The DC CTO Roundtable and Greenspring Associates present a virtual event on the state of the "Low Code" space. The event: Low Code App Dev - Drag and Drop Programming a Reality? will be held on Thursday, February 11, 2021 from 3:30 PM – 5 PM (Note the earlier start than usual).
 
Promises of drag and drop programming have been around for some time. Join us to see how this emerging technology can impact and streamline enterprise application development. We are including a diverse set of perspectives from an VC and two rising low code tool providers combined with real-life customer examples:
 
3:30 – 3:35: Welcome
Yuvi Kochar & Huff Millard

3:30 – 3:50: Venture View on Low Code
Luca Bocchio, Accel

3:50 – 4:15: Tray.IO ad use by Airbnb
Alistair Russel, CTO, Tray  & Hoon Kim, Airbnb

4:15 – 4:40: Bryter and use by Customer
Michael Grupp, CET, Bryter

4:40 – 5:00: Open Discussion with Q&A
 
 
Our partners: Greenspring Associates
We are partnering with Huff Millard of Greenspring to host a web-conference on Zoom. 

Enterprises are deploying AI-driven solutions at a rapid pace. A large number of startups are delivering innovative technologies to further simplify the development and implementation of new capabilities. During our recent CTO Roundtable, we heard from two such startups.

Ankur Goyal of Impira and Alex Ratner of Snorkel AI discussed how AI-based technologies are helping CTOs make their organizations more productive and efficient.

Impira is an AI powered automation platform that helps you leverage valuable data trapped in pdf documents, images, and other files. Fortune 500 companies use the platform to reduce operating costs by up to 90%, automating the arduous processes associated with application forms, order forms, invoices, insurance claims, and more. Impira is different from RPA firms, OCR applications, and simple data extraction tools, which all deploy pre-trained solutions that can be people intensive, expensive, and time consuming to implement.

Ankur Goyal is the Founder & CEO of Impira. Previously, Ankur built and scaled the engineering team at MemSQL. He received his B.S. in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science and holds several patents in database and AI technology.

Snorkel AI is an early-stage company developing Snorkel Flow, a new data-first platform for enterprise machine learning aimed at making AI adoption fast, practical, and adaptable. Snorkel Flow's end-to-end approach solves one of the greatest blockers to enterprise adoption of AI today — the labeling and management of the "training data" that fuels modern AI — using a new programmatic approach developed at the Stanford AI Lab, and deployed at places like Google, Intel, Apple, Dept. of Justice, FDA, DARPA, and others.

Alex Ratner is the co-founder and CEO of Snorkel AI. He also serves as an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. Alex holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he was supported by a Stanford Bio-X fellowship. His research focused on applying data management and statistical learning techniques to emerging machine learning workflows, such as creating and managing training data, and applying this to real-world problems in medicine, knowledge base construction, and more.

Our partners: Lightspeed
We partnered with Saqib Awan of Lightspeed to host the web-conference on Zoom.

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
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