AnsibleFest

Dr. Ruchir Puri is the Chief Scientist of IBM Research, an IBM Fellow, and Vice President of IBM Corporate Technology. He led IBM Watson as its CTO and Chief Architect from 2016-19 and has held various technical, research, and engineering leadership roles across IBM’s AI and Research businesses.

As an IEEE fellow and distinguished lecturer, an ACM Distinguished Speaker, and 2014 Asian American Engineer of the Year award recipient, Dr. Puri has been an adjunct professor at Columbia University in New York, and a visiting scientist at Stanford University, based in California. He was honored with the John Von-Neumann Chair at Institute of Discrete Mathematics at Bonn University, Germany and has over 70 U.S. patents. In addition to being an inventor, Dr. Puri has authored over 120 scientific publications on software-hardware automation methods, microprocessor design, and optimization and AI algorithms. He was chair of the AAAI-IAAI conference that focused on industrial applications of AI and has been a keynote speaker at numerous conferences. As a leading voice in AI technology, Ruchir has been featured in many publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, and IEEE spectrum.

Walter Bentley is a Red Hat Automation Practice Senior Manager and author with a diverse background in production systems administration and solutions architecture. Walter has more than 20 years of experience in many areas including online marketing, financial services, insurance, aviation, education, technology, and the food industry. As a part of his day-to-day routine, Walter spends his time helping enterprise organizations build automation strategies with repeatable patterns and blueprints focused on developing an automation first mindset. His passion is to evangelize the energy and connecting power of automation within the technology realm. As a part of his role at Red Hat, Walter has the pleasure of managing a team of automation experts who work directly with clients driving customer success, as well as demonstrating the effects of leveraging automation as a universal language between I.T. organizations.

Walter loves presenting and speaking regularly at conferences like Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest, in addition to participating in webinars, blog posts, and technical reviews. His first book, OpenStack Administration with Ansible, was released in 2016. Walter is a native New Yorker now living in Houston, TX with his lovely wife Tasha and two beautiful daughters, London and Rio. When he is not out promoting technology, Walter enjoys building things around the house (DIY'ing), riding his motorcycle, and is an avid amateur marksman.

David Duncan is a Principal Partner Solutions Architect for Amazon Web Services and maintains the Fedora Cloud Edition as a Fedora Packager. He enjoys working on Ansible Automation and Image building and management projects.

Chad Ferman is a Senior Principal Product Manager for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and has more than 25 years of industry experience in retail, public sector, and most recently oil & gas/manufacturing as the enterprise architect for automation. Over the past year, he has been instrumental in building the edge strategy for Ansible Automation Platform including the addition of new features into the product specifically for edge use cases. Chad is extremely passionate about automation, edge computing, hackathons, and open source methodologies as a means to help empower people to solve practical problems.

Stefanie Chiras is Senior Vice President of Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat, leading Red Hat’s global partner ecosystem engagement., and sheShe plays a critical role in articulating the value of Red Hat's product portfolio within the ecosystem, defining the strategy for partnering with Red Hat for customer success.

Prior to Red Hat, Chiras served as Vice President of Offering Management at IBM Cognitive Systems. As part of the Cognitive Systems brand team, she led worldwide business for the systems and software portfolios, AIX, IBM i, Linux®, and the cloud stack. She has extensive experience in both business and technology, including technical roles that range from silicon technology to system architecture.

Matthew Jones is a Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect of the Ansible Automation Platform for Red Hat and was one of the original developers for Ansible working on Ansible Tower. He has over 20 years of experience building highly scalable software systems across startups and enterprise.

Adam Miller is a Red Hat Senior Principal Software Engineer with a focus in edge management and automation engineering. As a part of the Ansible Business Unit, Adam leverages his role as Architect to develop and support Red Hat Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) for edge management and edge computing within the Ansible Automation Platform. He has not only launched several successful Ansible Automation Platform initiatives targeting new market segments like InfoSec and Industrial Edge, but has also led both the OpenShift Online Release and Fedora engineering team, as well as integrations with OpenShift and RHEL.

Adam graduated from Sam Houston State University with both a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science and Masters of Science in Information Assurance and Security. He is a Red Hat Certified Engineer and an active member of the open source community; he frequently contributes to the Ansible, Fedora, and CentOS Projects.

Kaete Piccirilli is the Director of Product Marketing for Ansible Automation at Red Hat. Prior to joining Red Hat Ansible, she was the product marketing manager for a DevOps implementation training and consulting company. She received an undergraduate degree from Clemson University and an MBA from NC State University. Kaete enjoys spending time with her husband and three daughters and is an avid supporter of the Clemson Tigers. You can follow her on Twitter at @kaetepiccirilli.