WIoTCoE Panel Discussion
The Women in IoT Center of Excellence is setting a blazing trail of innovation across the IoT landscape. Hear from these leaders in their respective fields, coming together to move the needle.
The WIoTCoE aims to collectively provide women in the IoT arena with strategy development and how to implement best practices which promote equality, fairness and meaningful outcomes. The goal of the Women in IoT CoE is to engage and enable organizations and leaders to create and sustain an inclusive culture to advance the development of IoT solutions globally. The WIoTCoE facilitate discussions, knowledge sharing, learning, best practices and connections that reinforce inclusive and diverse thinking targeting Culture, Business Acumen, Alliances, Leading by Example and Future IoT talent.
Speakers:
Mitra M. Best is an entrepreneur, technologist, and innovation leader. As PwC’s Lead Principal for Strategic Innovation and Technology, Mitra is a future-maker, responsible for creating new technology platforms and business models that solve critical challenges faced by organizations, the ecosystem of stakeholders, and the workforce. She has successfully led large-scale initiatives in both private and public sectors focused on new growth and efficiency models through innovative applications of technology. Mitra’s commitment to fueling innovation inspires her leadership of various initiatives both inside and outside PwC, particularly in promoting gender equity in STEM professions. At PwC, she co-leads the Women in Technology program , building an inclusive culture that resonates with technologists and provides equitable opportunities for growth. Additionally, Mitra is a frequent speaker at corporate conferences, leads C-suite workshops for Fortune 500 clients, mentors start-ups and entrepreneurs across industries, and guest lectures at top universities. Mitra holds Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science & Linguistics from UCLA, Graduate Management Certificate in Innovation & Strategy from MIT Sloan, and an Innovation Masters Certificate from Stanford University. She is a lifelong learner who values continued education as an imperative for growth and development.
Jenn Gamble – As the Data Science Practice Lead at Very, Jenn leads machine learning and AI initiatives on client projects, which includes problem formulation, scoping, and defining the analytical approach for each project. Before joining Very, Jenn was Director of Data Science at Noodle.ai, where she led multiple client engagements in the transportation and manufacturing industries, architecting and leading implementation of the data-analytical pipelines of AI applications used for high-value operational decisions. Jenn holds a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University, an M.S. in Statistics from the University of Alberta, and a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Alberta.
Vijji Suryadevara, is an accomplished entrepreneur and executive, passionate about using technology to make a difference. Vijji brings her technical and management skills to the role of CIO & Head of Engineering to build a scalable technology organization and innovation culture to enable rapid growth of Phizzle. Vijji was the Founder, CEO & CTO of CareerWaze a Future of Work startup. CareerWaze is an AI driven Career and Learning advisor helping users acquire in-demand skills. Vijji was also the Founder & CEO of BPA Technologies a VC funded Technology Services startup focused on Content Management Solutions for Fortune 500 Companies. BPA was acquired by a Moody’s group company ICRA in 2012. Prior to this she held technology leadership positions and architected and built enterprise solutions in Content Management and Telecommunications domains. Vijji has a Bachelor’s in Computer science, Mathematics & Physics and a Master of Computer Applications from NIT Warangal.
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 2020 Women Presidents’ Organization’s 50 Fastest-Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies. Kelly has also achieved numerous personal awards, including CRN’s 2020 Women of the Channel and Power 40 Solution Providers.
Kelly’s leadership has also led to a myriad of accolades, including the HP PartnerOne Solution Provider of the Year Award for Cloud, nine consecutive Boeing Performance Excellence Awards, two consecutive CRN IoT Innovators awards, and the 2019 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.
Amanda Healy is an award-winning marketing leader, social media expert, and national speaker. As Head of Brand Marketing 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.
Michele Null is an evangelist for artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, promoting the importance of a robust analytics lifecycle to drive valuable outcomes in IoT initiatives across industries. She and her team play an important role in growing SAS relevance and revenue related to IoT. 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, for specific use cases. Michele enjoys being an active member of global IoT consortiums including: the IoT Community, serving on the Board of Directors and as the Vice-Chair of the Women in IoT Center of Excellence; the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), serving in the Marketing and Ecosystem Workings Groups; and RIoT, as the SAS 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 SAS in 2014, Michele held various roles during her 10-year tenure at IBM including product management, product marketing and program management.
Sandy Carter is the AWS Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs. In her new role, she will be responsible for driving next-generation partnering. Her responsibilities include evolving partner models to intensify partner innovation, AWS cloud adoption and creation of mission critical cloud solutions with partners across public sector. Her impact will be growing the partner ecosystem as a major driver for public sector and contributing significantly to the success of Public Sector customers. Prior to this role, Sandy built an enterprise workload team as the Vice President of Windows and Enterprise Workloads at Amazon Web Services (AWS) focused on helping companies innovate using their current technology and assets with migration and modernization through containers and serverless. She led the team to overall growth with AWS now hosting nearly two times as many Windows Server instances in the cloud as Microsoft, per IDC. She led her engineering team to optimize SQL Server on AWS which exhibited 2X+ better price/ performance than Azure per ZK Research. For her leadership on the VMware Cloud on AWS business, she led the team to deliver results of 4x the number of customers year over year, with those customers having deployed 9x the number of VMs now vs 1 year ago. Finally, she grew the number of competency partners by 3x and the number of ISV validated solutions by 4x in the last year. She is the author of Extreme Innovation: Three Superpowers for Purpose and Profit, built on her research with Carnegie Mellon. Sandy was named Lifetime Achievement Winner, ‘Excellence in Cloud Achievement’ for 2019, AI Innovator of the Year Nominee in 2019, Top 10 AI Influencers for 2019, Top 10 Cloud Computing Influencer, Top 39 Engineers by Business Insider 2018, Top 50 AI influencer by Onalytica 2018, Top 10 Future of Work influencer in 2018, and Top 10 Women in Technology by CNN. Sandy is the Chairman of the Board of Girls in Tech, and an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley. Last year, Girls in Tech had over 125K women participate in their “Hacking for Humanity” initiative, and trained over 90K women globally on coding through boot camps, and workshops. She was honored two times with the AIT United Nations Member of the Year award for helping developing countries with technology. She is an Advisor to startups in AI, IoT, and AR/VR.