Service assurance and IoT
Moderator Kelly Hill, technology reporter at RCR Wireless News, is joined by Jim McNiel, Chief Marketing Officer at Netscout, Anand Gonuguntla, CEO, Centina Systems and Jason Shepherd, Director IoT Strategy and Partnerships, Dell in a panel to discuss Service Assurance and IoT at the Enterprise IoT Summit, in Austin, Texas.
Kelly Hill currently reports on network test and measurement, as well as the use of big data and analytics. She first covered the wireless industry for RCR Wireless News in 2005, focusing on carriers and mobile virtual network operators, then took a few years’ hiatus and returned to RCR Wireless News to write about heterogeneous networks and network infrastructure. Kelly is an Ohio native with a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on science writing and multimedia. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Canton Repository.
Jim McNiel joined Netscout in July 2014 to lead worldwide Corporate Marketing activities. He has over 30 years of experience in the technology industry as an entrepreneur, leader, and technologist. Mr. McNiel was the President and CEO of publicly traded FalconStor Software, the inventor of Virtual Tape Library, and a pioneer in the virtualized storage market. Prior to FalconStor, he was the President and CEO of Fifth Generation Systems. Before this, Mr. McNiel was General Partner at Pequot Capital for nine years where he invested in and served on the boards of: Netegrity, OutlookSoft, NetGear, Asia Online, Bowstreet, and many others. Prior to Pequot, he was Executive Vice President of Corporate Development at Cheyenne Software with responsibilities for business development, OEM sales, Product Management, and Investor Relations. During his tenure at Cheyenne, Mr. McNiel was also instrumental in the creation of ARCServe, the world’s first client server backup solution. Cheyenne was acquired by CA for $1.2 billion in 1996. Previous to Cheyenne, he held engineering and senior management roles at Lucasfilm and AST Research.
Mr. McNiel is a graduate of the Advanced Management Program at the Wharton School of Business.
With over 15 years’ experience in the telecom industry, Anand Gonuguntla co-founded Centina Systems. Prior to his current role, Anand was the Director of Systems and Software Engineering at Xtera. Anand also held management positions in software and program management at Fujitsu where he worked on FLM and FLASHWAVE product lines. Anand holds a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of North Dakota and a bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, India. He has published in Proceedings of ACM and holds a patent in network management.
Jason Shepherd is the Director of Strategy and Partnerships for Dell’s Internet of Things (IoT) division which is developing solutions anchored on edge gateways for commercial use cases in verticals such as buildings, manufacturing, transportation, and logistics. He manages a team of industry SMEs and has overall responsibility for the Dell IoT Solutions Partner Program, a curated community of Industrial IoT solution providers. He started his career at Dell as an engineer and then worked at several tech startups where he gained broad experience spanning product design to sales engineering. He returned to Dell in 2006 to manage Precision mechanical engineering before being tapped to lead a R&D team that pitched new solution concepts to senior leadership. Prior to his current role he was a technologist in Dell’s Office of the CTO where he developed numerous software innovations and helped lead the strategic core team that triggered Dell’s entrance into the IoT space. He holds 14 granted and 11 pending US patents.