical know-how and hands-on experience in all areas of client and infrastructure management, serving in Helpdesk, Desktop Support, DataCenter design, training and management capacities. For the past seven years, Steve has served as IT Operations Manager at Festo Corporation, a leading world-wide supplier of automation technology and the performance leader in industrial training and education programs. Steve’s team is responsible for all information technology related services supporting approximately 2,000 employees in its North and South American organizations, including helpdesk services, client computing, mobility, datacenter design and management, enterprise backups, unified communications and collaboration platforms, networking and telecommunications systems.

Wayne Eckerson has been a thought leader in the business intelligence and analytics fields since the early 1990s. He has conducted numerous research studies and is a noted speaker, blogger, and consultant. He is the author of two widely read books “Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business” (2005, 2010) and “The Secrets of Analytical Leaders: Insights from Information Insiders.”(2012). He is currently the director of research and founder of BI Leadership Research, an analyst firm that tracks industry trends and evaluates BI technologies.

Wayne Eckerson has been a member of the TechTarget Speaker Bureau since its formation in 2012.

Boris Evelson is a leading expert in business intelligence (BI) — a set of processes, methodologies, and technologies used to transform raw data into meaningful, useful, and action-oriented enterprise information. Boris delivers strategic guidance, helping enterprises define BI strategies, governance, and architectures and identify vendors and technologies that help them put information to use in business processes and end user experiences.

Boris' current research focuses on the practical and actionable best practices for building BI infrastructure and applications, such as BI business cases, architectural options, organizational structures, and vendor selection. Boris continues to explore emerging trends in next-generation BI, such as agile BI architecture and development approaches, in-memory analytics, advanced data visualization, convergence of structured data and unstructured content analytics, process-driven and operational BI, and many others.

Boris has more than 30 years of experience with enterprise software and applications implementation, management consulting, and strategic advisory skills. Most recently, Boris was a managing partner at Textra, a boutique strategic advisory firm serving all IT constituents: users, vendors, and investors. Boris cofounded Textra after spending several years as a VP and a strategic technology advisor at JPMorgan/LabMorgan, where he led many successful internal BI initiatives, advising the bank's large enterprise software clients on enterprise adoption issues and product and marketing strategies. Prior to JPMorgan, Boris served as a senior manager of data warehousing and customer relationship management (CRM) practices at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Boris started his career at Citibank, where, among many other successful projects, he implemented the bank's first global credit risk data warehouse.

Stephen Foskett is an active participant in the world of enterprise information technology, currently focusing on enterprise storage, server virtualization,networking, and cloud computing. He organizes the popular Tech Field Day event series for Gestalt IT and runs Foskett Services. A long-time voice in the storage industry, Stephen has authored numerous articles for industry publications, and is a popular presenter at industry events. His contributionsto the enterprise IT community have earned him recognition as both a Microsoft MVP and VMware vExpert. He can be found online at TechFieldDay.com, blog.FoskettS.net, and on Twitter at @SFoskett.

Cindi Howson is the founder of BI Scorecard, a resource for in-depth BI tool evaluations based on exclusive hands-on testing. She is the author of several BI books including Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App, SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0: The Complete Reference, a TDWI faculty member, and a frequent contributor to Information Week. She is a frequent speaker at BI industry events around the world and has been quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and The Irish Times. As a consultant, she advises clients on BI strategies and tool selections. Prior to founding BI Scorecard, Howson was a manager at Deloitte & Touche and a BI standards leader for a Fortune 500 company.

Harvey Koeppel is the President of Pictographics, Inc., a management and technology advisory and consulting services firm.  The firm has provided executive-level support to the financial services industry since inception in 1979.  Harvey is also Vice Chairman of the World BPO/ITO Forum, one of the leading industry associations focused on advancing the adoption and effective use of outsourced products and services globally. 

Harvey recently served as Executive Director of the Center for CIO Leadership, a global community serving more than 3,400 CIOs and other C-level executives interested in acquiring and developing the skills and good practices required to further leverage enterprise investments in information technology.  He continues to speak and write about technology leadership and innovation at numerous industry forums and guest lectures at post-graduate executive education programs offered by leading academic institutions around the world.

From May 2004 through June 2007, Harvey served as the Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President of Citigroup’s Global Consumer Group.  In that role, Harvey served as the Chairperson of the Enterprise Offshore Program Office Steering Committee. Prior to taking on the CIO role, Harvey provided consulting services to CitiFinancial, Citibank and other Citi affiliates from 1986 to 2004.  

Matt Kosht is presently an IT Manager at SEMCO Energy, a natural gas distribution company based in Michigan. He has worked for over 24 years in various Information Technology related areas, including Windows/UNIX Systems Administration, Application Virtualization and SCADA Administration. Matt has over 13 years of Citrix server based computing experience. He is fiercely vendor agnostic and solutions focused.

Gabe Knuth is an independent industry analyst, blogger, and speaker,known throughout the world as "the other guy" at BrianMadden.com. He has been nearly 100% focused on desktops, applications, and devices throughout his 16 year career in IT, a journey that has taken him from help desks, to data centers,to the cloud as a consultant, in-house IT person, and as an analyst. As evidenced by his co-authorship of the book The VDI Delusion, Gabe's focus tends to lean more toward practical, real-world uses for technology, essentially boiling off the hype and examining the actual usefulness of each technology in specific use cases. Gabe has written for BrianMadden.com and SearchVirtualDesktop.com since 2007, and has spoken at major industry trade shows such as BriForum and Citrix Synergy.

You can follow him on twitter @gabeknuth.

Gabe Knuth has been a member of the TechTarget Speaker Bureau since its formation in 2012.

Dean Lane has almost 30 years of hands on experience in the IT industry, having been a CIO at four companies: Honeywell Aerospace, ATK (Alliant Techsystems), Plantronics, and Masters Institute of Technology. He is currently the CIO of Henley-Putnam University and sits on the advisory board of the Society for Information Management, and is an active member of Executive World, the Project Management Institute, APICS and the CIO Collective.

Leading technology publications frequently name David Linthicum among the top 10 enterprise technologists in the world. He is a true thought leader in the industry, and an expert in complex distributed systems, including cloud computing, data integration, service oriented architecture (SOA), and big data systems. As the author of over 13 books on computing with over 3,000 published articles, as well as radio and TV appearances as a computing expert, he is often quoted in major business and technology publications. In addition, David is a frequent keynote presenter at industry conferences, with over 500 presentations given in the last 20 years.

David's industry experience includes tenures as CTO and CEO of several successful public and private software companies, and upper-level management positions in Fortune 100 companies. David has delivered over $2 billion dollars in value by transforming companies from traditional to innovative technologies, moving them to lucrative exits that benefitted investors, employees, and customers.

Currently, David is the CTO and founder of Blue Mountain Labs, a cloud computing consulting and advisory firm (sold to Bick Ventures in Feb. 2010). David’s latest book is "Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise, a Step-by-Step Approach." He is also the cloud computing blogger for InfoWorld and GigaOM Pro, as well as the creator and host of the highly successful Cloud Computing Podcast, now past 200 episodes.

Brian Madden is known throughout the world as an opinionated, super technical, fiercely independent desktop virtualization expert. He's also written several books and thousands of articles about desktop and application virtualization. His blog site, www.BrianMadden.com, receives millions of visitors per year and is a leading source for conversation, debate and discourse about the application and desktop virtualization industry. He also recently launched ConsumerizeIT.com (now a part of BrianMadden.com) to address the emerging trend around the consumerization of IT. In addition, Brian is the creator of BriForum.

You can follow him on twitter @brianmadden.

Brian Madden has been a member of the TechTarget Speaker Bureau since its formation in 2012.

Jack Madden writes about everything related to enterprise mobility management at BrianMadden.com. He was the editor of ConsumerizeIT.com (now a part of BrianMadden.com) and has also contributed to SearchVirtualDesktop.com. Jack is the co-creator of the Consumerization Nation podcast, and has spoken at BriForum, Citrix Synergy, and other events throughout the US. Jack was a co-author of The VDI Delusion, and his book Enterprise Mobility Management 2013 will be published this April.

Jack Madden has been a member of the TechTarget Speaker Bureau since its formation in 2012.

For more than 30 years, Craig Macfarlane has been a chief technology officer and/or managed large IT projects including Internet systems at a number of Boston-area companies. Prior to co-founding TDS, Craig directed the technology strategy and execution at Student Advantage and iCAST.  Before iCAST, Craig was vice president of advanced media development at Strategic Interactive Group (now called Digitas), a Boston-based direct marketer and interactive agency firm. He led teams that designed and built websites and content management systems for IBM, AT&T, Kraft, LL Bean and other companies.

In 1994 and 1995, Craig directed the growth, operations and services of a regional Internet provider and Web hosting company, The Internet Access Company. From 1978 to 1992, he deployed and managed a variety of global computer networks at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, a Cambridge, Mass.-based technology firm. This included networks for the U.S. government including ARPANET (the precursor to the Internet), NEARNET and TWBNet.

As Founder and Chief Scientist at DeepStorage, LLC Howard Marks provides the kind of practical, hands-on analysis that can only come from spending 30 years in the trenches. As a consultant, he helped organizations large and small including America Express, JP Morgan, Borden Foods, BBDO Worldwide and Foxwoods Resort Casino solve real world storage and network problems.

Now at DeepStorage, he runs an independent test lab evaluating the latest in storage products in beautiful Santa Fe MN and writing about them for multiple websites including NetworkComputing.com. An entertaining and energetic speaker, Howard speaks regularly at industry events including Storage Decisions, Interop, SNW and Microsoft’s TechEd. He has written three books and hundreds of articles on networking and storage technologies.

Howard Marks has been a member of the TechTarget Speaker Bureau since its formation in 2012 and has spoken at numerous TechTarget editorial events in previous years.

Dennis Martin is the founder and President of Demartek, a computer industry analyst organization with its own on-site test lab. Demartek focuses on lab validation testing and performance testing of storage and related hardware and software products. Dennis has been working in the information technology industry since 1980, primarily involved in software development and project management in mainframe, UNIX, and Windows environments. These include a variety of large and small end-user customers, and engineering and marketing positions for storage vendors such as StorageTek.

Rich has twenty years experience in information security, physical security, and risk management. He specializes in cloud, application and data security, emerging security technologies, and security management.

Prior to founding Securosis, Rich was a Research Vice President at Gartner on the security team where he also served as research co-chair for the Gartner Security Summit. Prior to his seven years at Gartner, Rich worked as an independent consultant, web application developer, software development manager at the University of Colorado, and systems and network administrator.

Rich is the Security Editor of TidBITS, a columnist for Dark Reading, and a frequent contributor to publications ranging from Information Security Magazine to Macworld. He is a frequent industry speaker at events including the RSA Security Conference and DefCon, and has spoken on every continent except Antarctica (where he's happy to speak for free-- assuming travel is covered).

Bob Plankers is a Senior Data Center & Virtualization Architect with a major Midwestern university, where he most recently successfully led efforts to create a private & hybrid cloud. He has 18 years of experience in the public and private sectors as a system administrator, project manager, data center architect, and virtualization & cloud expert, and is able to see the big picture when it comes to process, people, and how technology helps organizations deliver services. Beyond his regular column for Modern Infrastructure, he is also a blogger, writer, consultant, expert source for journalists, and speaker on a wide range of IT topics. In his spare time he enjoys photography, trap shooting, and riding his motorcycle when the weather is nice.

W. Curtis Preston (aka Mr. Backup) is an expert in backup & recovery systems; a space he has been working in since 1993. He has written three books on the subject, Backup & Recovery, Using SANs and NAS, and Unix Backup & Recovery. Curtis is the founder of Truth in IT, Inc. and BackupCentral.com and is also an independent consultant and writer. He is also a well sought after speaker and has spoken at over 300 seminars and conferences around the world. Whether it’s through TruthinIT.com, BackupCentral.com, or Truth in IT Seminars, Curtis’ mission remains the same: arming today’s IT managers with truly unbiased information about today’s storage industry and its products.

Marc Staimer is the founder, senior analyst, and CDS of Dragon Slayer Consulting in Beaverton, OR. The consulting practice of 15 years has focused in the areas of strategic planning, product development, and market development. With over 33 years of marketing, sales and business experience in infrastructure, storage, server, software, databases, and virtualization, he’s considered one of the industry’s leading experts. Marc can be reached at marcstaimer@mac.com.

With a background in managing one of the largest global financial networks, Mark Szynaka brings his network monitoring, security and ITIL best practices to the cloud. He helps enterprise IT investigate and implement cloud computing architectures – public, private and hybrid – using Amazon Web Services, Terremark/Verizon and Rackspace technologies.

Jon Toigo is a 37-year veteran of IT and has developed business continuity plans for more than 100 companies.  He has written 17 books, including four on disaster recovery planning, with the fourth edition of his Disaster Recovery Planning: Getting to Business-Savvy Business Continuity coming to bookstores in 2013. 

Toigo is Managing Principal Partner for Toigo Partners International, a consultancy specializing in IT consumer advocacy, data management and storage technology, and he is chairman and co-founder of the Data Management Institute, a professional organization for those who create, store, manage and administer data and storage assets.  DMI is now in its 20^th year and has trained and certified nearly 100,000 data management professionals worldwide.

Jon Toigo is proud to be part of the TechTarget Speaker Bureau since its formation in 2012, and has spoken at numerous TechTarget editorial events in previous years.  Jon also writes a column for Storage Magazine every month.

Ben Woo is the founder and Managing Director of Neuralytix, Inc. He is a recognized, celebrated, provocative market visionary and thought leader. Ben frequently speaks at industry and customer events worldwide and is often quoted by leading business and technology press. Ben has dedicated his entire career to the data and information industry. He uses this diverse set of skills, knowledge and experience to provide in-depth market insight and advice on key aspects of the IT marketplace to both vendors and buyers of technology. Ben also advises Wall Street clients and other interested stakeholders.