"Everything As a Service" for your Future

Rahul Bhuman, MS, MBA, has more than 18 years of leadership experience across corporate development, corporate strategy, business development, sales and software development. At Tech Mahindra, he is VP of Emerging Business. He is also a adjunct faculty at University of California Santa Cruz Extension campus. Bhuman has a master’s degree in Computer Science from Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago and an MBA in Finance and Strategy from the Indian School of Business where he continues to work as a startup business mentor at the school’s Atal Incubation Center. Formerly he was an advisor to the UC Berkeley Garwood Center of Innovation and Technology Pioneers selection committee at the World Economic Forum. In addition to teaching, he serves as an advisor to UCSC Silicon Valley Extension Artificial Intelligence program. Rahul was also on the Advisory Board of High Tech High Heels, a not profit organization with a mission to increase the number of girls entering into a college-level degree program in Science, Technology, Engineering or Math (STEM).

Dante Orsini serves as 11:11 Systems Chief Strategy Officer. He brings more than 20 years of experience leading direct and indirect sales teams, ideally positioning him to lead customer-focused strategy across all facets, from planning to execution, business transformation, and partner growth. In his role as Senior Vice President of Business Development for iland, he oversaw the global direction and execution of iland strategic and channel partnerships. Additionally, Dante along with his team were responsible for designing iland robust global, partner ecosystem from the ground up. He sits on the VMware Service Provider Advisory Council, as well as the HPE, Veeam, and Zerto Partner Advisory Boards. Dante was instrumental in helping iland to achieve Leader status in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service from 2016 through 2019 when the report was retired. Additionally, Dante and his team led iland to win CRN Partner Program (Five-Star rating) for three consecutive years as well as the Veeam Impact Partner of the Year award for four consecutive years and the Zerto Cloud Service Partner of the Year for three consecutive years. Dante background, combined with his thought leadership in cloud computing and cloud infrastructure, have ensured that he is repeatedly tapped to present at events across the globe. Dante holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Interpersonal Communications from Bowling Green State University.

Drew Lydecker is the Co-Founder and President at AVANT, a global leader in powering next generation technology decisions. Drew comes from a family of entrepreneurs who have continually pushed the envelope in disrupting the status quo by focusing on high value and high touch solutions. Drew built AVANT to fill a void in the market created by the accelerating pace of change in IT. AVANT’s market research, resources and technology helps Trusted Advisors support their customers to achieve their business transformation objectives, by navigating the ever changing IT landscape. From complex cloud design to global wide-area network deployments, AVANT empower Trusted Advisors and clients with access to the global marketplace of Cloud, Colocation and Telecom service providers that are disrupting todays IT landscape. To learn more about Drew, see this recent profile on “Let go and Lead”https://www.gagenmacdonald.com/lgl-print/drew-lydecker/

Sudakar Kodandaram joined Equinix in 2019 leading business development efforts with HPE. In this role, Sudakar collaborates with Equinix technology partners to ideate, co-develop, and launch joint offerings that help customers address their technology business needs. A tech veteran with over 20 years of experience, Sudakar previously spent over a decade with EDS, Hewlett Packard, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, working in different capacities across pan HP/HPE business units. He has managed business development and go-to-market strategies for application transformation, testing and validation services for retail and transportation verticals, been a solutions specialist for HP Technology Consulting Services supporting data center transformation and has been an HPE GreenLake Sales Specialist focused on accelerating digital transformation efforts. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Bangalore.

Dr Sanjit Singh Dang has been a successful Venture Capitalist, Corporate Executive, Board Member, Speaker, and Writer in Silicon Valley for two decades. He is currently the Co-Founder and Chairman of U First Capital. They provide Venture Capital as a Service to Corporations by bringing Startups in the Corporate's specific areas of interest (dedicated model). U First Capital's clients include Hitachi, Dupont, Booz Allen Hamilton, Ricoh, a multi-national Telecommunications Company, FedEx Institute, etc. Prior to starting U First Capital, Sanjit was at Intel Capital where he led Venture Capital investments in AI and Enterprise Software. He has been an Investor and on the Board of several companies. Sanjit has an excellent track record of driving at least 1 Exit every year: Pensando (Acquired by AMD in 2022), Nextdoor (IPO 2021), Palantir (IPO 2020), Orb Intelligence (Acquired by Dun and Bradstreet in 2020), Pinterest (IPO 2019), DocuSign (IPO 2018), Body Labs (AI startup, Acquired by Amazon in 2017 within 2 years of leading Series A investment), Voke (Acquired by Intel in 2016 within 7 months of leading Series A investment), Maginatics (Acquired by EMC in 2015 within 1 year of leading investment) and Basis Science (Acquired by Intel in 2014 within 1 year of investment). Sanjit has been on US-level Tech/Innovation Policy Advisory team. He is on the Advisory Council of UN’s World Artificial Intelligence Organization. He has also been on University of California President's Innovation Council. Sanjit has the fastest Engineering PhD from University of Illinois (2yrs 9mo after undergrad), which he received in 2000 with top research awards. He also attended the VC Executive program at Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. He’s an invited Speaker at several top conferences, eg SURGE/WebSummit, Venture Summit West, TiECon, Collision, ShopTalk, McKinsey Leadership Summit, Silicon Valley Open Doors, Global AI conference, etc. He’s a mentor at Stanford and Berkeley’s Entrepreneurship programs. Sanjit has over a decade of Exec leadership experience in Product Design, Business Development and Strategy across several domains: Big Data, Natural Language Processing, 3D Camera/Apps, Supply-Chain Analytics and Flash Memory. He has managed $2Bill/year accounts and executed >30 partnership deals in $100M-$2Bill range. Always striving to be ahead of the curve, Sanjit worked on Big Data Analytics before industry created the term 'Big Data'. Similarly, he launched 2 online courses during graduate school in 1999 and published iconic papers on learnings, way before the MOOC revolution started.