Tony Gillespie recently retired GS15 Assistant Chief of Staff G6 for Marine Corps Installations East. He has nearly 35 years of experience in the Marine Corps active duty and Civil Service. Gillespie was responsible for the Voice, Video, Data and Security for all USMC bases on the East Coast south of Quantico, VA., and the primary architect and Pilot for C2C for the Department of Defense.

Shmel Graham is a native of Los Angeles and a licensed California attorney with extensive experience driving complex infrastructure investments and strategic largescale projects in fast-paced, matrixed environments. Currently, Shmel works in the Office of Mayor Eric Garcetti's Operations Innovation team where she leads the citywide effort to drive long-term sustainable operational reform in real estate asset management. Prior to the Operations Innovation, Shmel served in the Mayor's Office of Public Safety implementing regional technology infrastructure projects that supports police and fire operations.
Shmel is an alumna of the University of Michigan, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Political Science. She earned her Juris Doctorate from Indiana University School of Law – Indianapolis, and studied abroad at Renmin University of China School of Law in Beijing, China. Ms. Graham also completed the Los Angeles AfricanAmerican Women’s Public Policy Institute (LAAAWPPI); and the Real Estate Associate Program (REAP) professional development programs.

Scott Grykowski is the Sales Consulting Director responsible for Security solutions in the Oracle Public Sector organization. The Security Sales Consulting team is focused on providing the deepest Oracle Security specialists to assist customers in leveraging Oracle technology to manage and secure the end-to-end lifecycle of user identities and data across all enterprise resources.
Scott has worked in the information security field for over twenty-five years as a manager, developer, systems engineer, solution architect, and director including tenures with the US Department of Defense, TRW, IBM, Vasco Data Security, RSA Security, and currently with Oracle. He is a Certified Information System Security Professional (CISSP) from (ISC)² and received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University.

David designs and manages development of shared technology services for the departments of the California Natural Resources Agency. Specializing in project management, business case-driven system design, and information architecture, he has served a large variety of government organizations, including small conservancies, large departments, constitutional offices, and the State Assembly. In his prior roles as Director of CERES, and as the Geospatial Information Officer for the Natural Resources Agency, David was privileged to lead one of California’s most award winning GIS development teams.

Peter Kelly is a fearless servant leader for the newly formed Child Welfare Digital Services. He is a long-time agilist, hacker and supporter of the open-source community; believing strongly that public investments should create public goods. Peter has welcomed the opportunity to lead cultural, technology and procurement changes within the State of California. He is building public sector capacity to deliver new technology to our social workers, who support the most vulnerable population of children in California.

Vice President, State & Local Government, Acquia

Joe Kroger has been in technology for over 31 years and the last 15 solely focusing on the State and Local Government market. He has worked with many State Governments on statewide projects as well as with city, county and K-12 school districts. He has helped these organizations use technology to improve processes, increase efficiencies and help governments reduce operational cost.
He has been a presenter at the Government Finance Officers Association national conference, California CIO Academy and also has presented with Public CIO Magazine on how government can improve paper-based processes.
He has worked on a task force for the Council of Great City Schools to identify and track key performance indicators for large school districts across the country and has received recognition from Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland for his work on process improvements within their organization.
He lives in Arlington VA and enjoys spending time boating with his family in the Chesapeake Bay area.

Scott MacDonald, as the interim California State Information Security Officer, is responsible for all aspects of information risk and security, security and privacy policy, and for peer outreach activities to drive improvement across the State of California in the understanding of cyber risks and best practices to manage and mitigate those risks. Previously, he was the Agency Information Security Officer (AISO) at California Department of Corrections for over 6 years. In that role, Mr. MacDonald was responsible for managing the risk, controls, privacy, security, and other related compliance activities for all of CDCR’s information assets, products and services. In addition, Mr. MacDonald has over 20 years of experience in various IT domains. Mr. MacDonald holds a bachelor’s degree in Information Systems, degrees in electronic communications, and holds the CISSP designation.

Craig has supported the CenturyLink Government & Education Solutions team in California for over 20 years. In that time, he has worked with many of our City, County, State, School District, Community College, California State University and University of California customers developing and implementing Data, Voice, Security, Cloud and Collocation solutions that fit into their individual needs. As CenturyLink grows our current network based services platform and adds more managed IT services like SD-WAN, Craig is focused on presenting these emerging platforms to the California Government & Education marketplace.

Kevin Mergruen is the vice president of vertical solutions at Information Builders. With over 30 years of software industry experience, Mr. Mergruen has held management positions in product development, sales, and marketing. He is currently responsible for the following industry sectors: state and local government, education, and healthcare across North America. The solutions his team drives address the vertical sector needs for enterprise system integration and operational business intelligence, enhancing overall efficiency, modernization of legacy systems, and improved quality of care. Mr. Mergruen is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and executive briefings.
Prior to his current position, Mr. Mergruen was vice president of the company’s ERP Solution Division. His previous experience includes SAP America where he was the North American sales director of SAP’s Business Information Warehouse, as well as positions at Informix, Cognos, and Britton Lee.
Mr. Mergruen graduated from Hofstra University with a dual degree in finance and computer science.

Joel Natividad is co-founder of Ontodia - a govtech startup born out of Open Data, recently acquired by OpenGov. Even before winning NYCBigApps for the second time, Joel and his long-time friend and collaborator, Sami Baig, quit their jobs, convinced that Open Data - data about us, for us, and paid by us, has the Biggest Impact. Not only will it improve and enable Gov 2.0 and improve Society, it will enable new business and business models that will maximize returns to society profitably. Joel is a civic hacker and entrepreneur. He is an active open source contributor to multiple open source projects including CKAN and Semantic Mediawiki. Joel is a charter member of the Open Semantic Data Association Steering Committee, and infrequent speaker at several Semantic, Open Data, and Civic Tech gatherings. Before Ontodia, Joel headed the Knowledge Engineering Practice of a small consultancy - TCG, creating knowledge systems for Fortune 100 companies in lifesciences and finance.

Heath Nieddu brings more than 14 years of experience in research and analysis to his current role as a senior analyst for solutions research and development at Optiv Security. As a senior research analyst for solutions research and development at Optiv, Nieddu issues guidance and develops models that help shape the way information security programs are understood and built.
Nieddu spends his days working with the solutions research team to identify emerging solution categories, brief with providers and identify key subject matter experts. Nieddu is a subject matter expert on insider threats and identity and access management (IAM). He leverages his program development skills with a variety of other experiences in finance, economics and the intelligence community.
He leverages his program development skills with a variety of other experiences in finance, economics and the intelligence community.
Prior to Optiv, Heath held a position at Providence Health as a senior information security analyst. While there he provided analysis to the chief information security officer, chief risk officer and board committees. Heath also served the intelligence community for eight years as an Arabic linguist and all-source economic analyst.
Nieddu earned a Bachelor of Science in finance from the University of Central Florida in 2000 and a Master of International Management from Portland State University in 2013. He is a contributor to security industry blogs, speaks at major conferences and holds a CISSP certification. Nieddu wrote for the Presidential Daily Brief on multiple occasions and contributed to the 2008 Economic Report of the President.

Satish Ramachandran is the Global Head of Design and User Interfaces at Nutanix. Nutanix applies design strategically to redefine Enterprise computing. In his current role, Satish bridges the twin worlds of design and engineering. Prior to Nutanix, Satish held a variety of Management and Technical leadership roles over the past 2 decades at computing infrastructure companies such as DataDomain, Andiamo (Cisco) and Tandem. Satish holds an M.S. in Computer Science.

David Rizzo is the Vice President of Product Development where he’s responsible for leading the development of Compuware products. He plays a key role in the implementation and execution of the agile process at Compuware. He has more than 20 years of IT experience with roles in development, architecture and strategic planning.

Jesse Romine has been working in the Cloud technology industry for over a decade with specific focus on Open Data in Government for the last three years. Jesse is certified by the Open Data Institute for Open Data in Practice and is an ODI Learning Associate. Jesse has worked with dozens of large Cities, Counties, and States across the US to implement Open Data policies and programs as well as governments in Mexico, Latin America, South America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. As a Director at Socrata, Jesse is currently responsible for strategic relationships within the States of California, Montana, and Texas. Prior to Socrata, Jesse was employed at Oracle Corporation, RightNow Technologies, Microsoft Business Solutions, and Great Plains Software. Jesse attended Concordia College in Moorhead, MN where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree majoring in Economics with minors in Business and Religion.

Scott has consulted with organizations throughout the West on developing cybersecurity strategies and systems as well as take advantage of the economic benefits of the public cloud. His career started with Symantec and joined Unisys in late 2015 to help global companies extend their datacenter workloads into the cloud securely. When he is not learning about the latest technology and cyber threats, he can be found exploring the California coastline or giant sequoias with his wife and two sons.

Endré Jarraux Walls is a Managing Partner for Ricoh USA’s advisory, consulting & workflow services organization with a focus on executive advisory services and advanced technology solutions. Ricoh’s advisory, consulting & workflow services organization provides advanced solutions to 850 of the global 1000 in areas of business process agility, enterprise mobility, governance, risk, compliance, and organizational change management.
Walls has more than 17 years of progressive experience providing leadership to information technology divisions for fortune 500 corporations, and experience in executive consulting for regulatory compliance management, enterprise mobility, information security, complex network architectures, disaster recovery & prevention, cost containment, and large scale enterprise project management. He also has experience in mobile applications development, cloud operations and program development, and enterprise infrastructure.
Prior to joining Ricoh, Walls was a former CIO and CTO and winner of the CIO award of excellence in 2013. He is well-known in the IT industry as a specialist in turnaround execution, and has served in a leadership role within several industries, including healthcare and human services, telecommunications, hospitality, and hosted infrastructure providers.
Walls studied at Strayer University for Marketing and received a Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems from Capella University. He is currently pursuing a Masters of Business Administration degree.