Speaker Biographies – Feature Sessions - New York

Hollis Beall, Director of Performance Engineering, X-IO Technologies.
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.

Gaurav Chakravorty, Co-Founder, Qplum.
Gaurav is co-founder and Head of Strategy Development at qplum. Qplum is a digital wealth management firm that specializes in family offices and HNWI. Qplum also works with endowment funds and pension funds to provide outsourced asset management services that integrate with their in-house technology. Gaurav has been one of the early pioneers in machine learning based high-frequency trading. He built the most profitable algo-trading group at Tower Research from 2005-2010 and was the youngest partner in the firm.

Jeremy Eder, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat Performance Engineering.
Jeremy specializes in measurement and analysis of performance metrics, and using that analysis to guide performance-tuning of real-world infrastructure. Jeremy has over a decade of experience in the financial services space, focusing on extreme low latency architecture design, tuning and jitter analysis. Jeremy is the author of Low Latency Performance Tuning for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7 available here: https://access.redhat.com/articles/1323793. Jeremy leads a high-output team of engineers focused on performance, scalability and capacity planning of container-based infrastructures in the Atomic and OpenShift family of Red Hat products, including the application of these next generation technologies to the high performance space. He is also a contributor to Kubernetes, Docker and the Linux kernel in a variety of areas where things need to go fast.

Dan Eisner, Technology Executive (recently AQR, DE Shaw).
Daniel has been building technology solutions in finance for 16 years. Having started his career at the New York Stock Exchange, he has since worked at Walleye Trading, D E Shaw & Co, and AQR Capital Management. His expertise is in leading development and architecture teams to build high performance and scalable solutions to solve key business issues. These usually involve large compute clusters with highly demanding storage requirements, and require a simple and straightforward interface for both users and developers. Daniel has a strong interest in emerging technologies and how they affect companies' development strategies.

William Fenick, Strategy & Marketing Director, Financial Services, Interxion.
Bill has over 20+ years of financial services industry experience in a variety of strategy, sales and marketing roles at Tibco Inc and Thomson Reuters. Before taking up his current position in September 2013 at Interxion, Bill drove business development for Elektron Managed Services at Thomson Reuters, where he drew on his successful track record in developing and marketing services for data distribution technology, managed services, co-location and hosting in the global marketplace. Prior to starting in the financial services industry, Bill was a lecturer at the University of Vienna and held a post-doctoral post at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Bill holds a PhD from University of Vienna, an MA from Webster University in Vienna and a BA from UCLA.

Harry Foster, Chief Verification Scientist, Mentor Graphics.
Harry Foster is Chief Scientist for Design Verification Technology Division of Mentor, A Siemens Business. He holds multiple patents in verification and has co-authored six books on verification. Harry was the 2006 recipient of the Accellera Technical Excellence Award for his contributions to developing industry standards, and was the original creator of the Accellera Open Verification Library (OVL) standard.

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.

Zahid Hussain, CEO, Vexata.
Zahid Hussain is Founder/CEO of Vexata Inc., a leader in high performance enterprise storage systems. Previously he served as SVP/GM of the Flash Products Division at EMC, which included the XtremIO and ScaleIO products, and had also led the product development teams for EMC’s mid-range storage, including the VNX and Isilon products. Prior to joining EMC in 2011, he served as Vice President of Engineering at VMware where he led the vSphere, vCenter and vCloud development teams. Zahid has 41 patents in the areas of computer graphics, computer systems, storage systems, and networking systems. He holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University.

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.

Luigi Mercone, Managing Director, Bank of New York Mellon.
Cornerstone career skill is driving excellence as a principled and believable enablement and transformation partner to the front office—consistently and successfully enabling front office strategy and innovation through technology. Extensive tenure in senior-level technology architecture, engineering, operations and business strategy enablement leadership roles—including senior engineering, research, execution and operations roles with global experience—having lived/worked/traveled throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia (US and EU passport holder.) People strengths are having excellent leadership, motivational, written and spoken communication skills. Frequently serve as a mentor, a public speaker and evangelist though constructively bringing to bear a high EQ awareness of organizational and social constructs to individual and group interactions. Technical strengths include enterprise-scale distributed and elastic computing, semantic technologies, predictive analytics, high performance, latency sensitive computing, large-scale in-memory computing.

Dave Payne, Vice President, Global Solutions Architecture, Elastifile.
Dave's role is to engage with Elastifile customers and accelerate their success. He and his team partner with enterprises and service providers to align our technology accurately, ensure our deployment success, and advocate on how our roadmap is shaped. Dave has enjoyed 20 years in the high tech community, building teams, leading people and solving problems. He got his start in the pre Y2K days building and supporting computing systems. He became an IT consultant, then emerged as an entrepreneur CTO creating services and software around the VMware movement. Dave has served previously as a presales leader at EMC & most recently executive at Code42. He is a big believer that technology can accelerate computer science’s boundless solutions, if and when we eliminate the continued complexity that most computer systems create.

Rob Peglar, Senior Vice President and CTO, Symbolic IO.
Rob has 40 years of data storage, network and compute-related experience. Rob is a published author and on the Board of Directors for the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and an advisor for the Flash Memory Summit. At Symbolic IO Rob provides executive management to drive the future product portfolio, executive-level forecasting and comprehensive customer/partner interaction. Previously, Rob was VP at Micron, CTO Americas at EMC, and Treasurer and Director at SNIA. He also held senior level positions at Xiotech Corporation, StorageTek and ETA Systems. Rob holds the B.S. degree in Computer Science from Washington University, and performed graduate work at Washington University’s Sever Institute of Engineering. His research background includes memory optimization, distributed systems, I/O performance analysis, queuing theory, parallel systems architecture and OS design, file systems & storage networking protocols, clustering algorithms and virtual systems communication.

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.