The discussion would be kicked-off by Guru Chahal. Guru will give us an overview of the rapid innovation underway in the areas of networking, security, DevOps, observability / ops tools, cloud infrastructure, and application development. Guru will give us an overview of the rapid innovation underway in the areas of networking, security, DevOps, observability / ops tools, cloud infrastructure, and application development.
 
Guru’s talk would be followed by a discussion of next-generation networking by Devesh Garg, founder and CEO of Arrcus. Arrcus is focused on interconnecting people, machines, and data by developing software-powered next-generation networks. The company is democratizing networking by providing best-in-class software, the most flexible consumption model and the lowest total cost of ownership.
 
Devesh is a seasoned technology executive with global entrepreneurial, strategic, and operational experience in early stage start-ups as well as private and public market leaders. Devesh has been at the forefront of several technology and business market inflections including the EDA industry, digitization of broadband communications, multi-core processing, and the emerging markets of Asia. He is a passionate builder of teams, businesses, and world-class companies.
 
Devesh has an MBA from Santa Clara University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from San Jose State University. A sports enthusiast and avid adventure traveler, Devesh has trekked to base camp at Mt. Everest and with his family has explored over 40 countries and countless cities.
 
Our partners: Lightspeed
We are partnering with Saqib Awan of Lightspeed to host a web-conference on Zoom.

We are excited to announce our first on-line event:

• Chaos Engineering
• Thursday, June 4, 2020 from 4 PM – 5 PM

Per Wikipedia: “Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a software system in production in order to build confidence in the system's capability to withstand turbulent and unexpected conditions. Given the current environment, this is a very relevant topic for us to discuss.
 
Kolton Andrus is the CEO of Gremlin, the first company focused on delivering Chaos Engineering as a Service. Kolton is an early pioneer of Chaos Engineering, with a decade of experience doing this 'in production'. He has built Chaos Engineering platforms for Amazon, Netflix, and now for the world with Gremlin to resolve internet scale outages.
 
Kolton will discuss how much reliability is enough reliability and share his experience, from not just Amazon and Netflix, but also from working with Gremlin's customers to scale their reliability. He’ll describe what each level of availability looks like, the challenges faced at each stage, and the tradeoffs required to achieve the next nine of uptime.
 
Our partners: Greenspring Associates
We are partnering with Huff Millard of Greenspring to host a web-conference on Zoom.

Our next CTO Roundtable on Applied AI: Process Optimization will be held on Thursday, Nov 7, 2019 from 8 to 10 AM.
 
Process Automation is one of the primary areas where IT has delivered significant value to all business over the past several decades. Business and IT professionals are very comfortable with acquiring and implementing new technology solutions to continue to streamline processes and create efficiencies. Therefore, it is not surprising that this is where we are seeing quick adoption of ML / AI technologies. During our next Roundtable, 3 very knowledgeable speakers would review two generalized solutions in the space and discuss the broader use of this new technology in Process Optimization.
 
I expect this to be a valuable discussion with immediate applicability within your business. If you are looking for a way to introduce ML / AI solutions to your organization, this is where you might wish to start. You should make it a point to attend!
 
We have a packed agenda and need to start the presentations earlier than usual (please arrive at 8AM!):

• 8:00 AM: Networking & light breakfast
• 8:10 AM: Introduction, Sphere of Influence (our hosts)
• 9:00 AM: UIPath
• 9:40 AM: Discussion

 
About our Presenters

• Thad Scheer (we all know Thad!), Partner at Sphere of Influence, has been focused on developing bespoke AI/ML solutions longer than anyone else I know.
  
  Thad will share examples of where ML/AI technologies are delivering significant value.

• Justin Greenberger, VP – Customer Success, Americas, UIPath
  Justin is an experienced technology executive with a demonstrated history of operational transformation utilizing software & systems. He is responsible for ensuring customer success at UIPath.
  
  Prior to joining UIPath, as VP and CIO of GE Digital, Justin led the enterprise Digital Technology (DT) strategy for GE’s software business, responsible for driving simplified data and streamlined systems for the company.
  
  Justin would share with us the reasons for the rapid growth UIPath, making it the latest hot startup, and provide a technical view of their solutions.

 
The team at Sphere Of Influence has again graciously agreed to host us at:
1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level
McLean, VA 22102

​After our very successful and well received 3-part series on Serverless Technologies, our next session would be a review of the Patent Landscape for CTOs on Friday, September 27, 2019 from 8 to 10 AM.
 
The session will be led by Hussein Akhavannik, a Partner at BakerHostetler, one of the nation’s largest law firms.
 
Today, CTOs should have a solid understanding of intellectual property issues. One of the core items that needs to be well understood is how the Patent system works in the US and globally. During the session, we will review the different types of patents and protection that can be utilized for different technologies. We will cover the some of the newest changes to Patent Law, Open Source and Trade Secret elements.
  
Thad Scheer and the Management team at Sphere Of Influence have again graciously agreed to host us at:
Tysons Corner Studios – Conference Center
1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level
McLean, VA 22102

The session would be led by Microsoft Cloud Architect Kyle Wilson. The initial part of this talk focuses on exploring a simple model for application modernization strategy. We then dive into the Serverless capabilities of Azure and how they can be leveraged in support of the application modernization process. We will cover technical insights into the pros and cons of various approaches along with some specific examples and demonstrations. The goal of the talk is to bring more clarity on the Serverless offerings in Azure and how they fit into a broader cloud/application modernization strategy.
 
Kyle Wilson has been working in technology for over 20 years.  As a technical resource at Microsoft he interacts with customers on a daily basis, helping them take advantage of the cloud to change the way they think about their business and their digital transformation journey. He spent a long time in the consulting world helping customers adopt collaboration portals and other web technologies before joining Microsoft 5 years ago.  He currently works as an Azure architect and technical specialist helping enterprise customers and partners digitally transform their businesses with Azure based services.
 
David McDonald, Director of the Reston Microsoft Technology Center, would kick off the event and join Kyle for follow-up Q&A. At the Reston MTC, Microsoft empowers customers and partners to digitally transform their organizations through the Microsoft Cloud. The MTC Director is the leader of a high performing team of technical architects as well as a customer centric facility designed to engage customers and help them envision the art of the possible with Microsoft Cloud Solutions.  Prior to being the MTC Director, David was the Technical Director of the MTC and a Technical Architect.  Throughout David’s career, including 25 years at Microsoft, he has worked with Government and Commercial enterprises helping them develop and deploy mission critical enterprise business solutions.

WHEN: May 10, 2019 from 8 AM - 10 AM

WHERE: Sphere Of Influence, 1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level, McLean, VA 22102

The first session in our series on Application Modernization with Serverless Technologies was presented by Amazon Web Services (AWS).  The session was led by Rory Richardson, Head of Business Development for Serverless at AWS, and she will discuss how enterprises can apply DevOps, microservices and serverless to innovate faster, at scale. Learn how Amazon got from four to over 60 million deployments per year and benefit from their key learnings from building modern apps at Amazon.com. Covering the transition from a monolithic application to event-driven serverless microservices, this session will dive into the reasons more and more Amazon customers are choosing the serverless operational model. By leveraging AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, AWS Fargate, SNS, SQS, and the entire serverless portfolio, customers are able to innovate faster and focus more on their core businesses.
 
Rory has been driving business development with some of the fastest growing and innovative services at AWS such as Aurora and DynamoDB. She is now head of business development for Amazon’s Serverless technologies which include Lambda, StepFunctions and API Gateway, as well as, enterprise messaging such as AmazonMQ, SNS, and SQS. These technologies enable customers to move to a microservice architecture. A serverless microservice architecture lets companies increase business agility, reduce undifferentiated heavy lifting, and optimize costs by paying only for what they use.

WHEN: April 5, 2019 from 8 AM - 10 AM

WHERE: Sphere Of Influence, 1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level, McLean, VA 22102
​

In domain after domain, Deep Learning is outperforming both people and competing algorithms at practical tasks:

• ImageNet Hit@5 object recognition error rates have fallen 88% since 2011 and can now recognize objects in photos faster and better than you can
• All major speech recognition engines (Google's, Baidu's, Siri, etc.) automatically translate a speaker's voice in one language to the same voice speaking another language.
• Machines can now beat you at Atari and Go

 
These breakthroughs are visible as both product offerings (Siri, Real-time Ray-tracing on NVIDIA Turing cards, Netflix Recommendations, etc.) as well as breakthrough results on international open benchmarks. All successful deep learning product teams:

1. Identify the best-matched organizational opportunities to drive ROI with machine learning
2. Address the talent crunch for deep learning expertise
3. Warehouse sufficiently large labeled data sets for training and
4. Update their models at scale as data distributions drift over time

 
We will review all four of these considerations, understand some of the key discriminators between product success and failure, and learn how to identify opportunities best suited for the application of Deep Learning.
 
Dr. John Kaufhold, data scientist and managing partner at Deep Learning Analytics, will lead the discussion. Deep Learning Analytics was one of the four fastest growing companies by revenue in Arlington, Virginia in 2015, and again in 2016. Dr. Kaufhold also serves as Secretary of the Washington Academy of Sciences and is a regular contributor to the DC Data Community, where he moderates the DC2 Deep Learning Discussion list. Prior to founding Deep Learning Analytics, Dr. Kaufhold investigated deep learning algorithms at NIH, SAIC and at GE's Global Research Center. Dr. Kaufhold is named inventor on 10 issued patents in image analysis, and author/coauthor on 40+ publications in the fields of machine learning, image understanding and neuroscience.

WHEN: December 17, 2018  from 8 AM - 10 AM

WHERE: Sphere Of Influence, 1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level, McLean, VA 22102
​

The move from an application-centric to a more data-centric and integrated systems approach is well underway. We’ve been successfully re-engineering workflows from internal user targets to include users across multiple stakeholders, multiple institutions, and disparate systems using REST based APIs for a while now. However, as the number of endpoints and integrated systems increase, the most significant limitations of REST-based APIs must be resolved:

• Discovery
• Flexibility
• Type-safety of data exchange
• Traceability
• Observability

 
There are a few emerging approaches worth considering – namely:

• GraphQL for next generation data-centric API endpoints
• gRPC for next-generation functionality-centric API endpoints
• Distributed event-oriented programming as an approach to create a more flexible and reliable systems integration strategy
• OpenTracing and OpenCensus for increased observability across complex API pathways across multiple boundaries

 
Shahid Shah, one of the most engaged CTO Roundtable member, has architected, designed and implemented several projects using these new approaches and will lead the discussion on the topic. Shahid, CEO of Netspective Communications, is a serial entrepreneur with over 28 years technology strategy and software engineering experience. He had led several complex projects in the fields of Government 2.0, Health IT, and Medical Device Integration. He has co-founded and led Netspective.com, Physia.com, InfluentialNetworks.com, HealthcareGuy.com, HITSphere.com, and simplifyMD.com within the last few years. Shahid also serves as a senior technology advisor to OMB’s Budget System Branch, the eGov Budget Formulation & Execution Line of Business (BFELoB.gov), Veterans Affairs (VA.gov), OSEHRA.org, and Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC.gov).
 
WHEN: October 12, 2018 from 8 AM - 10 AM

WHERE: Sphere Of Influence, 1420 Spring Hill Rd., Lobby Level, McLean, VA 22102

​