Building a resilient culture: What CIOs and CTOs can do now

Name: Satish Alapati
Title: Vice President - Mobility & Entertainment Customer Experience, AT&T Communications
Company: AT&T
Bio:Satish Alapati, Vice President, heads the Technology Development Mobility & Entertainment Customer Experience organization. As a leader of over 3,500 IT Professionals, he is responsible for developing software platforms and solutions that power effortless customer experiences across AT&T’s online, retail, and care channels.

Since joining AT&T in 2002, Satish has been known as an analytical and calculated risk taker using data driven insights to drive decisions. Throughout his 17 year tenure with AT&T, Satish has built a reputation for embracing emerging technologies, methodologies and techniques with a focus and passion on improving the customer experience. In 2012, Satish received the CIO magazine’s CIO 100 award for “innovative use of technology to deliver a best in class experience.”

Satish stands at the forefront of leading one of the most epic transformations in AT&T’s history into a Technology, Media and Telecommunications company. Satish is defining the vision and driving the modernization of the architecture for AT&T Communication’s online, retail & care channels that power the next generation of AT&T’s industry leading products, services and experiences. He is accomplishing this by aggressively enabling automation, microservices, personalization and machine learning throughout the platform with an emphasis on improving speed, cost and quality to drive business growth, innovation and profitability.

Satish is an advocate of investing in people and culture. He embraces the values of Customer First, Be Bold, Trust, Be Lean and Experiment . Satish is recognized as a champion of DevOps and employing a You Build It, You Own It mindset. He believes in empowering teams to have end to end responsibility for intake, design, development, testing, and production support for their respective application areas in full partnership with business product owners.

Satish holds a master’s degree in Computer Systems Design from University of Toledo, Ohio and Bachelor’s in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Osmania University, Hyderabad, India

Satish is an active member of local organizations which promote cultural integration. He lives with his wife and their daughter in Dallas, TX.

Full Bio.

Name: Andrew Clay Shafer
Title: Vice President, Global Transformation
Company: Red Hat
Bio:Always fascinated with the dynamics of high performing individuals and organizations, Andrew has a long history helping people deliver systems with better tools and processes. With more than 20 years experience in technology, he gravitated to Agile and Lean methods as a software developer and then applied this understanding to systems as the cofounder of Puppet. Andrew evangelized DevOps tools and practices before DevOps was a word and helped to organize DevOpsDays events since the earliest days of the movement. He’s been involved in a number of open source communities including Puppet, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. In addition to frequent conference presentations on related topics, Andrew also contributed ‘Agile Operations’ to the O’Reilly book Web Operations and wrote a Foreword for The Site Reliability Workbook.

Name: Kevin Behr
Title: Senior Director, Global Transformation
Company: Red Hat
Bio:Kevin is the founder, general manager and chief science officer of PraxisFlow, a consultancy focused on addressing the complex problems inherent to large IT organizations and creating a better flow through internal alignment. He is also the author and co-author of seven IT management books, including The Phoenix Project and The Visible Ops Handbook, and is often looked to as a visionary in optimizing businesses to blend technological evolution with human processes.

Name: Michael Walker
Title: Global Senior Director, Red Hat Open Innovation Labs
Company: Red Hat
Bio:Mike Walker is Senior Director and Global Leader of Red Hat Open Innovation Labs: a customer-facing offering dedicated to building high-performance teams that generate innovative digital solutions, the open source way. Walker has 19 years of IT engineering and consulting experience with emerging technologies, including specializations in application development, cloud computing, data integration, high-performance computing, and distributed systems.

Name: Kristina Pennella
Title: Practice Lead, NA Open Innovation Labs
Company: Red Hat
Bio:Kris is an accomplished 2x digital leadership executive with a track record of successfully launching emerging technology in global marketplaces. She translates technology into business strategy and increased concept to cash opportunities within new and existing product lines. Kris has developed and managed products with revenues of over $2BN and led the product technology departments at three enterprise companies. An advocate of lean enterprise and product development, you can find Kris leading the North America Open Innovation Labs Practice, accelerating customer journeys towards digital leadership.