Heidi Biggar - As a Solutions Marketing Principal at Hitachi Data Systems, Heidi Biggar is responsible for driving awareness around Hitachi Solutions, their benefits and application in the market/field, and importantly their positioning. Heidi has been in the storage business for more than 13 years. Previously, Heidi was with Enterprise Strategy Group, where she was the primary data protection analyst for disk backup and data de-duplication.

Robert Burch - Robert Burch has over 27 years experience in the IT business both as a vendor, IT professional and longtime Data Center Manager prior to joining HDS. This has included Data Center Operations, Technical Support, Product Testing and Sales Support specializing in Microsoft Operating Systems and Applications. Mr. Burch has worked at Hitachi Data Systems for over 11 years……..currently working in - Americas Sales and Solutions & Products as an ATC with responsibility for providing very technical product and solutions support during the sales cycle, including POCs, Technical Demos and Technical Customer Support around HDS and Microsoft solutions. He spends much of his time with Customers, discussing their unique Microsoft O/S and Application challenges and helping look at appropriate HDS solutions that meet or exceed their Microsoft requirements. He was the primary developer of the Hitachi Storage Cluster solutions that have allowed HDS to be the only Vendor to provide and all native Windows Geo-Cluster service / solution.

Scott Burkland - Scott has worked in the IT field for over 20 years. He is currently a SQL Server Infrastructure Architect for Avanade where he has worked for the past 10 years. He is responsible for designing and implementing the infrastructure that supports the highly available database services for Avanade deployment of SQL Server. This platform provides the back-end databases for applications such as Office Communication Services, SharePoint 2007 & 2010, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, BizTalk and a host of custom built databases. These applications are used worldwide by Avanade’s 9,000 employees.

Sean Deuby - Sean is a Senior Enterprise Solutions Strategist with Advaiya, Inc. He has 25 years’ experience in enterprise IT, including over a decade spent running Texas Instruments’ IBM VM systems—the first virtualized operating system. He also spent 10 years with Intel Corporation, where he was the design engineer of the core directory services team and one of the architects of Intel’s corporate Active Directory forest. Sean has written a book on Windows 2000 focused on explaining Active Directory, and he has been a Contributing Editor for Windows IT Pro magazine for 10 years. Microsoft has awarded Sean the MVP (Most Valuable Professional) distinction every year since 2004.

Dave Glatfelter - Dave is a Business Development manager in HP’s Solution Alliances team focused on driving HP’s storage strategy with Microsoft and Citrix. Dave brings more than 25 years of marketing and management experience and has held a variety of Business Development, Product Management, Product Marketing, and International Marketing positions with Sequent Computer, StorageTek and Legato Systems. Most recently, Dave was the Microsoft Alliance Manager for LeftHand Networks, one of the initial and most innovative companies in the iSCSI SAN market. LeftHand was acquired by Hewlett Packard in Nov. 2008.

Michael Otey - Michael Otey, technical director for Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine, is president of TECA, a software-development and consulting company in Portland, Oregon, and coauthor of SQL Server 2005 Developer's Guide (Osborne/McGraw-Hill). Michael has covered the topic of virtualization extensively for Windows IT Pro magazine, having written several features articles showing how to take advantage of virtualization in the enterprise as well as reviewing all of the major virtualization products.

Adrian Simays -

Claude Steinmayer - Claude Steinmayer joined NetApp as a senior marketing and product management professional with 39 years of experience and a proven track record of successfully leading cross functional teams in high tech companies. While working for companies such as IBM, Amdahl, HDS, EMC, and Sun Micro Systems, Claude’s emphasis has been on strategic sales, product marketing, product management, strategy development and implementation of go-to-market action plans. Claude has consulted independently in Canada, Europe, and Africa on IT strategic business plans and implementation with Fortune 100 companies.

Jeff Woolsey - Jeff Woolsey is a Principal Group Program Manager for Windows Virtualization in the Windows Server and Cloud Division. Jeff has over ten year’s virtualization experience in the development of numerous virtualization products including Virtual PC 2004, VPC 2007, Virtual Server 2005/2005R2 and the new hypervisor-based virtualization technology, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. In addition, Jeff’s team led the development and release of the free standalone Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and the Hyper-V Server R2 release. Jeff’s team is also active in the industry promoting interoperability and providing the Linux Integration Components for Hyper-V. He is a sought after virtualization expert presenting in numerous keynotes with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.

Noel Yuhanna, Forrester Research - Noel Yuhann is a Principal Analyst for Forrester Research. Noel has more than 20 years of experience in IT and has held various technical and management positions. He came to Forrester through its acquisition of Giga Information Group. Prior to joining Giga, Noel spent several years at Exodus Communications and led a group responsible for planning and implementing mission-critical enterprise applications. Prior to Exodus, he served as a principal consultant, benchmark specialist, and data architect for Amdahl. He has worked on several large, terabyte-sized database applications and deployed high-availability and high-scalability solutions for various enterprises. He has vast experience in implementing and supporting leading DBMSes and data management products. Noel has spoken at numerous industry conferences around the globe and is quoted frequently in industry publications, such as CNET News.com, Computerworld, eWeek, InfoWorld, InformationWeek, Forbes, Search.com, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. He has taught several technical and management programs on grid computing, data management, security, scalability, consolidation, and information fabric.