Speakers

François Locoh-Donou is F5’s President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board of Directors. He joined F5 in April 2017, bringing to the office nearly two decades of enterprise technology experience building a wide range of products, teams, and operations around the world.

Locoh-Donou previously held successive leadership positions at Ciena, the network strategy and technology company, including Chief Operating Officer; Senior Vice President, Global Products Group; Vice President and General Manager, EMEA; Vice President, International Sales; and Vice President, Marketing. Prior to joining Ciena, he held research-and-development roles at Photonetics, a French opto-electronics company.

Locoh-Donou serves on the board of Capital One Financial Corporation (NYSE: COF). He is also the co-founder of Cajou Espoir, a cashew-processing facility that employs several hundred people in rural Togo, 80 percent of whom are women. Cajou Espoir exports more than 400 tons of cashew kernels annually to the U.S. and Europe.

He holds engineering degrees from École Centrale de Marseille and Télécom ParisTech in France and a M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Kara Sprague is Executive Vice President and General Manager of F5’s BIG-IP, responsible for the company’s product portfolio management, product, and solutions.

Sprague joined F5 in 2017 from McKinsey and Company, where in her thirteen-year tenure she held various leadership positions across their technology practice. Most recently she led the Technology, Media, and Telecom Practice for the Western Region. Prior to McKinsey, Sprague was on the engineering staff of Oracle, Agilent Technologies, and Hewlett-Packard.

A trained computer scientist and electrical engineer, she holds two masters degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and serves on the board of Girls Who Code.

Gus Robertson joined F5 in 2019. Previously, he served as CEO of NGINX Inc., which was acquired by F5. Robertson joined NGINX as CEO in 2012 when the company had no commercial offerings or revenue and a staff of eight. Over the next six years, he grew NGINX to more than 250 employees and raised over $100 million in venture capital from such investors as Goldman Sachs and NEA.

Prior to joining NGINX, he worked at Red Hat for 10 years, first as Vice President of the Asia Pacific region and then to lead Global Business Development from the US. Before joining Red Hat, Robertson ran the Asia Pacific region for Visio, prior to its acquisition by Microsoft in 2000.

Robertson studied Marketing at Charles Sturt University in Australia and completed the Advanced Management Program at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

Haiyan Song is Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security, responsible for the company’s security product and managed services portfolio.

Song joined F5 in 2021. She previously led the Security business as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Security Markets at Splunk. In her more than 20-year career, she has held several leadership positions, including Vice President and General Manager at HP ArcSight, Vice President of Engineering at ArcSight, and Vice President of Engineering at SenSage. Haiyan started her career at IBM/Informix, building trusted relational database management systems for Federal customers.

Song currently serves on the board of CSG, a provider of revenue management and digital payments. Haiyan served on the board of LLamasoft, an AI-powered supply chain analytics software company that was acquired by Coupa in November 2020. She holds an M.S. from Florida Atlantic University and studied Computer Science in Tsinghua University in China.

Derek Smith joined F5 in 2020. Previously, Smith served as CEO and Co-founder of Shape Security Inc., which he co-founded in 2011 to protect the largest banks, airlines, retailers, and government agencies from fraud, abuse and other sophisticated attacks.

Before founding Shape, Smith was Senior Advisor for Cyber-Policy at the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the U.S. Department of Defense. He joined the government agency from Raytheon, the global defense contractor, where he served as VP of Cyber-Security after the company acquired Oakley Networks in 2007. Smith founded Oakley Networks in 2001, having developed the first data-leakage protection and insider threat network security technology, which is now deployed throughout the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. intelligence community, and the Fortune 500.

Ankur is the founder and CEO of Volterra now part of F5. Previously, he was the founder and CEO of Contrail Systems, which pioneered telco NFV and SDN technologies and was acquired by Juniper Networks in 2012. Contrail is the most widely deployed networking platform in Tier 1 telco mobile networks (AT&T, DT, Orange, NTT and Reliance JIO), and is used in many SaaS providers’ cloud deployments (Workday, Volkswagen, DirecTV). Prior to Contrail, Ankur was the CTO and VP Engineering at Aruba Networks, a global leader in wireless solutions. He holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Brian Krebs is an independent investigative reporter who writes about cybercrime at the award-winning Web site KrebsOnSecurity.com.

Formerly with The Washington Post (1995 to 2009), Krebs is probably best known for breaking stories on high-profile data breaches, including those that hit Target, Home Depot, Michaels, and Ashley Madison.

A frequent interviewee and public speaker, Krebs has been profiled by 60 Minutes, The New York Times, Poynter.org, and Business Week. Krebs’s book, Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime - From Global Epidemic to Your Front Door – is now a New York Times bestseller.

In January 2015, the National Press Foundation announced it was awarding Krebs its Chairman's Citation, an award designed to "recognize individuals whose accomplishments fall outside the traditional categories of excellence." In October 2014, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners gave Krebs the "Guardian Award," an honor given annually to a journalist "whose determination, perseverance, and commitment to the truth have contributed significantly to the fight against fraud."

Krebs graduated in 1994 from George Mason University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies.

Gregory (Greg) Crabb is the Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer at the U.S. Postal Service. Crabb was named to this role in March 2017 and is responsible for protecting the Postal Service — its employees, customers, critical infrastructure, and information systems — against present and future digital threats. He leads a team of information security professionals in defining and executing the Postal Service’s information security strategy and educating stakeholders and the public about its information security mission. In conjunction with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, he directs the investigative response to violations of laws that defend the nation’s mail system from cybercrime and misuse. Crabb also leads efforts in developing secure digital solutions designed to support new and innovative product offerings and strengthen the Postal Service’s business processes. He reports to the Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President.

Crabb has been acting in this role since July 2016 and has played a critical role in the Postal Service’s ongoing information security transformation. Before assuming this role, Crabb led many programmatic efforts throughout his 21 years as a U.S. Postal Inspector, including strategies focusing on investigating cybercrime, projecting revenue, strengthening export screening processes, and protecting the Postal Service’s assets. His past assignments with the Postal Inspection Service include Inspector in Charge of Revenue, Project and Global Security; Assistant Inspector in Charge, Global Cyber Investigations; and Projects Coordinator, International Fraud, for the San Francisco Division.

Crabb has been the executive sponsor for nearly twenty million dollars in applied information security research at the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute.  Before beginning his career with the Postal Service, Crabb earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in accounting from North Central College. He is also a graduate of the Postal Service’s Advanced Leadership and Executive Leadership Programs.

Celeste is a Senior Technical Writer at CNCF and one of the co-founders of the Inclusive Naming Initiative, a project that seeks to find consensus across the tech community on removal of harmful language. She provides technical writing and design support for cloud native projects across the organization. She has lived on various continents, but currently calls Vancouver, Canada home.

Dave Estlick is the Vice President & Chief Information Security Officer at Chipotle Mexican Grill. With more than 25 years of experience, Dave joined Chipotle in 2019 and is responsible for the creation and governance of Chipotle’s global information security roadmap including security operations, asset protection, cyber risk, intelligence and compliance, data loss, fraud defense and integrated cyber security architecture. With a collaborative approach to business and a passion for analytics, he leads a team of dedicated engineers, analysts, architects and project managers. Prior to Chipotle, Dave was the Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer for Starbucks, where he led the global technology infrastructure and global cybersecurity organization, including the establishment of the Starbucks private cloud. Dave has also held executive leadership roles at PetSmart and Amazon. Most recently, he was inducted into the 2020 CSO Hall of Fame. Dave sits on the Board of Advisors for Cyberstarts, Clear Sky and PCI Security Standards, in addition to serving on the Board of Directors for Internet Security Alliance, Retail Cyber Intelligence Sharing Center, and Security Advisor Alliance. Dave attended the University of Washington and received a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and a Bachelor of Science degree in business finance from Montana Tech.

As F5’s CISO, Gail has three primary responsibilities:

1. Implement and operate F5’s enterprise IT security program
2. Establish company-wide standards and programs for product and service security
3. Showcase to customers and the industry the use of F5 security technologies

Previously, Gail served as Vice President and General Manager of F5 Silverline, where she led product management, marketing, architecture, engineering, and customer success for F5’s cloud-based Silverline managed service offering. Before joining F5, Coury was CISO of Oracle Cloud, PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards. She brings more than 20 years of experience both as a CISO and as a security product leader.

Gail has an Executive MBA from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Clarke University. She is also a member of the following boards:

• One In Tech, an ISACA Foundation, Board Chair
• Clarke University Board of Trustees

Coalfire Cloud Security Advisory Board

Geng Lin is Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at F5. He is responsible for leading technology strategy, product evolution, and critical innovations for the company.

Lin joined F5 in 2019 from J.P. Morgan Chase, where he was Managing Director, Chief Development Officer and Head of Engineering for consumer and community banking. Prior to JPMC, Lin worked at Google as CTO of Corporate Networks and later as Head of Service Engineering for Next Billion Users. Previously, he served as CTO of Networking Group at Dell and CTO of IBM Alliance at Cisco Systems. He was also an appointed Fellow at Dell and Distinguished Engineer at JPMC.

Lin is an industry-leading expert in distributed systems, software defined infrastructure, and cloud services. He is a contributing author of two books on cloud and data-intensive computing. He has published many technical papers and holds nine U.S. patents. 

Lin received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from Peking University and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of British Columbia.

Jesica Church is Director, Marketing at F5 where she’s focused on brand strategy and development. As well, she’s personally and professionally committed to advancing inclusionary language and speech in all environments. She joined F5 in 2019 with the acquisition of NGINX, where she previously led corporate marketing.

Joanna Lee is an attorney who advises tech companies, standard development organizations, and open source communities and foundations on governance, intellectual property matters, and a range of issues related to diversity and inclusion, including code of conduct best practices.  Recently, Joanna has been helping organizations and tech communities develop and implement inclusive language policies and programs.  Joanna is an active contributor to the Inclusive Naming Initiative and co-leads its Standards Workstream.  Joanna is a Partner at the law firm of Gesmer Updegrove LLP. 

Mark C. Miller has supported VisIt and led development of Silo for scalable I/O requirements of LLNL HPC simulation codes for 25+ years. Mark’s interests include data models and their impact on software interoperability, high performance I/O, and Software Quality Engineering (Smart Libraries) for HPC libraries and, more recently, the importance of inclusive practices in productivity and sustainability of software projects.

Mike joined World Wide Technology in September 2010 after 25 years of government service at the National Security Agency. As the Vice President of Security Solutions, Mike leads a team of senior security experts and former CISO’s that work across our Global Enterprise, Public Sector, and Service Provider sales organizations to provide value to our customers.

Under Mike's leadership, WWT's Security practice has seen an average 40+% YoY growth with top line revenue exceeding $1B in 2020. WWT’s Security practice caters to a wide range of customers including Fortune 1000 enterprises in the global finance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, and technology sectors, as well as large Federal, state, and higher education organizations.  

Prior to his current role, Mike was the Vice President of Emerging Technologies, working closely with our big data, security, and software-defined networking teams, and the Vice President of WWT Advanced Solutions, responsible for sales and services offerings across the Federal Intelligence Community. 

As a member of the Senior Executive Service at the NSA, Mike led the design and development of next-generation cyber systems including real‐time systems, situational awareness tools, and command and control capabilities. He has held various technical and leadership positions in the areas of systems development, mathematics and cryptography. As a Technical Director within the Mission Capabilities Group, he led a team of several hundred software engineers across nearly 35 software projects. In this role, he also co-developed a new agile software development operations framework for the National Security Agency which standardized NSA’s approach toward designing, building and operating complex software systems. 

He is a graduate of the NSA’s Director Leadership Program and Senior Technical Development Program and has received several honorary awards including the Presidential Rank Award for Meritorious Executive Service, two Meritorious Civilian Service Awards, and the Deckert-Foster Excellence in SIGINT Engineering Award. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and a B.S. in Mathematics from the State University of New York at Albany.

As head of the IPAS Communications and PSIRT team, Suzy leads the execution of Intel’s global security communications strategy as well as Intel’s response to matters involving product security. Previously, Suzy was Vice President of Intel Architecture, Graphics, and Software (IAGS), where she ran the Software Program Office. Suzy also is a leader in the Intel Latinx Leadership Council and multiple diversity and inclusion efforts.

Joining F5 with the acquisition of NGINX, where he served as the Technical Director for APAC, Alan is currently a Sr. Product Manager focusing on microservice and service mesh technologies with NGINX and F5 products. Prior to his three years at NGINX, Alan was with F5 for ten years, running the Marketing Reference Architecture teams for ADC and cloud.

Joining F5 with the acquisition of NGINX, where he served as the Technical Director for APAC, Alan is currently a Sr. Product Manager focusing on microservice and service mesh technologies with NGINX and F5 products. Prior to his three years at NGINX, Alan was with F5 for ten years, running the Marketing Reference Architecture teams for ADC and cloud.

Joining F5 with the acquisition of NGINX, Allen is currently a Business Development Manager focusing on strategic technology partnerships. Prior to F5, Allen spent 10+ years in sales at Brocade, Riverbed, and Bluewolf.

Alessandro Fael Garcia is a technical marketing engineer at NGINX (part of F5). He empowers engineers in their journey to stay ahead of the curve by using the latest NGINX tech offerings. In his free time, Alessandro enjoys travelling (currently on hold), cooking, and any and all outdoors exercise.

Amir Rawdat is a technical marketing engineer at NGINX, where he specializes in content creation of various technical topics. He has a strong background in computer networking, computer programming, troubleshooting, and content creation. Previously, Amir was a customer’s applications engineer at Nokia.

Anish Johnson is a Senior Product Manager on the Analytics Product Group at F5, where he is working to define the capabilities and optimal customer experience for F5's next generation fraud prevention product, SAFE. He has 12 years of experience building and growing AI/data driven analytics products across a variety of verticals, including 6 years at Guardian Analytics, an innovator in using behavioral analytics for financial fraud detection. Anish holds an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, and a Bachelor of Engineering from Delhi University.

Anitha is a Sr. Solutions Engineer mainly focused on Security in the Business Development team. In this role, she researches new technologies in the market and develops and integrates new solutions with partners. She Creates the content and posts the solutions in the form of blogs, demo videos, and drives the field readiness webinars. Before F5, she worked at Facebook as a Network Security Engineer. She holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University. Anitha loves solving challenging problems and has a tremendous passion for cyberspace.

Azeem Suleman is a Director Product Management from Intent Based Networking Group (IBNG) who owns DC networking portfolio for operations platform and analytics. He holds several patents, written multiple documents, white papers, and technical tips related to the data center, cloud and security. He has been a representative to the Architecture Board and has been working with large-scale networks for more than two decades.

Azeem has a BS degree in Computer Engineering and has MS degree from The University of Texas. He has published research paper in the IEEE International Conference and has been with Cisco since 2009. He has achieved Cisco Distinguished Speaker status at conferences / events.

Brian Uffelman has two decades of cybersecurity experience, driving product management, product marketing, and technical marketing organizations at industry-leading cybersecurity firms including Cisco Systems, Symantec, EMC, F5, Forcepoint, and Shape Security. He has contributed to the world’s education and adoption of datacenter security, network edge, mobile, and IoT security solutions.

Chris Witeck is a Director of Product Management at NGINX, where his team is focused on the intersection of application security and application deployment for modern apps. Prior to joining NGINX, Chris was a Principal Technology Strategist at Citrix, where his specific focus was the Internet of Things (IoT), and engaging with customers to build IoT enabled product protypes that gathered contextual information for improving and personalizing the delivery of Citrix Workspaces. Before joining Citrix, Chris served as Senior Director of Product Marketing at iPass where he owned the road map and product launches for the iPass Open Mobile enterprise mobility solution.

In his role as Director & Sr. Security Solutions Architect at F5, Corey Marshall applies his 20+ years of global experience in a broad range of domains including secure network and platform design, digital forensics and surveillance, incident response, regulatory compliance, and vulnerability assessment/penetration testing to the challenges and opportunities facing F5’s clients. He currently focuses on web and mobile application security strategies and is recognized as F5’s leading expert in Zero Trust architectures.

After many years of managing infrastructure for multiple companies, Damian now heads up all things technical for Partnerships and Alliances for NGINX. Damian is a long time NGINX user, and it has played a key role in almost every environment he has managed.

David Garrison joined F5 six years ago after spending twenty-five years in various IT roles ranging from programming to network engineering. David is now a Solution Architect in the F5 Business Development organization and leads the team on various automation/containerization ecosystem integrations between F5, HashiCorp, and others.

Don Laursen is a Sr Manager responsible for F5 Encryption, and Global Certifications and Privacy. A member of the F5 Access Security Team. This includes SSL/TLS, Key Encryption, Key Protection (Hardware Security Modules, FIPS, Protection Profiles) and Certificate Management. 

Additional areas of focus include emerging cryptology topics such as post-quantum schemes, blockchain, and tracking of promoted standards from NIAP, NIST, CESG, ISO, ANSI, BSI and others as they relate industry best practices and compliance at the government, the region, or state level.   

Throughout his career, Dylen Turnbull, has worked for several companies Symantec, Veritas, F5 Networks and now F5's NGINX business unit. This time represents an accumulation of over 22 years of enterprise/opensource software and solution development experience. Working with NGINX Business Development on strategic partner alliances with Rancher and Grafana Labs, his primary focus has been integration work with opensource technologies including Rancher, Rancher Kubernetes Engine, K3s, Prometheus, and Grafana in the containerization, virtualization, and continuous integration/delivery solutions space.

Edgar joined F5 Silverline SOC in 2015 focused on the DDoS service, bringing over 15 years of Network Security experience to the company and helping keep customers protected against DDoS attacks, identifying different attack vectors and actively assisting customers understand the benefits of having a scrubbing provider that help them keep their operations online secure and available. Prior to joining F5, I was the Information Security Lead at RealNet in Mexico. During my tenure as a lead in the team, I was responsible for ensuring that customer networks were compliant with PCI and other standards, providing guidance on best practices to keep customer assets protected and secured.

Elijah Zupancic is a Solutions Architect for NGINX with experience as a software engineer, architect and technical manager. Elijah has been leading software teams in architectural design, product development and holistic improvement for over ten years and can loves to geek out about infrastructure, architecture, application composition, service design and psychology of making real world applications work.

Eric Ji is a Solution Architect at F5 with focus on technical development of DevOps and Cloud technology alliance partnerships. His expertise spans Kubernetes, OpenShift, Automation, Ansible/Puppet/Chef, SDN and Security.

As Director of Business Development at F5 Networks, Frank Strobel is responsible for managing the strategic technology partnerships in security and IIoT. Prior to joining F5, Strobel spent more than 10 years driving strategic alliances for technology companies, including Motorola, Intel, Tech Mahindra, Microsoft, and others. He is a frequent speaker at industry tradeshows, user group meetings, and other events, presenting on topics ranging from successful partnering strategies to cybersecurity and IIoT. Strobel received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Applied Science in Ulm, Germany and moved to the U.S. after receiving a full scholarship by the Carl Duisberg Society.

Gary has been at F5 for 14 years in various roles, and currently serves as Vice President of Solutions Engineering, Shape Security. An industry veteran, Gary has been working in Cyber Security since 1998 and has worked across several continents. With a passion for all things tech, he is always looking to learn from our customers and help them with their challenges.

Gregory Coward has over 20 years of experience in Information Technology and joined F5 over 9 years ago as a Solution Architect in the Business Development organization. For the past several years Greg has been focusing on emerging technologies, automation and public cloud initiatives.

Jakub Pavlik is a co-founder of tcp cloud (acquired by Mirantis) and ex director of engineering at Volterra (acquired by F5). Jakub and his team have worked several years on the IaaS & edge cloud platform based on OpenStack and Kubernetes projects, which they deployed and operated for global large service providers. Currently he works as Director of Engineering at F5 (Volterra), where they are working on Edge 2.0 revolution for Modern Application Delivery.

James Lee joined F5 in Feb 2019 and is currently responsible for supporting F5’s strategic customers and alliance partners in APCJ to design and implement the application delivery network. He serves as the technical subject expert for cybersecurity topics of F5 solutions.

Jason Feldt is an experienced product leader with a demonstrated history of successful creation and growth of a variety of innovative products. He co-founded the AI and data product group at F5 and is transitioning F5 into an AI and data company, first by creating a common data platform in 2020, and next by bringing new AI products to market. He joined NGINX to bring the NGINX Controller product to market. Before NGINX, he was leading software‑defined networking and WAN‑optimization load balancing products at Riverbed Technology.

Jay is Principal Product Marketing Manager for F5 Networks, responsible for Application Layer Security (Advanced WAF, etc.), Threat Intelligence, and API Security. Jay has also been responsible for product marketing of F5’s Trusted Application Access (F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager) and Application Infrastructure Security (F5 SSL Orchestrator) solutions. Prior to F5 Networks, Jay was Senior Product & Digital Marketing Manager for Menlo Security, Inc., responsible for go-to-market (GTM) strategy and execution, content strategy, and social networking presence. Before Menlo Security, Jay served as Senior Product Marketing Manager for F5 Networks, responsible for integrated marketing and GTM strategy and execution for application access, mobile security, service provider security, and hardware platforms. Jay has also served in product marketing and product management roles with Juniper Networks, Funk Software, and Microsoft. Jay has over 30 years’ experience in product marketing and product management in security and access control. Jay has spoken at numerous industry and corporate events, and is co-author of the book, “Network Access Control for Dummies”, published by John Wiley & Sons in 2009.

Jenn is a Manager of Product Marketing for F5’s NGINX product group. She leads the go-to-market strategy and execution for NGINX microservices solutions, including NGINX Ingress Controller and NGINX Service Mesh.

John is Sr Solutions Engineer who joined F5 through the Shape Security acquisition. John is a propeller head with over 15 years of experience in security, internet trends, and network infrastructure as well as co-author of RFC 7289. John has built and maintained several internal tools to catalog information across various dark web sites. These tools allow for a better understanding of malicious actors and tracking of changing trends on the dark web.

John Wagnon is a Solution Architect for F5 Network’s DevCentral technical community. In this role, he utilizes the full spectrum of F5 technology to analyze and solve complex problems for F5 users all over the world. He frequently writes articles and records videos that are featured on F5 and DevCentral. John is certified in several industry-relevant areas including CISSP, Certified Ethical Hacker, and Six Sigma (Process Improvement). Prior to his work at F5, John was a Communications Officer in the US Air Force where he specialized in ground and satellite networks. After leaving the Air Force, he worked for a technology consulting firm where he analyzed cyberattacks against US Department of Defense computer systems and networks. John holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and a Master of Science in Computer Networks.

Karthik heads Product Marketing for NGINX solutions at F5. He is an experienced product marketer with a proven track record as an advocate for cutting-edge IT solutions. Prior to F5, Karthik held similar positions at Fluke Networks, Cisco Systems and Nimble Storage, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

With over two decades of application delivery, security, and network experience, Ken is highly regarded as an empathetic thought leader passionate about helping customers—large and small—transform their application lifecycle management approach. In his current role, he uses his keen understanding of DevOps trends, customer challenges, and the evolving technology landscape to drive product vision for NGINX.

Kevin has over 20 years of experience in product management for application networking products and technologies in both large companies and in startups. As part of F5’s Automation and Orchestration (A&O) product management team, Kevin is Principal Product Manager responsible for F5 Automation Toolchain—a group of open sourced, supported, & interrelated tools designed to enable automated delivery of security and network application services on BIG-IP. The Automation Toolchain’s innovative declarative APIs are crucial for automation, orchestration, and deployment of BIG-IP application services in private/public & multi-cloud environments.

Kevin has over 20 years of experience in cybersecurity, with 10 of those years in the role of Technical Marketing Engineer (TME). He’s part of F5 Network’s Security Business unit with a focus on SSL Orchestrator. Prior to joining F5 Networks he had TME roles at Blue Coat, Gigamon and Fortinet.

Liam Crilly, Senior Director of Product Management at F5 Networks, wrote his first web app in 1993, and has enjoyed working with Internet software ever since. Liam has held various product management roles at organizations of all sizes. When not typing arbitrary commands into curl, he can be found behind the wheel (or more likely underneath) his race car. Liam is responsible for the NGINX data plane and API management products, and also specializes in web authentication technologies.

Lori Mac Vittie is a technologist and principal evangelist in F5 Networks’ Office of the CTO with an emphasis on emerging architectures and technologies including cloud and edge computing, network automation and orchestration, microservices, and containers. Mac Vittie has over twenty-five years of industry experience spanning application development, IT architecture, and network and systems’ operation. Prior to joining F5, Mac Vittie was an award-winning technology editor at Network Computing Magazine. She holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Nova Southeastern University and is an O’Reilly author. As a Wisconsin native she has very strong opinions about cheese and beer.

Luke has worked at F5 for the last 8 years; 3 years in field sales engineering and 5 years in product management within F5 Silverline's cloud security platform. In addition to the time at F5, Luke spent 11 years on the customer side, working at a corporation that had a large IT shop (~4000 folks). Overall, Luke brings 20 years of industry network and security experience to the discussion with a focus on application security, anti-bot, and anti-DDoS protection solutions.

Manish is a Sr. Product Marketing Manager in the Security group. Manish focuses on marketing access security, infrastructure security, public cloud security, and Zero Trust security. Manish has worked over 20 years in various product, solutions, and partner marketing roles at companies such as Dell EMC, Juniper, and Cisco. Prior to F5, Manish worked at Dell EMC helping to drive joint GTM NFV solutions with VMware and Red Hat. Manish holds an MBA from San Jose State University and a BBA from the University of Texas.

Marco is VP, Product & Services of Volterra within F5’s SPG. He has more than a 25 years’ experience in designing, building, and operating Internet & IP infrastructures and Web applications and services. Prior to Volterra, Marco led Solutions Engineering in Juniper’s Contrail BU. Prior to that he was a Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks supporting the world's largest Service Provider and Enterprise customers. He is an avid technologist and early adopter of disruptive technologies. Among his many interests, some of those include traveling (when it was a thing), hiking and spending time with his twin daughters. He's a Toronto native currently located in the San Francisco Bay Area. For additional details find him on LinkedIn or Twitter (@marcoprodrigues)

Marek is a Network Engineer with more than 10 years of experience in building enterprise and data center networks. He currently holds a position as a Cloud Network Architect in a DevOps team operating private cloud IAAS platform.

Mariana Agache is VP of Managed Services, responsible for helping Service Providers develop and sell Managed Services enabled by F5’s products and services and driving changes in F5’s product and go-to-market approach to enable success for both Managed Service Providers and F5. Mariana brings more than 20 years of experience in the telecommunications sector, having had global roles in portfolio management, strategic business planning, sales, network engineering and research and development, at Ciena and Nortel. She holds an MBA from the University of Ottawa, Canada, a master’s degree in computer science from Carleton University and she attended Executive Education at Harvard Business School. She lives in Ottawa, Canada with her family.

Matt Mabis is a Solutions Architect in Business Development for F5 Networks. Matt works with the VMware partnership developing new and innovative joint solutions for VMware technologies, while also working with the RedHat/Ansible Partnership providing automation solutions and trainings for customers. Prior to F5, Matt worked at VMware for almost 7 years architecting, deploying and supporting VMware Solutions.

Matt Quill has been with F5 for nearly 11 years as a Global Strategic Business Development Manager. As a long-term member of the F5 Business Development organization Matt has covered partnerships as varied as storage technologies, security, open-source technologies and virtualization. During his 23-year career in technology Matt has held various technical and sales roles at Permabit, Data Domain, Fannie Mae and AOL. Matt is an avid sports fan, proud ‘hockey dad’ and resides in Lowell Ma.

As senior director of product management, Mengmeng leads the product management and data science teams of Shape's analytics product group. Her team focused on bringing the power of data driven insights and the power of AI to enterprise customers and delivering the outcome of improved usability while balancing security. Mengmeng has a rich background in product analytics, product innovation and management consulting, with a particular focus and passion for the zero to one entrepreneurial journey.

Nic has spent the past 15 years in IT, with the first 5 in various roles between NetOps and AppDev. For the last 10 years however, he found his calling when it came to the InfoSec side of things and never looked back. He loves the thrill of a new zero-day exploit as well as working hard to ensure customer networks and applications are protected against the ever-evolving nature of cyber threats on a daily basis. Nic also works as an evangelical liaison between F5 Sales, Solutions Engineers, live customers, POC accounts, F5 product teams and more to provide a real-world perspective on how our solutions integrate and protect. He loves mentoring and does so at every possible avenue both within the organization and the community, working to inspire and help thrive the next generation of cyber security experts.

Nicolas is Director, Product Management at F5 Networks. He leads the Product Management team focusing on the Automation, Orchestration and Ecosystems strategy. This involves different technologies at F5: Automation toolchain, Container Ingress Services, Cloud Solutions (F5 CLI/SDK, Cloud Templates, Cloud Failover Extension) but also strategic partnership like Ansible and Terraform. Before working in the Product Management organization of F5, Nicolas was part of the Sales organization (Pre-sales/Solution Architect). He helped many customers with designing, implementing, and supporting next generation infrastructure.

Nicole Bahr is a Business Development Manager with NGINX, focused on Kubernetes and CI/CD alliance partnerships. Prior to F5, Nicole spent 15 years in operations, sales and marketing at the London Stock Exchange, Russell Investments, and Microsoft. 

Owen is a senior member of the NGINX Product Management team, covering open source and commercial NGINX products. He holds a particular responsibility for microservices and Kubernetes-centric solutions. He’s constantly amazed by the ingenuity of NGINX users, and still learns of new ways to use NGINX with every discussion.

Partha Sarathy is Global Fraud Architect at Shape Security (part of F5). Partha, as SME on Fraud and analytics products, leads fraud and customer experience solutions engagement working with Shape Clients across regions. Partha has over 15 years’ experience in Fraud, AI/ML, credit risk, marketing and business strategy having worked at Banks, led Fraud Risk P&L for JPMC credit card and was Lead Analytics Sciences at FICO. Across these roles he helped save $MMs from fraud loss while balancing customer experience. He also has significant experience in marketing and business strategy driving revenue, leveraging data, ML and insights for large enterprises. Partha also led several management consulting engagements during his tenure at Accenture & EY. Partha holds a Masters in Statistics and Computer Science from I.I.T Mumbai.

Patrick Campbell focused on building the joint opportunity between F5 and Cisco globally. Based in northern California, his responsibilities include worldwide strategy and execution resulting in growth of joint opportunity for F5 with selected Cisco business units. He joined F5 Networks 9 years ago. Prior to that, Patrick was with the turnaround team at Novell, leading business development for their infrastructure software solutions. Previously, he was an advisor the Board at XactLife, a Silicon Valley based start-up identifying funding and partnership opportunities. Additionally, Patrick held a variety of management positions with HP. Mr. Campbell has a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University; a master’s business degree from Pace University, and a Juris Doctorate in law from NESL.

Payal Shah is a Principal Product Manager in the Analytics Product Group within the Shape business unit at F5, where she is working on building secure and seamless digital experiences for businesses and users with the ‘Shape AI Fraud Engine’ (SAFE). Payal brings more than 14 years of experience across the fraud, risk, identity, and payments industries – including roles in both dynamic niche startups as well as large corporate organizations. Payal has led product, engineering, and other cross functional teams, and launched market leading products at Boku and TSYS prior to joining F5. Payal is an engineer by training and holds a Master of Science degree in EE from University of Cincinnati.

Prior to F5 Payal worked at Cisco Systems for 7 years as dev test engineer. She has hands-on knowledge in networking, virtualization, automation, and applications. As a Solutions Architect at F5 she has been working with the Cisco team to integrate F5 solutions into Cisco architectures and products. She has also been actively involved in providing her technical expertise to other automation and orchestration partners.

Phil has been a technology evangelist for 10+ years. He has a background in cloud security and has created and led cloud security programs and lines of business' in the past. Phil currently holds a board position for the Cloud Security Alliance Chapter in Chicago (President). He has a background in data center infrastructure (storage, network, and compute) architecture for public cloud, private cloud, and hosted managed infrastructure. His heritage is as a L2-3 network engineer; from campus/data center physical networks to SDN/NFV technologies.

Philip joined F5 Networks in 2018. Prior to that, he worked for AT&T and for a vendor to AT&T (Openet Telecom) for the prior 13 years. He has held technical and non-technical roles during those 13 years, including operations, support, professional service, technical sales, product management, architecture, and sales. Philip focused mostly on the Network side, including launching the first ever (world-wide) virtualized network functions (vPCRF at AT&T in 2011/2012), as well as work in IT (launch of first major micro-service at AT&T in billing/mediation).

Pranav joined F5 via the Volterra acquisition where he was the VP of Products. At Volterra Pranav led product management and product marketing for Volterra’s VoltMesh and VoltStack product lines. Previously, he ran the Connected Car Product line at Jasper, acquired by Cisco. Pranav’s connected car products, used by Tesla, GM and Ford, won the GSMA GLOMO award. At PayPal, Pranav drove several percentage point improvements in the checkout conversion rate for PayPal’s core checkout product. At Cisco, Pranav led acquisitions for the Collaboration group and led product management for the $1B core routing product portfolio. He has six patents, and his research is published in the IEEE Distributed Computing and Infocomm.

Rajiv Kapoor leads product marketing for Nginx Security and ADC offerings. Prior to joining Nginx/F5, Rajiv spent several years at Cisco systems and Microsoft taking various enterprise products to market. Rajiv holds an MBA from University College Dublin and completed his executive marketing training at Stanford University.

Raymond Pompon is currently the Director of F5 labs. With over 20 years of experience in Internet security, he has worked closely with Federal law enforcement in cyber‐crime investigations. He has been directly involved in several major intrusion cases including the FBI undercover Flyhook operation and the NW Hospital botnet prosecution. For six years, Raymond was president and founder of the Seattle chapter of InfraGard, the FBI public-private partnership. He is on the board of advisors for three information assurance certificate programs at the University of Washington. He is also on the board of the Delaware Chapters of InfraGard and ISC2. He is the author of IT Security Risk Control Management: An Audit Preparation Plan from Apress books.

Richard Lopez is Senior Strategic Architect for the Service Provider business at F5. With more than 25 years in Telecommunications, he has brought innovative products to market for both global companies as well as startups. Prior to F5, Richard was VP of Strategy at Cerra, an early-stage data science startup. At Ciena, he was VP, Global Solutions Architecture where he drove the market introduction of the industry-leading Blue Planet Orchestration Platform. Lopez has had direct GTM experience as a software developer, software team manager, and product manager and was at Tellabs, Mahi Networks, and Applied Digital Access. Richard has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Oklahoma State University and resides in Northern California.

Rick Salsa is a Sr. Product Manager for the F5 Cloud DNS service where he spends his time helping customers improve the performance and resiliency of their applications using DNS.

Roman is a Sr. Product Management Engineer working on BIG-IQ at F5 Networks for 3 years. BIG-IQ Centralized Management provides a central point of control for F5 physical and virtual devices. Roman specializes in automation and multi-cloud deployment. He spends his time building product roadmaps, improving user experience, and focusing on customer workflows. Before working at F5, he endorses the role of Network Support Engineer and then System Engineer at Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia working with major accounts such as T-Mobile and AT&T.

Director of Product Management for F5 Central Management. Joined F5 in 2014. Previously worked for Microsoft in the US and Ireland. 25 years’ experience in Telecoms and Software development.

Sander Vinberg is a Threat Research Evangelist for F5 Labs. As the lead researcher on the Application Protection Research Series, he specializes in the evolution of the threat landscape over the long term. He holds a master’s degree in Information Management from the University of Washington, as well as bachelor’s degrees in History and African and African American Studies from the University of Chicago.

Saurabh Bajaj, Vice President of Product at F5, leads the next-gen technology to make commerce safe and fast and blur traditional distinctions among cyber-attacks, fraud, and financial crime. Saurabh has extensive experience working on problems in cybersecurity, money laundering, online fraud, threat intelligence, IP geolocation, authentication, and payments. His mission is to shape digital trust that can unlock the true potential of how we do business and create a meaningful impact in this world. Prior to working at F5, Saurabh served as Chief Product Officer at Feedzai, where he led the product, engineering, and data science teams to bring the most advanced financial crime-fighting and explainable AI platform to protect +800M customers and trillions of dollars for the world’s largest fintechs, banks, processors, retailers, and tech companies. He has also worked for Neustar, a leading identity resolution company, where he served as Head of Fraud and Risk Products. Saurabh holds a Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Mumbai and an MBA from the University of California, San Diego.

Scott Laster is a business development manager who manages the relationships with key Security product vendors. I use my engineering and business background to drive the creation and delivery of solutions with strategic ISV and CSV partners for our global customers. These joint solutions require the active participation of F5’s and our partner’s Product Management, engineering, support and field organizations and my job is to make sure all of this comes together.

Shuman Ghosemajumder is the General Manager, AI & Data at F5. Prior to F5’s acquisition of Shape Security in January 2020, Shuman was the CTO at Shape, which he joined as a member of the executive team in 2012. Shuman previously led global product for click fraud protection at Google, where his teams built AI technology to protect and enable their advertising businesses (then $23B in pay-per-click annual revenue). He joined Google in 2003 as one of the early product managers for AdSense, one of the largest-scale applications of machine learning, which he helped grow into a $2B ARR business. He was also part of the team that launched Gmail.

Smriti Jaggi, Product Manager, Analytics Product Group at Shape Security, develops new data-driven products to enhance security and reduce friction for end users. She was a part of the Threat Intelligence team as well at Shape Security where she worked to identify different attack vectors in various industries such as finance, retail, telecom etc. Smriti is a frequent speaker on fraud schemes in different industry verticals and how security does not need to mean friction for end users.

Srikanth T R is a Solution Architecture in the F5 Business Development organization.

He works with F5 security partners like Microsoft, Okta, Cisco, and others to develop joint solutions and take these solutions to market to benefit our mutual customers for solving modern security challenges. Follow him on F5 DevCentral to learn about various security use cases and partner solutions.

Steve came up through the software development ranks having worked with small and large companies building enterprise systems. While mostly leveraging his Java skills, he has branched out into Groovy, PHP, Ruby and other languages as needed. He has gone from Consulting to full-time work over the years and kept his skills sharp by switching it up as he goes.

Over the last decade, Steve has fallen in love with the Sales engineering role as it allows him to keep his skills up to date while at the same time working with a huge variety of customers along the way. He really enjoys in depth conversations, finding new ways to do things and helping others succeed with technologies he believes in.

Lately he has found a real passion in building and leading teams, Sales Engineering teams to be exact. Having had a number of excellent mentors over the years, Steve is now taking what he has learned at Springsource/Pivotal and Elastic and building a team of Sales Engineers for Grafana Labs.

Sumit Agarwal is Vice President, Product Management & Co-Founder of Shape Security. Prior to F5’s acquisition of Shape in January 2020, Sumit was COO of Shape, which created unique technology to protect websites and mobile applications from sophisticated, automated cyberattacks. Sumit co-founded Shape, which was backed by leading investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Venrock, and Google Ventures, in October 2011. Previously, he was appointed Senior Advisor for Cyber Innovation at the Department of Defense by President Barack Obama. From Jan 2010–June 2011 he served, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, ​where he was in charge of creating the original policies on how the Pentagon used the public Internet​. In these positions, he was one of the highest-ranking Indian Americans to serve in the United States armed forces. From 2003 to 2010, Sumit worked at Google, where he led North American Product Management for Mobile. Sumit holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from MIT and a Master of Military Operational Art and Science from Air University. 

As Product Marketing Manager for F5’s BIG-IP Virtual Edition, Tom’s expertise centers around public-, private-, and multi-cloud adoption; using key insights into cloud trends, customer challenges and knowledge of BIG-IP VE to articulate the critical value F5 can deliver to customers within each of those environments.

Ulises Alonso-Camaró has been a Solutions Architect on the Business Development team for almost 6 years and he has been working in the VMware partnership for 3 years. Ulises is the author of the F5 BIG-IP NSX-T deployment guide. Previously he has also worked in F5 as ENE and as Consultant.

Wesley Hales is a technologist and author who has served in the cybersecurity and open-source communities for the past two decades. Wesley enjoys creating software that is capable of mitigating attacks launched against public facing IT infrastructure. He has assisted the world’s top cyber security professionals in their usage of point solutions (e.g., WAF, Bot, Fraud, etc.) from the perspective of API security, server-side exploits, and client-side vulnerabilities.

Yuxi is currently product manager of Shape Recognize at F5, a next-gen identity product that delivers the outcome of improved usability while balancing fraud and security for enterprises and their end-users. Passionate in bringing the power of data-driven insights and AI to market, previously Yuxi worked at Go Capital & EOC investing in life science start-ups based in Europe and Israel, and she also participated in transformation of digital marketing strategy at Wayfair.

Zach Westall is a product marketer with years of experience turning features, functionality, and speeds and feeds into captivating B2B stories that clarify solutions, communicate their value, and engage the target audience—motivating them to act. Zach has marketed products across several technology disciplines, from hardware-based infrastructure solutions to SaaS offerings on cloud marketplaces. At F5, Zach is tasked with product marketing for BIG-IP Cloud Edition, BIG-IQ, and the newest addition to the F5 portfolio: NGINX.