Norm Olsen has more than 15 years experience in designing and implementing successful indirect sales strategies. He is an expert in the areas of international business development, global channel strategies, partner program development, and multi-national contract negotiations. Norm has opened new sales channels and generated incremental revenue for high tech companies in Europe, Asia, The Middle East and Americas. He has substantial experience in integrating channel programs for companies with multiple acquisitions. Norm has also led SaaS transition teams to help traditional software companies move to a cloud business model. Prior to joining The York Group, Mr. Olsen led international channel development programs for high technology companies including Compaq Europe, Blackboard Inc and Aspect Software. Mr Olsen holds an MBA from Northeastern University, a BA from Bates College and has spent over 10 years living and working in Europe.

Kent Kusel is the founder and president of New England Cloud Solutions, a Boston based cloud computing integrator who helps businesses take advantage of cloud computing technology. Prior to founding this company in 2010 he served as Chief Operating Officer of Balsam Technologies, who delivers outsourced IT services to the greater Boston business community. Before this he served in various leadership, management and marketing positions, including President of Marketplace Network Inc., a not for profit marketplace ministry, Marketing Director for Berkshire Mortgage Finance and Vice President for GE Capital Corporation. Prior to this he was with several commercial real estate companies including Coldwell Banker Commercial, and Arvida Corporation. Kent brings over 25 years of leadership, operations, technology and marketing experience. Mr. Kusel has a bachelor’s degree in business from Stetson University and a Master of Arts in Leadership & Business Ethics from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary.

Adam is a recognized Salesforce.com / CRM expert that helps organizations unlock exponential capabilities through the power of collaboration. Adam frequently speaks on CRM Best-Practices and Governance topics and chairs the largest Salesforce.com User Group in North America. In response to Adam’s leadership and evangelism, he was recently inducted into the exclusive Salesforce.com MVP program limited to approximately 50 individuals WW. To help traverse business to IT discussions, Adam maintains an architect-level Advanced Admin / Developer certification credential with Salesforce.com. Adam attended UMass Amherst’s Isenberg School of Management and UNC Chapel Hill’s prestigious Kenan-Flagler Program for Executive Development.

While not at work, Adam cherishes family time with his amazing wife of 20 years and 5 children—two of whom were given through the blessing of adoption. Adam and family are outspoken advocates for adoption.

Michael brings nearly 25 years of strategic experience in technology to the IT domain
With a diverse background ranging from venture funded startups including:

• Telecommunications
  • Ignitus Communications (sold to Lucent Technologies)
  • Xedia (sold to Lucent Technologies)
  • BBN/Genuity
• Infrastructure and Storage
  • Camiant (sold to Tekelec)
  • Exagrid
  • Akamai
  • Imaging Technology (sold to the Faery Group)

As well as both operational and strategic IT positions at General Electric and consulting
service organization SSDS, prior to Axis.

Michael provides strategic guidance to customers today fulfilling a part-time CIO
role for a number of customers and guiding technology evolutions through virtualization
and cloud.

John oversees the company’s operations while remaining intimately involved in business development and client engagement activities. While working with Oracle Corporation in Venezuela, Boston and New York City, John served as a customer relationship management strategist, media & entertainment solution specialist and account executive. Other roles included business development & marketing at a technology consultancy and financial analysis and product management at a medical device startup. John’s extensive media operations consulting background and network across various sectors has helped him earn a reputation as a transformation specialist for early-stage and global media organizations.

John was educated at Washington University in St. Louis where he earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and an M.B.S. John’s international living experiences include the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Slovakia. His passions outside of work include spending time with his family, working on his Mac, exploring cities on foot and striking up random conversations with people from all walks of life.

Nick VanBuskirk is the National Director for Dell’s Public Cloud Services. Nick has been in technology services for 12 years and has been involved in Cloud Services and Software as a Service since 2007. Prior to joining Dell, Nick worked for several startups including MessageOne, which was acquired by Dell in April, 2008. Nick also was a practicing attorney for 4 years and was an electronic discovery consultant for Onsite3 before joining MessageOne where he helped clients navigate the management of electronic information in anticipation of and during complex litigation.

Phillip is a Security director with Dell’s Public Cloud Sales team. During his 15 years in the security space Phillip designed network and security infrastructure for many of the largest financial and government institutions globally. Phillip joined Dell through the acquisition of MessageOne, a leading cloud archive and disaster recovery company providing secure cloud services to over 6 million end users. Phillip has also authored several industry whitepapers and led webinars helping customers understand the myriad of privacy and compliance regulations.

Eric Scace is the Chief Strategy Officer at WWPass Corporation, creator of the world’s first authentication device that users own, control and bring in to work. While working as UUNet’s Vice President of International Development, Mr. Scace’s group built the first global commercial Internet backbone. He then continued to expand UUNET into a worldwide provider with national operations in Europe, Asia/Pacific, North America and Africa with the purpose of making mobile communication more practical. His technical background includes the invention of frame relay service; technical design for packet-switching, ISDN, and integrated voice-data PABX systems; and 12 years leading international standards development of technologies integral to today’s global data networks.

J. Trevor Hughes is the President and CEO of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP), the world’s largest association of privacy professionals.

Hughes is an experienced attorney in privacy, technology and marketing law. He has provided testimony on privacy issues before several committees within the U.S. Congress, British Parliament and EU Parliament.

Hughes previously served as the executive director of the Network Advertising Initiative and the Email Sender and Provider Coalition. He is an adjunct professor of law at the University of Maine School of Law and frequently speaks about privacy issues at conferences around the world.

Igor is building enterprise cross-platform and cross-technology distributed systems for more than 20 years. Passionate about all the technologies and methodologies that can enable products to scale seamlessly, to process large amounts of data and to serve more users. Now, with the cloud technologies becoming widely available and with the advances in the virtualization space, as a Director of Cloud Platforms practice he is using his expertise to help BlueMetal customers to modernize their applications and infrastructure , to become cloud-ready and to scale them in the private and public clouds. As a hands-on architect, Igor works with the customers to improve their development processes and to increase the effectiveness of their teams through the adoption of the Agile practices. BigData nerd and Robotics geek. Frequent speaker for multiple code camps and events and a big supporter of the New England user group community.

Michael Stiefel, principal of Reliable Software, Inc. is a consultant on software architecture and development, and the alignment of information technology with business goals.

His current work involves:

• Distributed application development and implementation such as Software as a Service
• Software best practices in Microsoft .NET
• Technologies such as Microsoft Azure, Windows Communication Foundation, and SQL Server.
• Advising on IT strategy and planning, including budgeting, hiring, and growth management, including the appropriate use of Agile development
• Requirements analysis and project planning

He is currently a member of the OASIS Identity in the Cloud Technical Committee. As a member of an OASIS Technical Committee he helped develop a core SOA Reference Model and related Reference Architectures.

He was a Lecturer in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where his research and teaching focus was understanding how people build mental models in order to solve problems. As Adjunct faculty, Stiefel has taught graduate and undergraduate software engineering courses at Northeastern University and Framingham State University.

Michael Stiefel’s education is from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a Interdisciplinary Ph.D degree in Nuclear Engineering, Political Science, and History of Technology; M.S. in Nuclear Engineering; and B.S. in Electrical Engineering. He is an active member of the IEEE Consultants Network.

Bill Wilder is a hands-on developer, architect, consultant, trainer, speaker, writer, and community leader focused on helping companies and individuals succeed with the cloud using the Windows Azure Platform. Bill began working with Windows Azure when it was unveiled at the Microsoft PDC in 2008 and subsequently founded Boston Azure, the first/oldest Windows Azure user group in the world in October 2009. Bill is recognized by Microsoft as a Windows Azure MVP and is the author of the upcoming book Cloud Architecture Patterns scheduled to be published by O’Reilly in 2012. Bill can be found blogging at blog.codingoutloud.com and on Twitter at @codingoutloud. You can also check out the Boston Azure cloud user group at www.bostonazure.org and @bostonazure.

Jim is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft who covers the Northeast District (namely, New England and upstate New York). His overall focus is to engage with the development community in the area through user groups, code camps, BarCamps, Microsoft-sponsored events, etc., and just in general serve as ambassador for Microsoft. Over the past year or so, Jim has been focusing on software development scenarios using cloud computing and Windows Azure.

Jim joined Microsoft in April 2008 after nearly 12 years working for Sybase in a support and sales consultant role for its developer tools, namely PowerBuilder and EAServer. Prior to that he worked on various DoD projects at MITRE (Bedford, MA) and BDM International (in McLean, VA, now subsumed by Northrop Grumman). Jim received in B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Austin Peay State University in 1985 and his M.S. in Computer Science from Duke University in 1987.

John Zablocki is a Developer Advocate at Couchbase. He is the organizer of Beantown ALT.NET , a former adjunct at Fairfield University and an author for O’Reilly. John holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Hartford. He has worked at startups throughout his career and is interested in the intersection of .NET and open source. Online, John can be found at http://about.me/johnzablocki. Offline, he can be found too infrequently around Boston, with his dog, daughter, and his Martin acoustic.