VMworld 2014 US – TAM Day Speakers

Provided below are short biographies for each speaker at our VMworld 2014 US TAM Day event.

Kit Colbert
Chief Technology Officer, End-User Computing
VMware, Inc.

Kit Colbert is the CTO, End-User Computing at VMware, driving technical strategy and advanced development of innovative solutions for VMware’s desktop, social, and mobility products. A 10-year veteran at VMware, Kit previously held roles as the Chief Architect and Principal Engineer for Horizon Workspace and as the lead Management Architect for the vCenter Operations Suite. At the start of his career, he was the technical lead behind the creation, development, and delivery of the vMotion and Storage vMotion features in vSphere.

Kit holds a ScB in Computer Science from Brown University and is a recognized thought-leader on End-user Computing and Cloud Management trends. He speaks regularly at industry conferences, on the main stage at VMworld, and is the desktop and mobility voice for the VMware Office of the CTO blog.

Follow Kit on Twitter: @KitColbert

Bret Connor
Vice President of Professional Services, Americas
VMware, Inc.

Bret Connor leads an organization that enables VMware’s customers to drive IT Transformation through the adoption and deployment of VMware’s software solutions and cloud platforms. His organization consists of Services Sales Executives, IT Strategy consultants, Technology Delivery consultants, and Technical Account Managers. His team supports customers in the US, Canada, and Latin America.

Previously, Bret was Vice President of Strategy and Business Transformation for the Americas at VMware.

Prior to VMware, Bret worked at McKinsey & Company, Goldman Sachs, Commerzbank AG, and PHB Hagler Bailly (now PA Consulting). He earned his BA in Economics from the University of Chicago and his MBA from Harvard.

Bruce Davie
Principal Engineer, Networking & Security
VMware, Inc.

Bruce Davie is a Principal Engineer in the Networking and Security BU at VMware. He has over 25 years of networking industry experience, and was a Cisco Fellow prior to joining Nicira. At Cisco, he worked closely with leading service providers to enhance the capabilities of their networks. He led the team that developed multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) and contributed to the standards on IP quality of service. He has written over a dozen Internet RFCs and several networking textbooks. Bruce received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Edinburgh in 1988 and is an ACM Fellow.

Follow Bruce on Twitter: @_DrBruceD

Carl Eschenbach
President and Chief Operating Officer
VMware, Inc.

Carl Eschenbach joined VMware in June 2002 and acts as the company’s chief operating officer. Eschenbach brings more than 24 years of high-tech industry experience including infrastructure software, networking, telephony and storage. Prior to joining VMware, Eschenbach was vice president of North America Sales at Inktomi, and he has held various sales management positions with 3Com, EMC and Lucent Technologies.

Ben Fathi
Chief Technology Officer
VMware, Inc.

Ben Fathi joined VMware in March 2012 and serves as the company’s chief technology officer. Prior to being named CTO in January 2014, Fathi was senior vice president of research and development leading the teams responsible for the core ESX hypervisor, VMware vSphere and many other key products. He has more than 30 years of experience in the computer industry, with an expertise in developing operating system software.

Prior to joining VMware, Fathi served as a senior vice president at Cisco leading the operating systems and networking protocol teams. Prior to Cisco, he held multiple roles at Microsoft over 12 years, most recently as corporate vice president of development for the Windows core operating system division. Fathi holds bachelor of science and master of science degrees in Computer Science, as well as a bachelor of science degree in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts.

Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenBFathi

John Gilmartin
General Manager & Vice President, SDDC Suite Business Unit
VMware, Inc.

John Gilmartin leads VMware’s SDDC Suite’s product management and marketing organizations.  He rejoined VMware in January 2013 as vice president of products, Storage and Availability. Prior to that, Gilmartin served as vice president of Marketing at Coraid, a storage start up developing a scale-out, distributed system for cloud and big data architectures. Before joining Coraid, he led the product marketing team for VMware’s virtualization platform, VMware vSphere, developing go-to-market, partnering, and pricing strategies that helped grow the business to over $1B in license revenue. In earlier roles, Gilmartin served as a brand manager for enterprise servers at Dell, Inc., and as a strategy consultant at Marakon Associates advising clients on corporate and business unit strategy.

Gilmartin holds a B.S.E from Princeton University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

David Hill
Senior Technical Marketing Architect
VMware, Inc.

David Hill is an experienced Entrepreneur, IT Consultant and Architect for over 16 years, working on projects for large consultancies and private corporations. David joined VMware April 2010 and is currently a senior technical marketing architect working within VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service Business Unit, supporting and developing VMware’s hybrid cloud strategy.

Follow David on Twitter: @DaveHill99

Mathew Lodge
Vice President, Cloud Services Product Marketing
VMware, Inc.

Mathew Lodge is a Vice President in VMware’s Cloud Services group. Mathew has 20 years’ diverse experience in cloud computing and product leadership. He has built compilers and distributed systems for projects like the International Space Station, helped connect six countries to the Internet for the first time, and managed a $630m router product line at Cisco. Prior to VMware, Mathew was Senior Director at Symantec in its $1Bn+ information management group.

Follow Mathew on Twitter: @MathewLodge

Rawlinson Rivera, VCDX #86
Senior Technical Marketing Architect
VMware, Inc.

Rawlinson is a Senior Architect in the Cloud Infrastructure Technical Marketing Group at VMware focused on Software-Defined Storage technologies primarily responsible for Virtual SAN, Virtual Volumes, and OpenStack. As a previous Architect in VMware’s Cloud Infrastructure & Management Professional Services Organization, Rawlinson specialized on vSphere and Cloud enterprise architectures for VMware’s fortune 100, 500 customers. Rawlinson is amongst the few VMware Certified Design Experts (VCDX#86) in the world, and author of multiple books based on VMware and other technologies.

Follow Rawlinson on Twitter: @PunchingClouds

Tony Scott
Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer
VMware, Inc.

Tony Scott joined VMware in August 2013 and leads the company’s global information technology group, bringing more than 35 years of leadership and management experience in IT services. Scott’s organization is focused on the effective use of IT to bring improved agility and cost savings to the business. Most recently Scott served as chief information officer (CIO) at Microsoft, overseeing all aspects of the company’s information technology organization and enterprise digital supply chain.

Prior to Microsoft, he served as CIO at The Walt Disney Company, responsible for corporate and companywide shared service functions including enterprise wide application development and support. He took the company through major systems upgrade of SAP environment, managed transformation of several major functions to outsourced partners and delivered multi-year strategy planning framework for IT within the company. Scott also served as the Chief Technology Officer of Information Systems & Services at General Motors Corporation. He holds a bachelor’s degree in information systems management from the University of San Francisco and a Juris Doctorate with a concentration in Intellectual Property, International Law from Santa Clara University.

Job Simon
Vice President of IT Strategy and Architecture
VMware, Inc.

Job Simon heads the IT Architecture and Strategy function at VMware, covering governance of Application, Infrastructure, Data and Business Process architectures. He is responsible for IT technology direction and transformation, driving strategic programs with focus on Cloud computing, SaaS, Mobile, Social and Big data. He works closely with R&D on IT testing and implementation of  VMware on VMware, as Customer one. Prior to VMware he was at NetApp responsible for IT Enterprise Architecture and Technology services. He started his career at Intel and in addition to NetApp has held management positions at 3Com and Applied Materials.

Dan Wendlandt
Director, Production Management for OpenStack
VMware, Inc.

Dan Wendlandt is a Director of Product Management at VMware, focusing on emerging cloud technologies, including OpenStack. Prior to this role, Dan was the community-wide Project Technical Lead (PTL) for the OpenStack Networking Project (codenamed “Neutron” and formerly known as “Quantum), which he helped create in 2011 while he was at Nicira. Nicira worked with service providers and enterprises to solve key networking challenges and was the start-up that popularized “software defined-networking” and “network virtualization” before being acquired by VMware in 2012.