DICE Local: Toronto '19

Jaime Leverton

CEO
Hut 8 Mining

Sean Maskell

President, Canada
Cologix

Mr. Sean Maskell serves as President of Cologix Canada at Cologix, Inc. He has over 16 years of experience in Telecommunication and Data Facility Operations. He founded Telehouse Centre Canada in 2004, which quickly became the fastest growing carrier neutral facility in Toronto over the next 8 years. Through Sean's vision and leadership, Telehouse has modeled a more efficient data center that reduces operational costs, while escalating facility reliability and customer experience. He continues to provide leadership and strategic direction for the Toronto and Vancouver locations to ensure Cologix customers receive the highest level of services to meet their most demanding applications. Mr. Maskell is an active volunteer in his community and holds a degree from Niagara College, along with sales/management certifications.

James Beer

Senior VP, Operations
eStruxture Data Centers

James is the Senior Vice President of Operations at eStruxture and brings over 20 years of experience in customer service, mission critical 24×7 operations, data centre design/build, managed services and cyber security and compliance. Prior to eStruxture, James was the Vice President of Services at Scalar Decisions where his national team of professional services, managed services and project management experts delivered complex IT infrastructure, security and cloud solutions to a broad base of Canadian customers. James previously held data centre and security leadership roles at Q9 and Bell Canada including the operations of more than 13 customer facing data centres nationally and harmonizing security compliance practices to meet the needs of the most stringent security standards.

Brian Ferris

Director, Real Estate Operations
Bell

Michael McCormick

VP, Property Management - Toronto
Canderel

Michael, Vice-President, Property Management, for Canderel, is responsible for all site management, operations and technical services. Michael’s role involves taking a holistic view of property management ensuring best in class service for Canderel’s clients, tenants and partners. During his career he has planned and led a number of complex projects. The most recent is a major electrical infrastructure upgrade for one of Canada’s largest banks. He greatly enjoys the challenges of balancing technical, operational, people and financial interests in finding solutions to business issues. Michael joined Canderel in 2016 as a General Manager at a mission critical complex serving financial services tenants. He was promoted to Vice-President in July 2017 with oversight of the Greater Toronto Area portfolio. Prior to joining Canderel, Michael worked at IBM in a variety of finance and real estate roles. He championed agile office development and the repurposing real estate for client engagement opportunities. He is a Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) and holds MBAs from both Cornell & Queen’s universities.

Thomas Perkins

VP, Data Center Operations & Real Estate
Sungard Availability Services

Tom Perkins, Vice President of Global Data Center Operations, Engineering and Real Estate at Sungard Availability Services is responsible for the operations and engineering of Sungard’s Data Centers, Workplace facilities and offices around the globe. He has extension knowledge of managing and delivering diverse infrastructure and IT solutions to medium and large organization. He has an in-depth experience with helping organizations design, plan and implement highly availability technology solutions. Tom has responsible for over 5 million square feet of data center space across 75+ locations around the world. Over the past 30 years Tom has assisted organizations with successfully building, operating, and ensuring resiliency of their business operations. As a IT Resiliency expert he has directly assisted organizations which were impacted by various local or regional disasters including the World Trade Center attack and Super Storm Sandy. He has a thorough understanding and practical experience with managing crisis events. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Montclair State University in New Jersey. He is ITIL V3 Foundations and Service Operations certified. He holds a Certified Data Centre Design (CDCD) certification.

Stephan Abraitis

VP, Data Centre Infrastructure & Strategy
Royal Bank Of Canada

Stephan Abraitis is the Vice President of Global Data Centre Infrastructure and Strategy (DCIS) at RBC. His responsibilities include 22 data centres, 54 compute sites, and over 50 critical back office facilities supporting RBC globally. Stephan leads a global team supporting data centre strategy, operations, engineering, data centre services, migrations and incident command & control. Stephan joined RBC in 2009 to lead the design, build and operation of RBC’s Enterprise Data Centres. The $1 Billion program included upgrading most of RBC IT facilities infrastructure. Since then, Stephan was successful in developing a world class operation supporting data centres in regions where RBC operates. Prior to RBC, he worked at American Express Canada as Chief Engineer, moving into a leadership role in their Real Estate division. His career started with 13 years in data centre engineering for TD Canada Trust. Stephan is an avid Martial Artist who enjoys donating his time instructing children and adults alike in the arts, self-discovery and self-improvement. Stephan lives in Woodbridge Ontario with his wife Leyla, their young children Theseus and Thea.

Nabeel Mahmood

Co-Founder
Nomad Futurist Foundation

Nabeel Mahmood is a Technologist, Futurist and a Keynote Speaker. His career is driven by one question – what’s next? He is passionate about the power of technology to deliver competitive and transformational change and the need to develop digital leadership that will create the enterprise of the future. He believes strongly in simplification, with a purpose. Nabeel brings 18 plus years of experience leading large-scale global technology organizations through seasons of explosive growth via M&A, global expansion, implementing new business models and technology innovation. His expertise includes leading organizations through transformation changes, connecting IT to the needs of the business, technology innovation, Big Data, Cloud, ERP, IoT, Mobility and Data Centers. He brings a unique blend of experiences spanning the entire breadth of technology from Grid to Chip. At, heart he’s a true technologist and futurist, he is a proven strategist, winsome communicator and leader with extraordinary vision and operational expertise within very large, complex organizations. Nabeel is a strategic CIO identifying opportunities that are being underpinned by emerging technologies. He serves on multiple boards and is an advisor to CIOs and CEO across a number of industries.

Kirby Peters

Director, Critical Facilities
BMO Financial Group

Shane Clemons

Global Team Leader, Platforms & Applications
Verizon

Shane is the product lead for the Platform and Applications services within Verizon Partner Solutions portfolio. Products include: IoT, Data Center, Security, Professional Services and Emerging Services. He is a 12-year wireless, cloud computing, data center and M2M veteran having held sales management, product development and marketing roles. Shane also served as an Engineer Company Commander in the United States Army. His service includes an eleven-month tour conducting route clearance missions in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan). Shane is an Army R.O.T.C alumnus and holds a bachelor’s degree from Ohio University.

Josh Crowe

CTO
Sungard Availability Services

Josh Crowe leads Sungard Availability Services’ (Sungard AS) initiatives to capitalize on emerging technologies and deliver fully recoverable production products and services to address customer availability and business continuity challenges. With over two decades in the field, Crowe is responsible for product management and engineering, including all of Sungard AS’ portfolio of offerings: data centers and recovery centers, cloud and hosting, managed application cloud and recovery, and business continuity services. He also leads the company’s global information technology and chief security office organizations. Before joining Sungard AS, he was senior vice president, product development for Internap and served in roles as vice president of software development and cloud services at Savvis (now CenturyLink). Josh holds a Bachelor’s degree from Missouri State University and Master’s degrees in both business administration and information management from Washington University in St. Louis.

Alano Medonte

Channel Lead, Canada & GTM Partnerships, Canada
Google

As the GTM lead for Google Cloud (GCP ) Canada, Alano Medonte leads the Channel & Partnership organization for GCP (Google Cloud Platform) managing the countries mission to ensure customers have the best and most talented partners in the program to assist & consult on Cloud Migrations. Alano's role involves supporting multiple Global Enterprise Customers & Partners through cloud migration journeys . His PDM ( Partner Development Managers) team build experienced Solution integrators, resellers & MSP partners who help customers migrate from Data centers to Cloud. His partnership team also have a fleet of PSM (Partner Sales Managers) who work directly with Partners, Customers and Googler's in migrations journeys to the cloud. The focus of his group is mainly on Hybrid cloud workloads , Data Lake migrations, containers (kubernetes ) with Anthos & GKE, C4M (Cloud for marketing), VM migrations and SAP migrations ). Prior to Google his passion for the networks and interconnectivity lead him to Equinix as the Director of Channel Sales & Alliances (Canada & North East U.S). During this time, alano worked with the world's largest managed services providers and Cloud Hyperscalers on data center & cloud migrations in an extremely global fast growth environment. During 3 year stay at Equinix the company grew from $245 USD a share to $575 USD growing from $19B to $49B market cap. Canada has also penetrated most of the key Enterprise and Global customers during that time. Prior to Equinix he had spent 15 years of his Career at Hewlett Packard most notably as the Director of Networks for Enterprise & Global accounts. Do to his time at HP alano is intimately familiar with Data Center ( servers, storage and networking and data center solutions). Outside of work , you can find alano teaching yoga as a certified kundalini yoga instructor, or sculpting interesting work that has made its way into several art galleries in Toronto and Montreal.

Padmalatha Ragunathan

Cloud Solution Architect
Microsoft

Sheldon So

Executive Director, Canada
KPMG

Sanjeevan Srikrishnan

Head of Global Solutions Architecture, Canada
Equinix

Lin Zhu

Director, Global Network Services
Scotiabank