Greg Day
Director of EMEA Security Strategy, McAfee

Bio

Greg Day is director of EMEA security strategy for McAfee, driving the enablement of business solutions for strategic customer accounts, channel partners and sales teams. He is also the primary analyst of security trends and McAfee strategy in the region. As an active spokesperson for the company, he is a frequent contributor to journals, has had numerous papers published and is a keynote speaker on all aspects of information security at conferences and events across EMEA. Day has taken an active role in promoting awareness of today’s broader security challenges and has played a key role in a range of initiatives designed to highlight and address these issues, both today and in the future.

Day has worked in the information security industry since 1991, having started his career with Dr Solomon’s, where he built and led a consultancy team. Dr Solomon’s was subsequently acquired by McAfee and Day has since held a number of different roles within the company. He was instrumental in founding the company’s best practices team and has also worked as a global solutions architect, providing senior consultancy to McAfee’s blue chip customers and high-security government offices and remains an active member of McAfee Labs, the company’s global threat analysis and response team.

Day is the EMEA lead for McAfee’s cybercrime fighting initiative, working closely with law enforcement agencies, government and private sector groups to tackle and educate on this growing threat.

Day has a BSc (Hons) in Information Systems from the University of Portsmouth and wrote his own TSR (Terminate Stay Resident) virus interceptor in assembler language as part of his dissertation on computer viruses. He lives in Buckinghamshire with his family and is a keen skier, scuba diver and golfer.

Shane Grennan
Country Manager, Fortinet Ireland

Bio

Shane Grennan is Country Manager for Fortinet Ireland. Working with customers and partners, he is focused on raising awareness of Fortinet's capabilities in the Irish market. Shane joined Fortinet in 2009 with a long history working in networking and security vendors in Ireland, the UK and Asia. His breadth of engineering experience in all areas of networking and security give him a deep understanding of the key value that Fortinet solutions can bring to customers.

Living in Dublin and an Engineering graduate of NUIG, Shane held various senior Systems Engineering positions in the early part of his career, in such companies as IBM, Nortel and Eircom. Shane has presented at many industry events using his experience to bridge the technology and business divide.

Dr Geoff Bradley
Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing (TCHPC)

Bio

Geoff Bradley, PhD, MBA, is Director (Acting) of TCHPC and a part time lecturer in Trinity College Dublin. He has been instrumental in the development of High Performance Computing (HPC) services in Ireland having: led the delivery of the first national service; carried out the first national review of HPC users' requirements; provided local and national HPC and visualisation infrastructure through the PRTLI funded IITAC and e-INIS programmes; demonstrated technology transfer of HPC to SME's and multinationals and participated in the early stage development of the spin-out company Crème Software Ltd.; and acted as the Irish Partner in the FP6/7 funded HPC-Europa program providing researchers with access to training, consultancy, and collaborative visits to some of Europe’s largest HPC systems. He has also recently led the delivery of advanced research computing solutions for the Irish Prostate Cancer Research Consortium, the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing and the Irish African Partnership.

Scott Coombs
Senior Business Consultant, Version 1

Bio

Scott Coombs is a Senior Business Analyst with IT Consulting and Outsourcing firm Version 1. Scott has over 17 years’ experience in the IT industry and has worked on a number of large-scale projects in the higher education sector. Before joining Version 1, Scott worked for Oracle in both Ireland and USA, managed the delivery of internal solutions for a global e-bank based in Ireland, and was part of the management team for a national change management programme in the higher education sector in Ireland.

Ian Fitzgerald
Senior Manager - EMEA App Hosting and Data Centre Operations, IT Department, EMC²

Bio

Ian Fitzgerald, in his eleventh year at EMC, drives EMC IT’s journey to the Private Cloud in EMEA. He leads the EMEA Application Hosting and Data Centre Operations teams, playing an integral role in developing an internal IT-as-a-Service model.

Ian’s team drives the adoption of new technologies such as Next Generation Backups, Deduplication, Archiving and Virtualization, while also pursuing an IT Sustainability agenda.

He engages in ‘Conversations in IT’ with EMC customers, and recently presented EMC’s Cloud Strategy to the Irish Minister for the Environment and Telecommunications. Prior to joining EMC, Ian worked in the IT Department of the Irish Post Office – the first to do so as part of their Graduate Program, having qualified with a Business Degree and postgraduate diploma in Computer Science.

On his downtime, Ian likes to indulge in his passions – family, football, and cooking.

Victor Reijs
Network Develoment Manager, HEAnet

Bio

After studying at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, Victor Reijs worked for KPN Telecom Research and SURFnet. He was involved in CLNS/TUBA (one of the earlier alternatives for IPv6). Experience was gained with X.25 and ATM in a national and international environment. His last activity at SURFnet was the tender for SURFnet5 (a step towards optical networking). Emigrating to Ireland, he is managing the Network Development department of HEAnet and is actively involved in international activities such as GN3, FEDERICA and MANTYCHORE (IP Networks as a Service), as well as (optical) networking, point-to-point links, virtualisation and monitoring in general.

Marco Ruffini
Lecturer on optical network architectures, TCD

Bio

Marco Ruffini is currently a lecturer on optical network architectures at the department of computer science of the University of Dublin, Trinity College, where he obtained his PhD in 2007. He is part of the CTVR telecommunication research centre and his research interests include low-based optical switching, experimental optical testbeds, long-reach PON, cross-layer and cognitive optical networks, and techno economic studies of next-generation transparent architectures. He worked on wireless inter-vehicle communications at Philips Research Laboratories in Aachen (2003-2005), and before that as a technology consultant for Accenture, Milan. He holds a degree in electronic engineering from Universita' Politecnica delle Marche in Italy (2002).

Mark O’Leary
JANET

Bio

Mark O’Leary is JANET(UK)’s specialist on network access issues, encompassing wireless, mobile broadband, last mile technologies such as LLU and various niche applications that require innovative connectivity solutions. He also delivers JANET’s training courses in the wireless area. He has been with JANET(UK)’s strategic technologies division for 4 years, having previously worked in the networking unit of the University of Manchester. His academic background is as both a molecular biologist and historian of science – a curious introduction to data networking.

Kevin Leahy
Director, Cloud Strategy, Global Technology Service Sales, IBM

Bio

Kevin is the Director of Cloud Strategy for IBM’s Global Technology Services Sales Organization. In that role he works on the plans and offerings for IBM Services to help clients move to and get the value promised by Cloud Computing. In this role he helped define IBM’s strategy for cloud, including the cloud adoption framework and co-authored IBM’s vision for the future of the IT Infrastructure (Dynamic Infrastructure). Prior to this assignment Kevin served as the Director of Strategy for IBM’s IT Optimization Business Unit. Earlier assignments included director of strategy and marketing for Virtualization across IBM. Kevin also led development of medical imaging and digital media solutions. He also played a critical role in defining the IBM WebSphere Platform. Over his 31 years of experience with IBM, he has held software and hardware development and management positions including managing the portfolio of networking directors, switches and converters, development and delivery of the ESCON architecture as well as fiber optic advanced technology.
He is a graduate of The Cooper Union in NYC.