Ronald Barrett is currently the Director of Information Technology for the City of Marietta and the Board of Lights and Water. He has worked in this capacity for 5 years and has 16 years of experience in Information Technology and Geographic Information Systems. His career with the city started in 2003 as a Business Analyst and was promoted to Systems Manager in 2006 before becoming the Director in 2010. The City of Marietta Information Technology Department is responsible for enterprise computing, networking, telecommunications including radio’s, geographic information services, security, application development and technical support. Ronald Barrett holds a bachelor’s degree from Kennesaw State University and a Master’s degree from Georgia State University.

Kerry L. Bass is a Public Sector Subject Matter Expert with Unisys Enterprise Services United States and Canada, Public Sector Practice. Mr. Bass’ focus is in the Health and Human Services (HHS) industry. His responsibilities include management of some of Unisys’ HHS technology solutions, including helping with their introduction and implementation leadership to HHS enterprises and agencies across the nation. He also provides solution portfolio assistance to the Practice across the HHS and the Public Safety and Justice industries. Mr. Bass’ professional expertise and focus is on guiding enterprise level transformation with an emphasis on leveraging information technology. Prior to joining Unisys, he was a Director of Project Management with First Data Government Solutions, where he was responsible for leading and supporting HHS projects, as well as leading Independent Validation and Verification in several states. Mr. Bass’ extensive leadership experience also includes serving as CEO and Executive Director of TechCorps Georgia, (a non-profit working with K12 education and industry to close the Digital Divide in Georgia); the Deputy Director of the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services and Director of the Office of Change Management; Division Director with the Georgia Technology Authority (responsible for executive branch agency IT strategic planning, the state Project Management Office and account management for Shared services) and Global leader and North American Manager of Service Quality, Customer Loyalty and Skills vitality for the Information Technology Services Division of IBM Global Services. Mr. Bass earned an MBA from Emory University Goizueta School of Business and is an ASQ Certified Manager of Quality and Operational Excellence and a PMI Certified Project Management Professional.

Jeff Brown is a Director of Consulting Services with Navigator Management Partners and leads up Navigator’s Business Intelligence and Analytics Capability Group. He has over 15 years of consulting experience in both functional and technical capacities implementing complex Business Intelligence, COTS, and custom software solutions. Recently, Jeff has consulted at the State of Ohio successfully delivering over 20 BI projects. Prior to Navigator, Jeff worked at Accenture and his career experience ranges from roles such as functional lead, solution architect, IT strategist, project manager, solution designer, integration lead, and systems administrator. Jeff earned his undergraduate degree from The Ohio State University as well receiving his MBA from Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business. He holds certifications in project management (PMP), change management (Prosci), in addition to being a Certified Business Intelligence Professional (CBIP) at the mastery level. Jeff resides in Columbus, Ohio with his wife, a Georgia native, twin daughters, and son.

Over the last 25 years Rob has the honor of building businesses – first in the private sector and for the last 17 years as a Principal with Deloitte Consulting. Words that have been used to describe him include – competitive, creative, driven, motivating, and intuitive.

Rob has worked extensively with private sector clients and government agencies. He holds a TS/SCI w/poly security clearance.

Rob has built and operated two global lines of business, and for the last 5 years, he has been heavily focused in the digital arena. He developed our Public Sector Federal Digital lines of business and is currently leading our Digital Transformation organization for our Global Consulting practice.

Digital is driving change at a pace many have not seen in their lifetime and Digital Transformation focuses on the disruption that is happening across all business sectors. The mission is to help companies understand and embrace the challenges and opportunities digital presents and turn them into a disruptive advantage.

Rob has a deep understanding of what drives digital transformation and how to best respond to the market. He has substantial experience in the digital strategy, mobile app, social, and innovation arena. Being an innovator himself, the creative aspect of digital is a natural skill set of Rob’s.

He has spoken on the topic of digital and its impact at several public forums and remains active in digital networks. Back in 2001, Consulting Magazine recognized Rob as one of the top 10 Consultants in the US. Among his many speaking engagements, he co presented with President Bill Clinton at the Aspen Institute.

Tom Fruman is Director of Enterprise Governance and Planning (EGAP) for the Georgia Technology Authority. EGAP promotes an enterprise approach to technology by establishing statewide policies, standards and guidelines based on industry best practices and federal requirements. It works closely with the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget and state agencies to ensure an individual agency's IT strategy aligns with its overall business strategy and business continuity planning. EGAP is also involved in managing the state's portfolio of technology projects and ensuring the security of the state's information systems.
Prior to his current position, Mr. Fruman was the Director of Enterprise Portfolio Management, an office in EGAP that oversees technology investments for Georgia state government. In his almost 30-year career in technology management, he has worked in multiple capacities, including as a project executive, business development executive, consultant, researcher, worldwide deployment leader, project manager and programmer. He was president and chairman of the Atlanta Chapter of the Project Management Institute. Under his leadership, it grew to become the organization's second largest chapter with 4,400 members. Mr. Fruman has also contributed his time as an elections manager, a local planning and zoning commissioner, and an assistant scout master for the Boy Scouts of America.

Marcus Gates is a Senior Manager within Avaya’s Private Cloud Services group, with responsibility for the Southeastern US. Marcus is a 16 –year veteran of the engagement technology industry and quite possibly the tallest speaker on the panel today. He currently works with leaders of public- and private-sector organizations to create highly-secure, custom-tailored cloud service engagements that deliver immediate fiscal and operational results. Marcus has a B.A. from St. Mary's College of Maryland, and an M.A. from Towson University.

For over 15 years, Matt has been an information technology professional, primarily in support of higher education. He joined the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) in 2003 and served as their director for enterprise infrastructure. During his tenure with the VCCS, Matt served as Vice President for Information Technology at Thomas Nelson Community College, one of the VCCS member institutions. Matt holds a Masters of Information Systems Management and Bachelors in Business Management from Brigham Young University. Currently, Matt is a principal architect for NetApp U.S. Public Sector focusing on SLED customers. His areas of focus include virtualization, disaster recovery technologies, enterprise storage, and green data centers. 

John is an IT professional with over 25 years' experience in the design, implementation, operation, and maintenance of technology products, services, and processes. He is certified in all of the major industry standard process frameworks (CMMI, ITIL, COBIT, 6 Sigma, TQM), and has implemented process improvement programs to increase operational effectiveness and efficiencies in both the Private and Public sector. He has worked in all facets of IT holding positions as, Programmer Trainee, Application Developer, Development Manager, Quality Assurance Director, Operations Director, and Vice President of IT. He received his Baccalaureate degree from the University of Maryland with a BS in Information Systems Management, and a MBA from Wesley College with a concentration in Executive Management. In addition, John holds a Software Engineering Process Management Certificate from Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute and was also awarded a Certified Government Chief Information Officer designation from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently working as the Chief Information Officer for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. He lives in Duluth Georgia with his wife Jennifer, daughter Erin, and their border collie "Rugby".

Deepak Mohapatra is an Executive with IBM responsible for Analytics Solutions for Government Clients in North America. Deepak has held multiple leadership sales roles in his 15 year career at IBM, mostly dealing with Information Science, Big Data and Analytic solutions. He has considerable experience and background with Health and Human Services, Tax, Finance, Treasury, Intelligence, Criminal Justice and Public Safety agencies.
Deepak holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Boston Univ. and has completed numerous executive development programs at IBM, Babson and Harvard Business School. He lives in Lexington, MA with his wife of 22 years and 8 year old boy/girl twins.

Patrick Moore has spent his career working to improve government and its responsiveness to citizens. Patrick spent 8 years working for Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue, who was committed to making Georgia the best managed state in the nation. Patrick helped Governor Perdue implement an organizational model that was unique to government, and served as state CIO from 2006-2010. During that time Patrick led a transformational restructuring of the state's technology function. Patrick's most recent experience in the private sector put him in a leading role for some of the largest strategic procurements in the state government market in the last four years. He is the managing principal for Set Consulting, and is working to help governments and private sector firms implement strategies and partnerships that harness technology's power for outcomes that benefit citizens.

As Chief Technology Officer for the state of Georgia, Dr. Nichols advises the leadership of the Georgia Technology Authority and state agencies on technology issues. Since joining GTA in 2002, he has played a key role in several important initiatives to modernize the state’s IT infrastructure, including the privatization of the state’s IT infrastructure services and managed network services in 2009.
He is responsible for Georgia’s state portal, including several critical enterprise applications and the webMethods Enterprise Service Bus. He recently led an initiative to redesign www.georgia.gov, and to move from a proprietary content management system to an open-source system hosted in the cloud. Government Technology named Dr. Nichols as one of the nation’s Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers for 2012 in recognition of his contributions to advancing information technology in government.
Before coming to GTA, he was a principal consultant at Daugherty Business Solutions in Atlanta. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Robert (Bob) Orr is the Chief Information Officer at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville. This role includes working with the campus to identify technology needs as well as providing oversight for the institution's technology areas supporting teaching and learning and enterprise operations. The position develops budgetary information and strategies for meeting these technology needs including enterprise technologies, faculty computers, discipline specific labs, presentation classrooms, computer classrooms and various other technologies. Robert served in many different roles for approximately 30 years at the University of North Carolina Systems campuses including Associate Vice Chancellor for Information Resources at UNC Pembroke and the Associate CIO for Education Technologies at Western Carolina University. He has served the University of North Carolina Teaching and Learning with Technology Collaborative by managing several initiatives including a professional development retreat bringing together faculty development experts and IT professionals from across North Carolina. Robert also served as Chairperson for the UNC-CIO Council, a group comprised of all UNC Campus CIOs. He has presented at a number of national conferences on past projects including EDUCAUSE and the National Liberal Studies Conference, Computers on Campus and the NLII sponsored by EDUCAUSE in New Orleans. He has presented at regional conferences including EDUCAUSE Southeast and NCCAUSE. His research interest is in supporting faculty teaching online and is a contributing author in several journal publications. He has been quoted as a technology expert in numerous newspaper and magazine articles including Apple Computer's best practice magazine and is a 2006, Frye Leadership Institute Fellow.

Mark Ray is a Special Agent with the FBI in the Atlanta Field Office. As a member of the FBI's Cyber Division, Agent Ray has investigated a number of high-profile computer intrusion matters, specializing in complex malware investigations, and dismantling major cyber crime syndicates. He spearheads FBI corporate outreach in Atlanta, including working with small business and Fortune 500 companies on data breach detection, investigation, and remediation. Prior to joining the FBI, Agent Ray worked as a consultant and manager in the Information Technology industry for over 12 years. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Management Information Systems from Purdue University, and a Masters of Business Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Paul, a principal for Deloitte US, is the Organic Portfolio leader for Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Innovation group (DCI). In his role, Paul drives Deloitte Consulting LLP’s internal disruptive innovation strategy and oversees its investments targeting next generation products and services. Paul has worked with several of the major health care and life sciences companies and currently serves as the Lead Client Services partner for WellPoint and its global subsidiaries.

Susan Sports has been the Public Information Officer (PIO) for the Georgia Department of Driver Services (DDS) since October 2000.
Under the direction of the Commissioner, she manages the daily internal and public dissemination of news and information about the agency. This includes maintaining a knowledge base of agency operations, programs and activities. Ms. Sports supervises the editing, publication and distribution of employee newspapers and advises on the preparation and format of handbooks, bulletins and booklets for distribution to employees and the public. She creates marketing campaigns, produces the DDS Fiscal Annual Report and helps manage the Agency’s social network platforms.

Stephen is a 20 year Industry veteran with experience in Networking, Storage, Compute Platforms, Applications and Databases. Stephen holds a number of Industry and Vendors Certifications and has been a CISSP since 2002. His broad Infrastructure experience combined with working knowledge of the top Financial, Government, Retail and Healthcare Institutions and their operations makes him an invaluable resource for organizations looking to build, implement and maintain their IT strategies. 

Chris Van Wagoner serves as Chief Strategy Officer. He teams with Commvault’s senior management to identify, evaluate, and execute on business and product growth opportunities across all technology, business, and market segments. Chris also drives the investigation, analysis and recommendation of core corporate strategies and tactics, including evaluating competitive threats and has played a major role in several significant Commvault milestones. He spearheaded the 2001 launch of our backup and recovery product and the transformation of the company from a leading data protection software provider to a broader unified data management company. Most recently, Chris helped shape the evolution of Commvault into a recognized innovator within the Virtualization, Cloud and Managed Services categories, as well as crafting the 5-year vision for making data more strategic and actionable. Chris joined Commvault in 1996 after serving in senior marketing roles for companies in the consumer high tech, HBA and consumer packaged goods.