WIoTCoE Panel Discussion

Mitra M. Best is an entrepreneur, technologist, and innovation leader. As PwC’s Lead Principal for Strategic Innovation and Technology, Mitra is a future-maker, responsible for creating new technology platforms and business models that solve critical challenges faced by organizations, the ecosystem of stakeholders, and the workforce. She has successfully led large-scale initiatives in both private and public sectors focused on new growth and efficiency models through innovative applications of technology. Mitra’s commitment to fueling innovation inspires her leadership of various initiatives both inside and outside PwC, particularly in promoting gender equity in STEM professions. At PwC, she co-leads the Women in Technology program , building an inclusive culture that resonates with technologists and provides equitable opportunities for growth. Additionally, Mitra is a frequent speaker at corporate conferences, leads C-suite workshops for Fortune 500 clients, mentors start-ups and entrepreneurs across industries, and guest lectures at top universities. Mitra holds Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science & Linguistics from UCLA, Graduate Management Certificate in Innovation & Strategy from MIT Sloan, and an Innovation Masters Certificate from Stanford University. She is a lifelong learner who values continued education as an imperative for growth and development.

As the Data Science Practice Lead at Very, Jenn leads machine learning and AI initiatives on client projects, which includes problem formulation, scoping, and defining the analytical approach for each project. Before joining Very, Jenn was Director of Data Science at Noodle.ai, where she led multiple client engagements in the transportation and manufacturing industries, architecting and leading implementation of the data-analytical pipelines of AI applications used for high-value operational decisions. Jenn holds a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University, an M.S. in Statistics from the University of Alberta, and a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Alberta.

Vijji Suryadevara, is an accomplished entrepreneur and executive, passionate about using technology to make a difference. Vijji brings her technical and management skills to the role of CIO & Head of Engineering to build a scalable technology organization and innovation culture to enable rapid growth of Phizzle. Vijji was the Founder, CEO & CTO of CareerWaze a Future of Work startup. CareerWaze is an AI driven Career and Learning advisor helping users acquire in-demand skills. Vijji was also the Founder & CEO of BPA Technologies a VC funded Technology Services startup focused on Content Management Solutions for Fortune 500 Companies. BPA was acquired by a Moody’s group company ICRA in 2012. Prior to this she held technology leadership positions and architected and built enterprise solutions in Content Management and Telecommunications domains. Vijji has a Bachelor’s in Computer science, Mathematics & Physics and a Master of Computer Applications from NIT Warangal.

Kelly Ireland founded CBT in 2001 as a value-added reseller (VAR) focused on unparalleled client service. However, having a keen eye for technology trends and always taking the time and opportunity to listen to industry experts, she assessed the impending changes in the industry early on. She built up CBT’s engineering expertise, data science practice and partnerships to revolutionize the company’s offerings and make the difficult transition from VAR to domain expert integrator. Since that time, the Company has flourished. CBT is now in rarefied air, bridging the gap between operational technologies (OT) and information technologies (IT) with groundbreaking projects like the Refinery of the Future (RotF) at Texmark Chemicals. Successful initiatives like RotF in Industrial IoT and High Performance Computing have positioned CBT as a key partner to industry-leading companies such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, PTC, Intel, National Instruments, Antea, RealWear, SparkCognition and more. This has spurred explosive growth for CBT, increasing its revenue by 55% in the last two years. Kelly’s leadership has also led to a myriad of accolades, including the 2019 Triple Crown Award from CRN, nine consecutive Boeing Performance Excellence Awards, three consecutive CRN IoT Innovators awards, and the 2020 Women Presidents’ Organization’s 50 Fastest-Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies.

Amanda Healy is an award-winning marketing leader, social media expert, and national speaker. As Head of Brand Marketing for Cisco’s Internet of Things (IoT) group, she drives thought leadership, brand awareness, and advocacy for IoT at Cisco. Amanda has trained world-class teams ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies on how to leverage social media, spoken at industry-leading conferences including the Massachusetts Conference for Women, Women in Technology International Summit, Microsoft Envision, Social Tools Summit, Watermark’s Lead On Conference for Women, and more, and regularly conducts workshops for small, medium, and large companies, trade shows, and groups.

As the global marketing leader in the IoT Division at SAS, Michele is an evangelist for artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, promoting the importance of a robust analytics lifecycle to drive valuable outcomes in IoT initiatives across industries. Michele and her team play an important role in growing SAS in the world of IoT. She is focused on collaborating with the commercial business development team to identify, further develop, and amplify strategic partnerships. She works closely with customers and partners to understand market requirements and then works in conjunction with product management and R&D to ensure technology and solutions meet key market needs and will help drive business value. Michele enjoys being an active member of leading IoT consortiums including the Industrial Internet Consortium, the IoT Community and RIoT. After graduating from the University of Virginia, Michele began her journey in the technology field, which has spanned nearly 20 years. Prior to joining SAS in 2014, Michele held various roles during her tenure at IBM including product management, product marketing and program management.

Sandy Carter is the AWS Vice President, Public Sector Partners and Programs. In her new role, she will be responsible for driving next-generation partnering. Her responsibilities include evolving partner models to intensify partner innovation, AWS cloud adoption and creation of mission critical cloud solutions with partners across public sector. Her impact will be growing the partner ecosystem as a major driver for public sector and contributing significantly to the success of Public Sector customers. Prior to this role, Sandy built an enterprise workload team as the Vice President of Windows and Enterprise Workloads at Amazon Web Services (AWS) focused on helping companies innovate using their current technology and assets with migration and modernization through containers and serverless. She led the team to overall growth with AWS now hosting nearly two times as many Windows Server instances in the cloud as Microsoft, per IDC. She led her engineering team to optimize SQL Server on AWS which exhibited 2X+ better price/ performance than Azure per ZK Research. For her leadership on the VMware Cloud on AWS business, she led the team to deliver results of 4x the number of customers year over year, with those customers having deployed 9x the number of VMs now vs 1 year ago. Finally, she grew the number of competency partners by 3x and the number of ISV validated solutions by 4x in the last year.