VMUG Connect Speakers & Content Sessions

Pablos is an international speaker featured at Davos, Microsoft CEO Summit, the CIA, and many top tech companies in the world. He has worked with icons like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, and his TED Talks, interviews, and speeches have inspired over 30 million viewers.

Pablos Holman | Opening General Session

Hacker, Inventor, and Investor

Pablos is a hacker, inventor and technology futurist with a unique ability to distill complex technology into practical tools. Always building the future, his projects include cryptocurrency in the 1990s; AI for stock market trading; building spaceships at Blue Origin for Jeff Bezos; the world’s smallest PC and 3D printers at Makerbot. Pablos helped start the Intellectual Ventures Lab for Nathan Myhrvold to support a wide range of invention projects, including a brain surgery tool; a machine to suppress hurricanes; a nuclear reactor powered by nuclear waste; and a machine that can shoot mosquitoes out of the sky with lasers – part of an impact invention effort to eradicate malaria with Bill Gates. A member of the most prolific team of inventors in the United States, Pablos has over 70 patents.
 
A world-renowned expert in 3D Printing, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Robotics, Automated Manufacturing, & Cryptocurrency, Pablos has contributed to visions for the future of urban transportation, entertainment, education, energy, manufacturing, health care, food delivery, sensor networks, payment systems & cloud computing.
 
Currently, Pablos is host of the Deep Future podcast and is leading Deep Future investments in startups that are implementing science fiction to solve the biggest problems in the world.

Brenda Emerson | Opening General Session

Chief Information Officer | Carollton Bank | VMUG President

Brenda Emerson is from Clayton, Missouri. She is the CIO for Carrollton Bank. Brenda has served on the VMUG Board of Directors since 2021 and currently holds the position of Secretary/Treasurer. Brenda has over 30 years of Information Technology experience and has been a CIO for the last 10 years.

Frank Denneman | Opening General Session

Chief Technologist, VMware’s Cloud Platform | Broadcom

Frank is the Chief Technologist for VMware’s Cloud Platform Business Unit, focusing on enhancing our product suite to deploy modern workloads and hardware on the vSphere platform successfully. He engages with customers, the press and presents at industry-leading events to generate excitement about the work. As a trusted adviser, Frank gathers feedback from customers and partners to ensure their needs are met by VMware Cloud and Hypervisor products. In addition to his role at VMware, Frank serves as a technical adviser for Hippo Ventures and EVO Venture Partners, providing strategic guidance for their investment portfolio. Frank is a VMware Certified Design Expert, the primary author of frankdenneman.nl, and the host of the podcast Unexplored Territory. He also developed the vSphere Design Pocketbook concept, which allows community members to share their expertise. Frank has co-authored several books as well.

Hock Tan | Closing General Session

President and CEO | Broadcom

Hock Tan is Broadcom President, Chief Executive Officer and Director. He has held this position since March 2006. From 2005 to 2008, he served as chairman of the board of Integrated Device Technology. Prior to becoming chairman of IDT, Mr. Tan was the President and Chief Executive Officer of Integrated Circuit Systems from 1999 to 2005. Mr. Tan was Vice President of Finance with Commodore International from 1992 to 1994, and previously held senior management positions with PepsiCo and General Motors. Mr. Tan served as managing director of Pacven Investment, a venture capital fund in Singapore from 1988 to 1992 and served as managing director for Hume Industries in Malaysia from 1983 to 1988. Mr. Tan currently serves on the Meta Board of Directors.

Chris McCain | Closing General Session

Senior Technologist, Application Networking and Security | Broadcom

Chris McCain is a product management director in the Application Networking and Security franchise at VMware by Broadcom. Chris has over 20 years of experience in the world of information technology. In addition to being a double VCDX in data center virtualization and network virtualization Chris has written several books on virtualization and infrastructure design. As part of his mission at VMware Chris travels around the world talking to customers and partners about VMware vision and strategy for next generation enterprise architecture. Chris is based in St Petersburg, FL.

Matt Heldstab | Closing General Session

Systems Engineer | Minnesota State Colleges & Universities | VMUG Vice President

Matt Heldstab is from Hudson, Wisconsin. He is an Enterprise Systems Engineer for the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system. Matt is focused on core VMware products, automation, application delivery, and EUC.  He is also the VMware practice lead for his system of higher education which serves 33 colleges and universities and over 300,000 students.  Matt has served on the VMUG Board of Directors since 2019, currently holding the position of Vice President. He has also been a co-leader for the Minneapolis VMUG Community Group since 2015.

Justin Sider | Closing General Session

Chief Information Officer | Belay Technologies

Mr. Sider has over 20 years of professional experience in management and as a technical lead, with significant exposure to public speaking in various settings, including: Development of written and visual material for training, proposals, and business public speaking engagements. Presenting new technologies to business leaders, investors, and end-users from both a business and a technical perspective.

Marc Crawford | Closing General Session

Solutions Architect | Crimson Phoenix | St. Louis VMUG

Coming soon!

Wil Gonzalez | Closing General Session

Senior Cloud Engineer | State Agency

Coming soon!

Eric Kubla | Closing General Session

IT Server Manager | Pittsburg VMUG

Coming soon!

Brad Tompkins | Closing General Session

Executive Director | VMUG

Brad Tompkins is the Executive Director of the VMware User Group (VMUG). In his role, he is responsible for providing executive leadership for the organization, as well as participating on the VMUG board who is responsible for advancing its mission by guiding its strategic plan and building a vision for the future. Brad has oversight of all VMUG programs and operations and is focused on driving value for all stakeholders, including VMUG’s 150,000+ members around the world, volunteer leaders, Broadcom, and its partners.

Maarten van Driessen

Freelance Infrastructure Consultant

Coming Soon!

Gaël Aberlenc

CHU de Nîmes | France VMUG

Coming Soon!

Steve Athanas

Boston VMUG | Former VMUG President

Coming soon!

Patrick Coble

Solutions Architect | Crimson Phoenix | St. Louis VMUG

Coming soon!

Kevin Dickens

Lead Technical Solutions Architect | Broadcom

Kevin has a 28 year history with Enterprise and Information Technology after spending 6 years in the U.S. Army as a helicopter pilot. Over the last 20 years with VMware, Kevin continues to serve key Global Fortune 100 customers as the Lead Technical Solutions Architect for Enterprise IT, Telco and Cloud Service Providers. Kevin is a trusted technical and business partner with his customers.

Prateek Duggal

Founder & CEO | CloudsAI Limited | Chandigrah VMUG

Prateek Duggal is a visionary entrepreneur, educator, and an AI specialist, dedicated to bridging the gap between technology and humanity.
 
As the Founder & CEO of CloudsAI, Prateek has established himself as a leader in the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and technology consultancy.
 
His mission revolves around empowering individuals and organizations with innovative solutions, driving progress toward a brighter future.

Austin Gadient

CTO & Co-Founder | Vali Cyber

Austin Gadient is a co-founder of Vali Cyber and serves as the company’s CTO. Austin is the primary author of Vali Cyber’s product, ZeroLock. ZeroLock is the world’s first Linux and hypervisor security product that combines portability, performance, and efficacy into one easy-to-use system. Austin is also the author of SecurityPerf, an open-source framework that determines the impact of security software on production Linux workloads. Prior to starting Vali, Austin was an officer in the United States Air Force and developed secure software architectures for America’s satellite infrastructure. Austin holds a S.M in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he completed a thesis on a novel automatic exploit generation system called RAGE. Austin holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the United States Air Force Academy where he was a captain of the Academy’s competitive hacking team and the number one engineering graduate from the class of 2018.

Kyle Gleed

Product Marketing Engineer, VCP-DCV, VCP-NV | Broadcom

Kyle Gleed is part of VMware by Broadcom’s technical marketing team covering VMware Cloud Foundation. Kyle has been with VMware for 14 years and dedicated to Cloud Foundation for the past eight years. He currently specializes on VMware Cloud Foundation networking and deployment.

William Grismore

Co-founder & CEO | 27 Virtual

William Grismore is the Co-founder and CEO of 27 Virtual. William’s background as both a VMware Certified Instructor (VCI) since 2010 & Principal Architect of many complex Multi-Cloud Data Center Solutions based on VMware VCF & NSX since 2016. And now VMware by Broadcom with both VCF & VCF Networking (NSX) since 2023 has enabled William to build out a strong VMware Professional Service Practice at 27 Virtual. 27 Virtual provides both (Software & Services) of the full VCF Stack and add-ons. 27 Virtual now boasts over 30 Engineers and growing. 27 Virtual was founded in 2006 primarily as an education business, expanded in 2017 to add professional services with complete software & services bundles. To date 27 Virtual has educated literally tens of thousands of folks on VMware Solutions and now has over 300 VMware deployments in general and over 20 VCF deployments under their belt and growing.  

Weiguo He

Head of Technical Marketing, VCF | Broadcom

Weiguo is head of Technical Marketing in the VCF Division at Broadcom, responsible for technical content, enablement, and evangelism of the VCF private cloud platform and its full technology stack including compute, storage, networking, operations, automation, advanced services and workloads.

Morgan Jones

Network Wrangler and Virtualizer | Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP | San Diego VMUG

Experienced Network Engineer with a demonstrated history of working in the law practice industry. Strong information technology professional skilled in Storage Area Network (SAN), VMware ESX, VMWare NSX, iSCSI and FC Storage, Servers, and Windows Server.

Jens Klasen

Evangelist | CID GmbH

Jens Klasen is a seasoned Technology Evangelist with over 25 years of experience in the IT industry. He specializes in data center management, hybrid cloud, and AI. As an Evangelist at CID GmbH, he focuses on technology transfer, architectural design, and innovative cloud solutions.
 
Beyond his professional role, Jens is deeply involved in the IT community as a VMUG Leader and an active contributor to various user groups. He is passionate about sharing knowledge, making emerging technologies accessible, and helping IT professionals grow. With extensive experience in presales, architecture, and business strategy, he has established himself as a trusted advisor, guiding customers and partners in optimizing their IT landscapes.

William Lam

Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect, VCF | Broadcom

William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using either VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). One of his primary responsibilities is driving VMware’s Customer[0] organization and co-developing products and services with both Product and Engineering leaders, by providing early feedback on the usability, design and architecture across VMware’s Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud offerings. Lastly, through customer interactions he continues champion their challenges and needs to help further improve VMware’s products and services.

Nathan McMahon

Director, Global Sales Enablement, AVI Networks | Broadcom

Nathan is a twenty-five year industry veteran in the load balancing industry, having been in various customer facing roles since the late 90s. He has been with Avi Networks since its inception, providing assistance to field engineering for high profile customers and environments. Prior to Avi, Nathan spent 13 years at F5 Networks in solution architect and customer advocacy roles. Nathan holds patents for load balancing and traffic distribution algorithms commonly used today.

Dave Morera

Staff Technical Marketing Architect | Broadcom

Staff Technical Marketing Architect at VMware. In my role, I cover topics related to Private AI Foundation, Persistent Memory, hardware accelerators (DPUs, GPUs), and everything core vSphere.

Alec Pinkham

Product Marketing Manager, AppNeta Solution | Broadcom

Alec is a Product Marketing Manager for the AppNeta solution at Broadcom. He spent seven years with AppNeta in the Application and Network Performance Monitoring space before joining Broadcom. Prior to AppNeta his background is in software product management in HMI/SCADA solutions for industrial automation as well as mechanical engineering for computer drafting and passive stormwater filtration systems.

Bob Plankers

Product Marketing Engineer | Broadcom

Bob Plankers has spent three decades leading teams that design, build, operate, and automate reliable & secure IT infrastructure, as both an end user and part of product development teams. He currently focuses on applied security, compliance, and operational resilience within the VMware vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation platforms at Broadcom. He can often be found talking about his experiences on stage, in person, and even sometimes on YouTube, in his authentic, humorous manner.
Outside of work he can be found hanging around with his family, watering his garden, feeding pellets to his smoker, teaching his AIs new tricks, or at the Stoughton Conservation Club in Stoughton, WI where he serves on its board of directors.

Daniel Richison

Cloud Solutions Architect | NetApp

Coming soon!

Corey Romero

Senior Community (vExpert) Manager | Broadcom

Corey is a seasoned professional in the tech industry with over 29 years of experience. Starting his career as a Web Developer in 1996, he has successfully navigated through various roles, from designing website functionality to building enterprise-level websites.
 
Currently, he manages VMware’s Global Evangelist vExpert program, where he leverages his passion for technology and community building to enhance digital engagement and outreach. Corey is also a sought-after speaker at technology events, known for his insightful talks that bridge technical knowledge and industry trends.
 
Outside of work, he is passionate about the outdoors and enjoys engaging in fishing, hiking, and motocross in Utah with his sons.

Joel Schwartz

Solutions Architect | Broadcom

Joel has over 12 years of experience in the healthcare industry as a VI Administrator and Datacenter Architect, making him a valuable member of the VMWare Digital Services team. He has honed his expertise through his extensive involvement with VMware solutions and his active participation in two VMUG chapters and VCF Experience Days as an instructor.
 
Beyond his professional accomplishments, Joel had a memorable year in 2023 as he got married in Hawaii, together, he and his wife are proud parents of six children. When he’s not working or spending time with his family, he enjoys walking in nature, playing racquetball and watching hockey.
 
Currently, he manages VMware’s Global Evangelist vExpert program, where he leverages his passion for technology and community building to enhance digital engagement and outreach. Corey is also a sought-after speaker at technology events, known for his insightful talks that bridge technical knowledge and industry trends.
 
Outside of work, he is passionate about the outdoors and enjoys engaging in fishing, hiking, and motocross in Utah with his sons.

Darryl Shorts

Staff Technical Adoption Manager | Broadcom

Darryl Shorts is a Multi-Cloud Technical Adoption Manager at Broadcom and has been passionately assisting Healthcare customers in solving highly challenging IT problems for the past 7 years. He started his career in Information Technology in the early 2000’s as a Support Desk Analyst and by 2007 worked his way to a position as an Enterprise Architect for a major Healthcare provider. By leveraging his highly technical skillset and keen business acumen, this allows him to focus on helping Healthcare customers better understand how to minimize security risks, speed up delivery of services, and increase their agility – all by adopting and consuming Broadcom products, solutions, and services.

Dave Simpson

London VMUG | VMUG Board Director

Coming soon!

Suresh Thoppay

Coming soon!

Coming soon!

Stephen Wagner

Coming soon!

Coming soon!

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