Join Us! Hybrid Chicago Assembly

Apex Assembly is excited to be bringing together 60+ CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, CISOs and other Divisional Leaders from F500 and Global 2000 Enterprise organizations for our Hybrid Assembly using Bizzabo as the event success software to create a more immersive, successful experience. We will unite the Chicago-based executives for a day of panels, thought leadership discussions, a networking lunch and more. Apex will be using the Virtual Platform to bring together a more national audience through live streams to engage and join in the discussion.?

In collaboration with industry-leading speakers and our sponsors IBM, Traceable AI, TigerGraph, DataStax, Denodo, Privitar, ForgeRock, Check Point Software, CoreSite, Arctic Wolf, Oomnitza, and Source Defense we will examine the challenges and concentrate on the most pressing issues that lie ahead in 2022 and 2023.

Assembly Sponsors Include

Panels & Sessions

We will kick off the day with The Opening Keynote Panel on, "Top Trends & Challenges for CIOs & CISO's and CDO’s in 2022" moderated by Brian Benn, CIO of Atlanta Housing Authority. Joining the panel is Edip Pektas, Chief Innovation Officer with Alliance Ground International, MJ McSheehy, CISO at the Addison Group, Anil Saldanha, Chief Cloud Officer with Rush University System for Health, Akshay Bissoon, CIO|CISO, at Lussier, and Kemas Ohale, GISO at SMC.

Next up, IBM will be giving the Keynote Presentation on “Empowering IT to drive innovation” by Mandy Long, Vice President, Management & AIOps with IBM.

IT leaders are looking for ways to align strategy and execution to optimize their business results. Increasingly, CIOs need to build adaptive and resilient operations to enable the entire organization to move at the speed the business is growing, all while optimizing cost and resources. Join IBM’s VP of Management & AIOps, Mandy Long, as we discuss how businesses are leveraging IBM’s AIOps solutions to address increased IT demands, and how platforms like IBM’s Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps can proactively detect service issues, reduce outages, and provide automated resolution guidance to take corrective actions with runbook automations, ultimately accelerate time-to-value and reducing MTTR by 50% or more.

Traceable AI, will give a presentation on “API Security from 0 to 360” by Ashish Kuthiala, CMO & DevSecOps Evangelist with Traceable AI. Traceable AI enables security and engineering teams to move in lock-step with fast-moving API-driven applications, enabling purpose-built API protection that blocks sophisticated API cyberattacks.? Powered by machine learning, Traceable AI delivers enterprise-grade API Security to your cloud-native applications.

Following that, TigerGraph, a Technical Demo Presenter, will speak on “Accelerate AI projects with Graph Analytics – a faster path to production and shorter time to value” given by Steve Matthews, Sales Engineering Manager, TigerGraph. Gartner famously stated in 2017 that 85% of data science projects fail. Many reasons have been put forward for the dismal success rate, and most commentators agree that the cultural obstacles are the most intractable: everything takes too long, and business can’t afford to wait. Too often, initiatives lose momentum and executive sponsors lose patience.??

Graph analytics is not just technically powerful, it also breaks down cultural barriers because it reflects the way people think, how we see patterns in data, and how we use those patterns to inform our decisions and actions. Graphs enable business users to get started with the imperfect data that they have, not the perfectly cleansed data that they would like.

Then, DataStax will give a talk on “Empowering Business with Data-In-Motion” given by George Trujillo, Principal Data Strategist at DataStax. The demand for business insights and innovation with data-in-motion are driving significant change in real-time data strategy.? This discussion will share best practices in accelerating value from data, reducing data ecosystem complexity and the evolving view of real-time data architecture.? The importance of a data operating model and execution patterns for consistent improvement and delivery is included.? The goal is to highlight the importance of building the right technology stack to drive the next generation of digital applications and analytics. ?

Next, Denodo will host the CXO Panel on “How to Meet the Data Demands of the Business In the Post-pandemic World” moderated by Mike Woods, Vice President Central Region U.S. with Denodo. Joining the panel is Mir Ali, Head of Software Engineering with The Kraft Heinz, Tim Riddle, Senior Product Director, Enterprise Analytics with Premier Inc, Amy Bloedorn, SVP, Head of Data Governance with Northern Trust, and Eric Meyer, Director Digital Analytics with University of Chicago Booth School of Business. CTO, CDO, and CDAO executives now need to meet the increasing demands of business users from different lines of business, who have become increasingly sophisticated in their uses for data. This need requires technology leaders to respond expeditiously from technology, process, and organization perspectives. What are the best practices, dos and don’ts? This distinguished panel will share their thoughts as to how to meet the needs of this wide range of data consumers with varying degrees of skill set and data needs

Privitar, will follow with a presentation on “Modern Data Provisioning:?How Privitar empowers organizations to use their data safely and ethically” given by Bill Ziske, SVP of Sales, North America with Privitar.

Next is ForgeRock, with a presentation on "AutoAccess: Future of Just In Time Provisioning'' given by Zee Alsayag, Senior Sales Engineer with ForgeRock. Attend this session to learn how AI powered threat protection can help you: Protect your organization from account takeover fraud and Analyze threat patterns to make real time risk based decisions.

Check Point will give a presentation on "The Problem with EMAIL and Legacy Security Solutions'' given by David Wheeler, Cyber Security Evangelist, Office of the CTO, Security Engineering Manager, Illinois with Check Point Software. Email is the primary entry point for malicious files and a major contributor to business compromise.? Modern email security requires a modern approach that goes beyond static analysis and must have the ability to prevent email threats **before** they reach the recipient’s inbox.? Sadly many well-known email security solutions were not written to address modern SaaS-based email, are complex to configure, and are not effective at preventing modern-day threats.? This presentation provides a brief summary of current email threats, inadequacies of secure email gateway and next generation email security solutions, and outlines an effective approach to address these threats and security shortcomings.?

Next, CoreSite will give a talk on "The Case for Going Native: Why Businesses are Choosing Direct Connections to Public Cloud Providers" given by Chris Straley, Senior Director of Sales Engineering at CoreSite and Ron Rodi, Director at CoreSite.

Businesses need a multi-cloud strategy that’s tailored for their operations and long-range infrastructure vision. Public cloud is almost always part of the overall vision. While cutting costs has always been a primary objective for cloud adoption, what many companies experience is that their?data egress?charges far exceed expectations.

There’s a way to solve that problem… DIRECT CONNECT or NATIVE CLOUD ONRAMP. It’s the fastest and most reliable avenue to your digital ecosystem and customers – and?60%-70% cost savings on data egress rates. By leveraging direct connection to public cloud, businesses can also enhance security and reliability, improve performance and reduce total cost of operations.

Kicking off the afternoon we have a CISO Panel on “State of Security & Risk in 2022, Empowering CISOs and their teams" moderated by Brian Benn, CIO of Atlanta Housing. Joining the panel will be Maher Rahman, VP of information Security with Inteliquent, Kathleen Ogurek, VP IT & Security of Kelly Services, Donna Beatty, Director Digital Identity and Fraud, London Stock Exchange, Shilpi Ganguly, VP, IT & Cybersecurity with The Weather Channel (Allen Media Group), and Scot Miller, CISO at Mr. Cooper?.

We will then have a Thought Leadership Presentation on “Optimize Business Operation Representatives Productivity Using Cloud AI/ML Solutions” given by Naresh Chintalcheru, Director, Software Engineering with XPO Logistics. Brokerage business representatives get high volume of emails from Customers for freight quotes every single day which includes manual work and some amount of research to send response. The Customer quote requests are time-sensitive in nature few hours of delay result in loss of loads and revenue to competitors. Let’s hear the story of how empowering engineers to solve complex business problems using Cloud AI/ML solution helped our business operation reps productive.

Next, is a CXO Panel on “The Role you play in Diversity, Inclusion, and Leadership” moderated by Kathleen Ogurek, VP IT & Security of Kelly Services. Joining the panel we have Taruna Rai, VP of Information Technology with Articulate, Nisaruddin Syed, Director Operations & Infrastructure at Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, Altaf Uddin, Information Systems Director with University of Kansas and Mike Kissel, Director Information Technology with Schnuck Markets Inc.

Following that we will then have a CIO & CDO Panel on “Keys to unlock your Cloud & Infrastructure Journey“ moderated by Amul Mago. Joining the panel will be Steve Young, Vice President of Technology & Innovation with VIA Metropolitan Transit, Raj Singh, Managing Director, Cloud Platform Engineering with State Street Bank and Trust, and Seema Jayaram, VP Technology with Wolters Kluwer.?

We will close out the day with our Closing CXO Fireside Chat speaking on “The Future Enterprise AI: Data Analytics, Data Science and Machine Learning“. Joining the discussion is Kiko Doblado, Head of Digital Experience with The National Alliance for Insurance Education and Research, Raymond Parpart, Director Data Center Strategy & Operations at University of Chicago and Rajendra Gangavarapu, SVP Credit & Portfolio Analytics with MetaBank.

You can also find our partners Oomitza, Source Defense and Clumio located in our Networking Hub throughout the course of the day.

Following the Assembly, Arctic Wolf will host a cocktail hour where John Mulroy, Enterprise Account Executive with Arctic Wolf will be present.??

Through these thought leadership sessions, panels and live chats we will bring to the forefront today's top successes, challenges and focus areas for CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, CISOs and other Divisional Leaders in the enterprise.?

Apex Assembly specializes in bringing together technology leaders from the world’s largest companies to discuss technology trends and focus on solving their biggest technology challenges. By uniting exclusive C-level communities, Apex offers unparalleled opportunities to mindshare in a secure environment and collaborate on industry trends, challenges and successes. Headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, Apex Assembly hosts regional and national events focused on open discussion and education to assist technology leaders in building lasting business relationships. Learn more at https://apexassembly.com