F5 Engage 2021

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 as the Senior Vice President and General Manager of NGINX and has recently become Executive Vice President of NGINX, AI and Data.

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.

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.

Shuman earned his BSc in Computer Science from Western University in Canada, where he was a President's Scholar, and his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is co-author of CGI Programming Unleashed (Macmillan Publishing) and a contributing author to Crimeware (Symantec Publishing). He has also written for Harvard Business Review, Recode, VentureBeat, and other publications, and is a regular guest lecturer at Stanford University.

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.

Sara Boddy is the Senior Director of F5’s threat intelligence reporting division: F5 Labs. Prior to F5, Sara was the VP of Information Security and Business Intelligence at Demand Media after spending many years as information security consultant at Network Computing Architects and Conjungi Networks. With over 20 years’ experience in the Information Security field, Sara specialises in strategic threat analysis, incident response, application security, and information security awareness training. She is a frequent keynote speaker, and author of F5 Labs threat intelligence reports.

F5 Labs author page: https://f5.com/labs/about/authors/sara-boddy
Linked In: Sara Boddy
Twitter: @sarab0ddy

 

Part of the F5 DevCentral Team, Peter is a technical writer, evangelist, speaker, video host, storyteller and overall clever guy for F5. Bringing the slightly theatrical and fairly technical together, he enjoys digging into how technology impacts society and people. On top of it, he has also been in such plays as The Glass Menagerie, All’s Well That Ends Well, Cinderella and others. Happy to celebrate nearly 17 years with F5!

Peter is F5’s Global Senior Director, Public Cloud Solution Architects and is responsible for the technical relationships with F5’s cloud provider partners and their associated ecosystems. His team works with these partners to increase adoption of F5 cloud services through technical integration, field enablement and driving joint strategic initiatives.

Prior to F5, Peter spent 12 years at Microsoft where he led a range of technical sales teams focused on building partner ecosystems across IoT, Embedded, large multi-national OEM partners and local PC system builders. He has worked at software start-ups, consulting firms as well as at mid- to large-sized companies. He has significant experience leading diverse, globally dispersed teams in the manufacturing, PC and telecommunications industries across functions ranging from product design, program management and engineering to product marketing.

Before joining Shape, Woods served as Assistant Chief Special Agent of Special Investigations at the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, where he investigated computer crimes and complex fraud. Prior to that, he spent 20 years with local, state, and federal law enforcement and intelligence organisations, including the FBI as a special agent, where he investigated cyber terrorism; and the CIA as a technical operations officer, where he specialised in cyber operations.

Lori Mac Vittie is a technologist and principal evangelist in the F5 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 extensive development and technical architecture experience in both high-tech and enterprise organisations, in addition to network and systems administration expertise. Prior to joining F5, Mac Vittie was an award-winning technology editor at Network Computing Magazine. She holds an M.S. in Computer Science and is an O’Reilly author.

Mark Dittmer has over 20 years of experience in the Information Technology industry in both Product Management and Solution Architecture. Mark has racked up millions of miles flying across the country consulting clients on deploying Data Center technology. His greatest achievement was becoming a trusted advisor, deploying thousands of blade servers and migrating large hospitals. Today Mark is a product owner driving key partnerships around Cloud, programmability, automation, orchestration & Application Delivery Controller (ADC) Infrastructure for efficient deployment of application services and infrastructure life cycle management. Mark also leads the product management initiative for container integration with F5 BIG-IP.

Shawn Wormke leads Aspen Mesh, an F5 incubation project, that is focused on delivering a next generation service mesh for container and microservice architectures. Shawn is an entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience in application networking and security. He is passionate about making products that enable DevOps workflows and make teams efficient and successful in their cloud and container journey. Joining F5 through the acquisition of LineRate Systems in 2013, Shawn led the Ecosystems Organisation where he became an advocate for open source. Under his leadership, F5 delivered supported open source solutions for OpenStack, Kubernetes, Mesos, Red Hat OpenShift and Cloud Foundry. He also serves on the Board of Directors for the Application Communication and Security Initiative foundation.

Sean Maritz is a Technical Solutions Architect for the NGINX business unit of F5 Networks based in Sydney, Australia. Over the last 18 years he has supported the architecture and technical delivery of communication solutions for enterprise and government organisations across the Asia Pacific region. His extensive experience in unified communications, video streaming and content distribution across complex infrastructure and network designs compliments the NGINX suite of solutions. Sean is driven by his passion to share knowledge and experience of NGINX’s capabilities and vision. Prior to NGINX, Sean worked for tech companies like Viocorp, InterCall, and Genesys Conferencing, to name a few.

Hard at work creating awesome products for the #devops, #netops and #secops worlds. Co-creator of the #supernetops program; enabling #netops with #automation, #code and #devops skills and methodology.

Randy leads market development for Aspen Mesh. He's drawn to the intersection of people and technology and loves the thrill of building something from scratch. In the course of his career, he's worked in product and marketing at a range of companies — big and small — from Twitter and Accenture to LambdaNet and Gnip. When he's not talking to companies about the security and observability of their microservices, you'll find him skiing or playing soccer with his kids.

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’s Automation Toolchain -- a group of open sourced, supported, & inter-related 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 and multi-cloud environments.

Kevin Jones is a Global Solution Architect at F5 where he specialises in application delivery, routing, monitoring, and load balancing. Kevin has passion for technology and art. He previously worked as a Site Reliability Engineer and Production Manager for Yellowpages.com and most recently as a Technical Solutions Architect and Product Specialist for NGINX.

Shain Singh is the lead Security Solutions Architect for the F5 Asia Pacific Japan and China region, focusing on Cloud, SDN/NFV, Security and Telco/Service provider solutions. Shain has over 20 years’ experience in the design, implementation and administration of multi-vendor, multi-protocol systems and networks.

Prior to joining F5, Shain held network, security and engineering roles in the Telco, Service Provider, Consulting and Education sectors.

Shain holds a Masters in Applied Science (Information Security - Mathematics and Cryptography) and a B. Eng (Aerospace), both from RMIT University; as well as numerous certifications in networks, open source and DevOps technologies.

Scott is a Solutions Architect at NGINX and F5, helping customers across Australia and New Zealand be successful in their software deployments. Scott focuses on emerging technology in DevOps, modern apps and automation, with particular interest and vast experience in APIs, service mesh, continuous deployment and microservices.

Prior to joining F5, Scott was a solution architect at Red Hat. Scott has a long history of experience in Information Technology. He is passionate about open source technology and open data systems. He is currently the co-host and convenor of several community-based technology meetups, where he shares knowledge and draws inspiration from the people he meets.