WIoTCoE Panel
Session Abstract:
This panel will focus on the Education pillar of the Women in IoT Center of Excellence. Jennifer Halstead, will moderate a panel featuring Michele Null, Redhat, Marcia Walker, SAS, Kelly Ireland, CBT, and Amanda Healy, Cisco.
Speakers:
Michele Null is an evangelist for IoT, Edge, artificial intelligence and open hybrid cloud. She works closely with customers and partners to understand market requirements and then works in conjunction with product management and R&D to ensure technology and solutions meet key market needs and will help drive business value. She collaborates with partners to support strategic joint go-to-market initiatives in target verticals. Michele enjoys being an active member of global IoT consortiums including the IoT Community, serving on the Board of Directors and also as the Co-Chair of the Women in IoT Center of Excellence. She is an active member of RIoT, serving as a partnership leader and member of the Founders’ Roundtable. After graduating from the University of Virginia, Michele began her journey in the technology field, which has spanned nearly two decades. Prior to joining Red Hat earlier this year, Michele spent 7 years at SAS in various roles involving IoT go-to-market strategy. She became one of the initial team members of the IoT Division, which she helped charter. She led product and partner marketing within the IoT Division. Michele also held various roles during her 10-year tenure at IBM, including product management, product marketing and program management.
Amanda Healy is an award-winning marketing leader, social media expert, and national speaker. As, Head of IoT Global Demand Generation, Awareness, Marketing Operations for Cisco’s Internet of Things (IoT) group, she drives thought leadership, brand awareness, and advocacy for IoT at Cisco. Amanda has trained world-class teams ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies on how to leverage social media, spoken at industry-leading conferences including the Massachusetts Conference for Women, Women in Technology International Summit, Microsoft Envision, Social Tools Summit, Watermark’s Lead On Conference for Women, and more, and regularly conducts workshops for small, medium, and large companies, trade shows, and groups. Get in touch with Amanda on Twitter at @amanda_healy, or send her an email at Amanda.Healy37@gmail.com to bring her in to speak at your organization or event.
Kelly Ireland founded CBT in 2001 as a value-added reseller (VAR) focused on unparalleled client service. However, having a keen eye for technology trends and always taking the time and opportunity to listen to industry experts, she assessed the impending changes in the industry early on. She built up CBT’s engineering expertise, data science practice and partnerships to revolutionize the company’s offerings and make the difficult transition from VAR to domain expert integrator. Since that time, the Company has flourished. CBT is now in rarefied air, bridging the gap between operational technologies (OT) and information technologies (IT) with groundbreaking projects like the Refinery of the Future (RotF) at Texmark Chemicals. Successful initiatives like RotF in Industrial IoT and High Performance Computing have positioned CBT as a key partner to industry-leading companies such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, PTC, Intel, National Instruments, Antea, RealWear, SparkCognition and more. This has spurred explosive growth for CBT, increasing its revenue by 55% in the last two years. Kelly’s leadership has also led to a myriad of accolades, including the 2019 Triple Crown Award from CRN, nine consecutive Boeing Performance Excellence Awards, three consecutive CRN IoT Innovators awards, and the 2019 & 2020 Women Presidents’ Organization’s 50 Fastest-Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies. Kelly has also achieved numerous personal awards, including CRN’s 2018 & 2019 Women of the Channel and Power 30 Solution Providers and 2020 Women of the Channel and Power 40 Solution Providers.
Marcia Walker is a principal consultant at SAS, where she helps clients apply data management and analytics technologies to make better decisions, faster. Her career has revolved around the industrial sector including energy, manufacturing, and mining. Marcia’s experience includes working as a senior director at SAP; managing international engagements with the Deloitte Consulting manufacturing practice; service in the industry business of Schneider Electric; and a decade in roles of increasing responsibility at Rockwell Automation. She is on the International Board of Directors for the Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association (MESA) as well as the Executive Committee. Because of her engaging, story-telling style that simplifies advanced technical concepts for audiences of all skill levels, she is in high demand as a speaker on behalf of both MESA and SAS. Marcia holds seven issued and multiple pending patents related to analytics in the industrial space, was named one of the most influential women in IoT by the IoT Institute, and has been widely published on manufacturing and advanced analytics topics. She was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Heidelberg; in addition to her academic studies, she has hundreds of hours of training in martial arts.
Jennifer Halstead is the chief financial officer at Link Labs, a leading provider of an end-to-end IoT platform for tagging, locating and monitoring equipment, supplies and assets anywhere at any time. An expert in start-up and early-stage financing, Jennifer plays a vital role in projecting, forecasting, budgeting and reporting the capital required to support Link Labs’ go to market strategy. With more than 20 years of experience in finance and legal compliance, she also plays an essential role in the company’s marketing, human resources and operations management. Prior to joining Link Labs, Jennifer spent seven years as the director of finance with Cloudistics, an on-premises cloud computing company, delivering a complete public cloud experience with composable on-premises infrastructures to medium and large enterprises. During her time with Cloudistics, she supported the company through its integration of core technology into Lenovo’s ThinkAgile CP and acquisition by Fungible. Preceding Cloudistics, Jennifer was the controller for AppAssure Software, a software provider of backup, replication and recovery solutions for virtual, physical and cloud infrastructures, where she led the company’s sale to Dell Technologies. During her tenure at AppAssure, she played a key role in driving the company’s 33 consecutive quarters of revenue growth. After the acquisition by Dell Technologies, Jennifer was the controller for Dell Software’s data protection division, managing worldwide finance functions for all data protection products. For 15 years, Jennifer also ran her own public accounting firm, Halstead & Halstead PC, which specialized in outsourced CFO services to software companies and non-profit organizations. Jennifer holds a master’s degree in accounting and business management. She is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), passing the CPA exam in the top 1% in Virginia. Jennifer is a musician who performs regularly with her spouse and seven children, including performances at The White House.