California Technology Forum 2015

The Honorable Dr. Sam Blakeslee founded the Institute for Advanced Technology and Public Policy at Cal Poly in 2012. With a portfolio of experience as a scientist, business owner and state legislator, Blakeslee is working to bring these diverse worlds together with cross-disciplinary thinkers at Cal Poly to solve complex public policy challenges facing society today. The Institute takes a unique approach of developing and deploying technology-based prototypes and solutions. Multidisciplinary teams of faculty and students are currently working on projects in open government, education, marine renewable energy, and combat veteran PTSD.

Blakeslee served in both the California State Assembly and State Senate. Elected Assembly Minority Leader in 2009, he was a member of the "Big 5" with responsibility for negotiating the state budget and major policy initiatives. In 2009 and 2012, the Sacramento Bee identified Blakeslee as one of "Sacramento's Most Bipartisan Legislators."

Mr. Borton is an accomplished Information Systems professional with over 20 years of technical experience. As the Director of Security Research at PTP, Mr. Borton is responsible for managing enterprise assessment projects, refining assessment and penetration testing methodologies as well as staying abreast of emerging technologies, threats, and attacks.
Mr. Borton combines a strong passion for technology with a belief that security and privacy are critical components to the future of Internet commerce. He has been involved in the information security community in various facets over the course of his professional career and most recently volunteers for Security BSides, a nonprofit that provides free training and collaboration opportunities to anyone interested in the field.
Prior to PTP, Mr. Borton was the Director of MIS for United Way in Sacramento and most recently served as the Senior Security Architect for CalPERS, the largest pension fund in the country. His expertise encompasses vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, and web application testing. He is also a member of the Sacramento FBI Infragard chapter, a public-private partnership that facilitates the sharing of information in order to protect critical infrastructure.

Randy brings 20+ years of experience providing leadership, guidance and solution to complex business and IT problems. His focus on service enablement through optimized IT investment has consistently resulted in meeting business objectives.
Randy has a successful track record of building and leading high performance teams, driving significant results. Under his leadership and value-add solutions, many organizations have streamlined organizational change, increased customer satisfaction, decreased operational costs and improved their return on investment.

Jim Bryan is the Director of Corporate IT Applications and Operations for Compuware. Jim has nearly 30 years working in IT, much of it at Compuware. As the IT Director of a company going through many dramatic changes, he has the opportunity to participate in a complete reinvention of how Compuware does business. A large part of this transformation is their migration from a traditional Data Center to a Mainframe/Cloud hybrid.
Prior to his time at Compuware, Jim worked as a Senior Developer at Williams International. Jim is a graduate of the Pamplin School of Business at Virginia Tech.

Sean Cordero brings over 15 years of information security and IT experience to his current role of director, information security in the Office of the CISO. As director, information security, Cordero provides executive level advisement, strategy development and relationship management for the company’s Fortune 100 clients and advises global account managers and sales leadership teams to develop leading and client-centric security service solutions.
Cordero brings deep experience as both a senior leader and a technical expert, enabling him to communicate at all levels of a client’s organization. His experience crosses a diverse set of industries including financial services, bio-technology, retail and software development.
Prior to joining the company, Cordero served as president and principal consultant for Cloud Watchmen, Inc. where he advised state and federal institutions and cloud service providers on security program development. Cordero’s prior leadership roles included chief security officer for EdFund, chief security officer for ECMC West, director of security and compliance for Charlotte Russe and global leader for the Life Technologies Distributed Systems program.
Cordero is a thought-leader in the information security space and serves as chair of the Cloud Security Alliance’s Cloud Control Matrix working group where he drives the development of security standards for cloud computing. Cordero was awarded the 2013 Ron Knode Service Award by the Cloud Security Alliance for his contributions to cloud research.

Dan Katz, Technical Director for Public Sector, is responsible for empowering forward thinking government organizations with Acquia’s game changing digital solutions. As a key member of the leadership team, Dan drives product strategy and innovation to help governments leverage best of breed technology for citizen engagement, mission support, and web operations. Dan articulates Acquia’s value to public sector as an enablement platform that provides governments a secure, resilient, agile toolbox enabling freedom to focus on the business of serving citizens.
Prior to joining Acquia, Dan led successful open source and digital platform initiatives for numerous public sector enterprises such as the District of Columbia, the American Battle Monuments Commission, and the Department of Homeland Security - including the design, execution and deployment into the public cloud of an Enterprise-wide open source Drupal solution for all of DHS's public-facing websites.
Earlier in his career, Dan led knowledge management efforts at the BlueCross BlueShield Federal Employee Program, ran a consulting company, and worked at Amazon.com. Dan received his MS in Technology Management from George Mason University, holds a Federal CIO Certification, and a BA from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Marlon Miller is Director, Public Sector Workflow and Business Process Automation Solutions for Large Enterprise Operations – US. He is responsible for the delivery of workflow automation solutions to Xerox Public Sector customers. Xerox provides solutions to improve document intensive businesses processes leveraging professional consulting and technologies such as document scanning, intelligent capture, enterprise content management, workflow automation software and integration with ERP and custom systems. Xerox Public Sector workflow solutions reduce process complexity, improve responsiveness to constituents and lower overall processing costs for our Public Sector customers. Marlon has supported the U.S. Public Sector business at Xerox for the last 10 years in a variety of different business areas. Most recently he has been the Director of Public Sector Marketing covering Primary Education, Higher Education, State/Local Government and the Federal government.  Marlon has used his broad experience in technology, workflow, content management solutions, security, contracts and sales to help drive the growth of the Public Sector business for Xerox.  He has helped develop multiple partners and vertical solutions for Xerox’ public sector business. He has extensive experience in the application of security technology to meet the unique data and network protections required in government environments. Marlon’s previous experience at Xerox included roles in software development, product testing, professional consulting services, customer support, direct sales and partner development. Marlon joined Xerox in 1984 from a Systems Integrator to help develop new products for the electronic publishing industry. Marlon is a graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University with post-graduate computer science work completed at UCLA. 

Brian Purchia is a communications and policy strategist who has served as a new media advisor for Fortune 500 companies and as a spokesman for Change.org, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Protect Our Defenders.

Brian was the driving force behind the City of San Francisco and Porto Alegre, Brazil’s open data programs. He also organized the first mayoral debate on open government and helped Newsom write, “Citizenville” a book that explores civic participation in the digital age. He is the co-founder of CivicMakers and recently helped launch DigitalDemocracy.org, a searchable, sharable video engine for California government.

Brian is currently working the California HealthCare Foundation on a statewide pilot program to build a bridge to local communities with California's health data. A team of health data ambassadors has been hired in Fresno, Los Angeles, and Sacramento to inform the State of California on data that is most valuable to these communities and to create apps and visualizations that raise awareness of pressing health and health care issues through the use of data from the portal.

Chris Short manages the Big Data & Analytics sales division for immixGroup, an Arrow Company. He has over 9 years of sales experience, 5 of which have been to public sector customers. His focus is identifying strong emerging technologies in the data and analytics technology category and helping to bridge the gap between their solutions and government’s requirements.

Rod joined VMware in 2012 through the acquisition of Nicira where he led product marketing. He has a unique combination of technical knowledge and market experience having led product management and marketing for a number of network infrastructure, network management and network security start ups, and in the past has held field and product management positions at ActivIdentity (HID Global), SynOptics/Bay Networks and Novell.