Speaker Biographies – Feature Sessions - Chicago

Philip Filleul, Segment Director – Financial Services, Cray Inc.
Phil is Cray’s global segment director for Financial Services. His role is to understand how Cray’s technologies can be used to bring value to the more challenging use cases in FS. Prior to Cray he has been responsible for capital markets use cases with Teradata analytics and has also created an industry reference data utility for the large banks. He has a strong fascination with how advanced technology can rethink traditional systems in Banks and is a frequent conference speaker, and white paper writer. He has a Masters in Computer Science from Cambridge University, UK and lives in Charlotte NC.

Adam Honore, CEO, MarketsTech LLC.
Adam is the Chief Executive Officer of MarketsTech, LLC, an advisory firm focused on helping companies create and grow innovative ideas inside capital markets. Prior to MarketsTech, Adam was a managing director at NASDAQ responsible for global business development and ISV relationships for FinQloud. Adam has conducted consulting engagements for global exchanges, Fortune 500 technology and financial companies, as well as routine work in trading technology advising on partnerships, M&A, competitive positioning, product roadmaps, market entrance, marketing, and thought leadership.

Peter Lankford, Founder & Director, Securities Technology Analysis Center.
Peter leads STAC®, which provides hands-on technology research and testing tools to the finance industry and facilitates the STAC Benchmark Council™, a group of leading financial institutions and vendors that engages in technical dialog and specifies standard ways to assess technologies used in finance. Prior to STAC, Peter was SVP of the $240M market data technology business at Reuters. Prior to Reuters, Peter held management positions at Citibank, First Chicago Corp., and operating-system maker IGC. Peter has an MBA, Masters in International Relations, and Bachelors in Chemistry from the University of Chicago.

Chuck Piercey, Head of Product Management, TidalScale.
Chuck heads TidalScale product management, enjoys startup teams, and applies an innate curiosity to learning about customers, use cases and technology. He's happy to find an excuse to bring a soldering iron to a software company (true story) and recently led a band of teenagers the full length of the John Muir Trail without major mishap. Chuck grew up in Silicon Valley and has worked at ROLM, IBM, Silicon Graphics, Acta Technology, Business Objects and Trolltech among others. Chuck is one of the co-founders of TidalScale.

Vin Sharma, Director, Artificial Intelligence Solutions, Intel.
Vin is the director of machine learning solutions in the Data Center group at Intel, where he focuses on autonomous driving and automated trading. Vin has helped build data center infrastructure software platforms—most recently the Trusted Analytics Platform—and has helped drive enterprise adoption of open source software like Linux, KVM, OpenStack, Hadoop and analytics for over 20 years. Before joining Intel, Vin held various engineering and management roles at HP for 15 years, building enterprise software products based on Linux, Java, XML, and other open source software.

Dr David Snowdon, CTO, Metamako.
David is a Founder and co-CTO at Metamako, with his core role comprising product and technology strategy at the company. His role liasing with customers about their needs gives him a unique view into the challenges faced by such firms. Prior to founding Metamako, David gained a wealth of experience working in and for HFT firms, optimising their network structures, network performance, and building performance hardware, gateware and software. He has a PhD in Operating Systems, looking at and taking advantage of the effect of frequency scaling on power and energy usage. Energy efficiency has long been an interest, with ten years spent designing, building and racing high performance solar powered cars in international events. David’s team formerly held the Guiness record for the world’s fastest solar powered vehicle.

Mike Strickland, Director of Strategic Technology Marketing, Intel.
Mike has more than twenty years of computer, networking and storage experience with companies such as Hewlett Packard, Silverback Systems, and Altera. He currently is leading the computer and storage business unit strategic direction, and is also leading the FPGA High Performance Computing vision across the Programmable Solutions Group at Intel. Previously Mike has led the development and launch of numerous products including networking, storage management, TCP/IP Offload and iSCSI. He holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Brown University and a M.S. degree in management from the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.

Bernie Wu, Chief Business Development Officer, Levyx.
Bernie is passionate about using innovative software to unlock the value and performance of new processor and storage technologies with respect to Big Data. Previously, Bernie was at 2 Silicon Valley startups as President of PDS Inc, focused on Software-defined storage and as VP of Business Development for Pi-Coral, focused on Flash/Object storage. Bernie was also a founder/EVP for FalconStor - a leader in disk and tape virtualization and heterogeneous data replication. Prior to that, he was SVP at Trend Micro where he pioneered deploying virus protection onto email internet relays thru partnerships with major Telcos. He has BS/MS Eng. degrees from UC Berkeley and an MBA from UCLA.

Rocky Zayed, Senior Solutions Architect for Financial Services, DDN.
With over a decade of hands-on expertise in storage and storage subsystem engineering and architecture Nadir "Rocky" Zayed has built high-capability compute and storage infrastructure for the customers of such companies as FusionIO, SanDisk, and IDG Global. Rocky's experience spans multiple high performance markets including financial services, academic research, government and manufacturing. His current role at DDN is Senior Solutions Architect for the Financial Services market.