Speaker Biographies – London, Fall 2018

Hollis Beall, Director of Performance Engineering, Axellio.
With almost 20 years in the data storage field, Hollis has worked in roles from hardware qualification testing, replication solutions design, proof of concept testing, and technical marketing. As the director of performance engineering, Hollis is responsible for benchmark testing, performance data analysis and visualization, and performance troubleshooting. Hollis holds a B.S. in Engineering from Louisiana Tech University.

Yves Charles, VP Business Development, NovaSparks.
Yves is in charge the Business Development of Novaparks, where he has been involved since 2010. Prior to Novasparks, Yves has founded and managed two companies in the IT industry, one in France and the second in the USA. Yves holds a master degree at the Engineering school of SUPELEC in France.

Ian Cunningham, Senior Vice President, Europe, Zayo.
Ian is Zayo’s Senior Vice President, overseeing the European sales team. Ian joins Zayo with extensive experience in both the telecommunications and technology sectors, having held high profile roles at Experian, Vodafone and BT over the past 20+ years. Ian has successfully built and transformed sales organizations in both the US and Europe and leads Zayo’s European team across all key verticals including Finance, Media & Content, Infrastructure and Healthcare. Ian graduated with a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Sunderland, followed by a Diploma from the Chartered Institute of Marketing.

Laurent de Barry, Co-founder & Chief Sales Officer, Enyx.
Laurent has worked in Ultra Low Latency Technology for close to 10 years and co-founded Enyx in 2011 at the age of 23. As Managing Director of Enyx’s trading solutions, Laurent leads the development and commercialization of the next generation FPGA-enabled market access technology. A hardware engineer by training, Laurent is passionate about high performance computing and bringing cutting-edge technology to market. Prior to co-founding Enyx, he worked on critical hardware components for the aeronautical and military industries.

Michel Debiche, Guest Analyst, STAC.
Michel is both quant and technologist, whose passion is making data science actually work for financial firms. He is currently leading the expansion of the STAC community to include more buyside firms looking to leapfrog to the best technologies and Analytics Ops processes for quant/quantamental investing. Prior to STAC, Michel re-engineered strategy development and implementation at numerous firms, first as a quant, then as a consultant. Employers include CSFB, Daiwa, First New York, CIBC, and Think Big Analytics, where he led the financial services practice. Michel has BS, MS, and PhD degrees in geophysics from Stanford and Princeton Universities.

Crystal Downie, Equities Technology - Director, Credit Suisse.
Crystal has over 12 years’ experience in managing production technology environments across Equities and Fixed Income trading businesses. She is keen to suggest and drive change, with a proven track record of achieving significant operational stability improvements and new business deliveries for the benefit of her clients. Aside from her busy day job, she actively helps to drive initiatives within her firm to make the technology workforce more diverse and inclusive. She acts as a role model for the younger generation in her organization, supporting and sponsoring them through their journey.

Andy Flesch, Regional Sales Manager, WekaIO.
For 20 years Andy has been a pioneer in bringing disruptive technologies to the Financial Services Industry including Turbolinux, Citrix, VMware, Riverbed, and most recently WekaIO. Andy specializes in supporting unique technology paradigm shifts and holds a BS in Business Administration from the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley

Roop Ganguly, Chief Solutions Architect, Bigstream.
Bishwa Roop Ganguly is Chief Solution Architect at Bigstream Solutions. He has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and an MS and BS in Computer Science from University of Illinois and University of California at Berkeley, respectively. He has published extensively in the field of parallel processing and computer networks. He also has 5 years experience as a Data Scientist using Hadoop, Spark and SQL.

Dr Matthew Grosvenor, Senior Systems Engineer, Exablaze.
Matthew is a Senior Systems Engineer at Exablaze. He's been working with the Exablaze family of companies for over 8 years. In that time, he has been involved in trading strategy development, market data acquisition, FPGA acceleration, systems optimisation, and measurement and analytics. Matthew holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge. His research work focused on techniques for managing and mitigating latency variance in hyper-scale datacenter networks. He continues to publish widely in the fields of big-data, hyperscale datacenters, networks, latency and network measurement.

Ayelet Heyman, VP Product, SQream Technologies.
Ayelet holds over a decade of experience in the startup arena with a focus on technology, in product-oriented companies. Utilizing her background in mathematics enhanced with deep technological expertise, Ayelet has been a driving force in turning technological innovations into well-known, viable products. Prior to joining SQream, Ayelet served as VP Research at ThetaRay, a big data analytics company, and has held additional leadership roles in innovative start-ups such as Trusteer and Finjan.

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.

Andreas Lohr, Senior Expert, Derivatives and Cash Trading IT, Deutsche Boerse.
Andreas has a degree in computer science from University of Applied Sciences in Darmstadt. He started in trading technology for financial markets in 1994 and continues doing so since. Andreas has worked in a startup for trading software and two major investment banks in Frankfurt and London. Before joining Deutsche Boerse in 2016, he spent many years in Amsterdam where he worked for a prop trading company.

Sandi Mays, Co-Founder, Chief Information and Customer Experience Officer, Zayo Group.
Sandi’s passion is providing an effortless customer experience for both internal and external customers. Sandi is a champion for diversity in the tech community and serves on the Board of the Latino Leadership Institute, the Salesforce CIO Advisory Board and the Denver Metro Chamber Economic Development Executive Committee. She is also a patron/supporter of the Denver Art Museum, the Colorado Ballet, Denver Performing Arts Center and Greenhouse scholars and an active member of many minority and diverse charities. In 2016 Sandi was named Women in Comms Leading Lights: Most Inspiring Woman in Comms. Previously, Sandi served in various management positions at ICG Communications, Level 3 Communications, MFS Telecom, WorldCom, Focus Enterprises and Northern Trust. Sandi earned a B.S. (magna cum laude) in Finance from DePaul University.

Pat Mead, Business Development EMEA - Datacenter and acceleration, Intel.
Pat Mead is the EMEA business development manager for datacenter and acceleration within Intel’s programmable solutions group. Pat joined Intel in in 2015 following Intel’s acquisition of Altera Corporation. Pat joined Altera in 1999 and held management roles in marketing, business development, technical management and global sales. Prior to Altera Pat worked for Lucent, Fujitsu and Marconi in technology and engineering roles. Pat earned a BSc (Hons) degree in Electrical and Electronic engineering from the University of Kent.

Matt Meinel, SVP Solutions Engineering, Sales and Business Development, Levyx.
Matt is a veteran innovator / entrepreneur in Capital Markets financial technology. He has been a key player at several successful, innovative financial technology firms including:Co-founder at startup 29West (low latency messaging technology) which exited to Informatica; RedHat CIO during transition period to the now popular subscription business model; Principal at O’Connor & Associates (bought by Swiss Bank which was acquired by UBS Investment Bank). At Swiss Bank he served as co-CIO and later at UBS Investment bank was Global Head of IT for the Fixed Income & Treasury Division.

Oskar Mencer, CEO, Maxeler Technologies.
Oskar is the Founder and CEO of Maxeler, affiliated with the Computing Department at Imperial College London and Member of Academia Europaea. Oskar is driving the deployment of operational excellence for data processing via a new science of Multiscale Dataflow Computing and Space-Time-Value discretization. Prior to Maxeler, Oskar was in Computing Sciences (1127) at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, Stanford University and Hitachi Central Research Laboratories in Tokyo. Oskar received two Best Paper Awards, an Imperial College Research Excellence Award in 2007 and a Special Award from Com.sult in 2012 for "revolutionising the world of computers".

Ori Modai, VP R&D, iguazio.
Ori has deep technological knowledge in designing and developing communication systems. He is experienced in R&D management, wide scale software and hardware projects, architecture and the development of new technologies. Prior to his role at Iguazio, Ori was the CTO of Radvision and a board member of the International Multimedia Telecommunications Consortium (IMTC). Ori co-owns several patents and has a B.Sc in Computer Engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Sebastian Neusuess, Head of Trading System Analytics, Deutsche Boerse.
Having joined Deutsche Boerse in 1999, Sebastian co-authored the messaging system that drives T7 and designed the latency monitoring for T7. Besides heading the trading system analytics team, his work includes real time application monitoring for the T7 platform, time sync (PTP, white rabbit), market microstructure analysis, data analysis and chasing nanoseconds. Sebastian is a C/C++ expert and recently dropped perl for python. He has a diploma in Theoretical Physics from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.

Ron Nevo, VP Systems Engineering, cPacket Networks.
With more than 25 years of industry experience, Ron brings a wide range of technical and networking knowledge to his current role. He is responsible for leading cPacket’s engineering teams through the creation and development of complex networking. Ron holds a B.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The Technion in Israel, and holds over 15 granted US patents.

Steve Newcombe, Account Manager UK, Chronos Technology.
Steve's involvement in telecommunications began in 1984 as an antenna design engineer, progressing into engineering management and culminating in Director status of a leading UK antenna manufacturing and installation business. He moved into the sales environment in 1999 selling Microsemi (formerly Datum) time and timing synchronisation solutions for enterprises and telecoms carriers. Steve holds a Master of Science Degree and is a Member of the IET.

Balaji Prabhakar, Co-Founder, Tick Tock Networks.
Balaji’s research interests are in computer networks; notably, data centers and cloud computing. His group at Stanford University is currently working on "Self-Programming Networks," developing systems and algorithms for enabling networks to sense, monitor, program and control themselves. He co-invented the QCN (Quantized Congestion Notification) algorithm and DCTCP algorithm. Balaji has received the CAREER award from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Erlang Prize from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society, the Rollo Davidson Prize from the University of Cambridge, and delivered the Lanteren Lectures. He is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Cesar Prados, Managing Director, Seven Solutions.
Cesar has started his Engineer career 13 years ago at I.D.S Space Laboratory, Italy, developing numerical methods and in parallel he continued working on research projects at the University. Cesar, won the first prize of the Innovative Entrepreneurial Projects Contest and founded an spin-off in 2007. In 2009 he started working at GSI particle accelerator, as a Technical Project Manager of the Control & Timing System. He has designed and developed HW/SW for the new accelerator critical network for the control and timing system. Since February 2018 Cesar is the managing director of Seven Solutions Germany.

David Riddoch, Chief Architect, Solarflare.
David co-founded Level 5 Networks in July 2002 and joined Solarflare when it merged with Level 5 in April 2006. David is the architect and lead developer of Solarflare's market leading OpenOnload network acceleration middleware. David's mission is to deliver absolutely the best possible performance without asking users to abandon the standard network stack: Sockets, TCP, UDP and Ethernet.

Dr David Snowdon, Director of Engineering, Arista.
David very recenty joined Arista when it acquired Metamako. David was co-founder and CTO at Metamako, where he looked after product and technology strategy. Prior to founding Metamako, David gained a wealth of experience working in and for electronic trading firms, optimising their network structures, network performance, and building performance hardware, gateware and software. He has a PhD in Operating Systems from the University of NSW, Australia, looking at the effect of frequency scaling on power and energy usage. Outside of work, David spends time designing, building and racing high-performance solar powered cars in international events and formerly held the Guinness record for the world’s fastest solar powered vehicle.

Sergei Storojev, Tools and Design Methodology Application Engineer, Xilinx.
Sergei joined Xilinx more than 20 years ago as a Software Product Marketing responsible for RTL (VHDL/Verilog) Synthesis flow covering product definition, customer support and training. With introduction of the Vivado FPGA design suite, Sergei moved a Tools a Design methodology team helping European customers to adopt a completely new design flow. Today, his primary focus is SDAccel environment allowing users to develop and accelerate applications using standard programming languages such as C/C++, OpenCL and RTL.

Jean-Claude Tagger, COO, quasarDB.
Jean Claude with over 35 years' experience in the High-Tech industry has been Managing Director of Dell France, President of NEC Computers for EMEA and held several positions of responsibility at Xerox, Philips, ZDs and Cabletron. Since 2009, he has supported several software companies in their growth especially at the international level, before devoting himself entirely to quasardb since 2015. He graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and holds a MSc from UC Berkeley.

Aman Thind, Co-Founder of BestX, now part of State Street.
Aman Co-Founded BestX in 2016 which quickly became an industry leader in FX TCA winning multiple awards, acquiring some of the biggest names both on the buy and sell side as its clients and getting acquired by State Street achieving in 2.5 yrs what should take a lifetime. Prior to BestX, he spent 7yrs at Morgan Stanley in their electronic trading and realtime analytics division leading the core architecture of Matrix. He built risk analytics tools at Lehman Brothers (though he wishes they used them a bit more) and has worked at Adobe providing a unique perspective of technology both in and outside the financial domain.

Jeremy Thomas, TSN Market Manager, Orolia Enterprise.

Dave Weber, Wall Street CTO & Director, Lenovo.
Dave Weber is the director of Lenovo's global financial services industry initiatives and Wall Street CTO. Dave is focused on server-based low latency, high performance, analytics and cloud technologies, and works with financial markets clients to provide solutions, with partners to build an ecosystem, and with Lenovo Research and Development to influence future products. Dave also leads the Lenovo relationship with STAC®, where Lenovo has worked closely with our partners to publish numerous world record benchmark results.