Kim Hightower is the Sales Director for the Strategic Azure Infrastructure team at Microsoft, orchestrating strategic initiatives and driving revenue for Microsoft's largest clients in the South region. Before going into sales leadership, Kim spent nearly two decades as a top-performing Account Executive, a proven producer with a remarkably consistent track record of successfully closing complex software deals. Kim's journey includes both startup ventures and large enterprises, all with a focus on how to help companies innovate to make better sense of their data. She also spends time as an advisor and seed investor in early stage startups.
 
Kim is a charismatic leader and is passionate about building collaborative and motivated teams. She is an advocate for women in technology and believes her business presents an unparalleled opportunity to provide technology solutions that drive innovation and deeply resonate with customers on a personal level. She believes in the power of authentic connections to transform businesses and this has been a driving force in establishing her as a trusted advisor and industry expert.
 
Outside of work, Kim is a music lover, a wanderer, and a jigsaw puzzle afficionado. She believes every day should be lived to the fullest and embraces living and loving and traveling with her family, playing Latin and African drums, and on occasion belting out Janis Joplin on the karaoke stage.

Drake Deno is a dedicated, strategic, and holistic advocate focused on guiding Red Hat’s customers to adopt, expand, and evolve their business by building open source solutions that address real-world problems. He focuses on building meaningful and impactful partnerships and relationships with all customers to build a deep understanding of their business, pain points, and how the power of open source can bring transformational change. With a consistent track record, Drake has helped Energy customers adopt open source software and methodologies  to successfully deliver on enterprise scale and multi-geo programs under budget and consistently ahead of schedule. Drake, a Mechanical Engineer by degree from Purdue University, comes with diverse experience across multiple industries including NASA, video game development, oil and gas, and Red Hat. This diverse experience empowers him to draw from best practices across various industries, ensuring a tailored and effective approach for each unique customer challenge.

Stephen McAleer is a Theory of Constraints practitioner and the creator and author of the COTSOps Software Ecosystem Optimization Strategies. COTSOps (aka: DevOps complicated friend) focuses on a significant percentage of the global software ecosystem and industry verticals that predominantly buy proprietary 3rd party commercial solutions (ISV COTS) vs build custom applications. COTSOps innovatively optimizes the decades of interdependency constraints across complex technology/software ecosystem partners to produce win-win flow/throughput improvements for Digital program initiatives execution; such as, Cloud-Native Architecture, Automation, Cybersecurity, and API-first. Stephen's Sales Executive role with Red Hat for the past 7 years has been focused on critical infrastructure Energy clients and ecosystem solution partners.