Richard Villars, Research Vice President, Datacenter & Cloud, IDC
As Research Vice President, Datacenter & Cloud, Richard Villars is a senior member of IDC's IT Infrastructure research team, which assesses the evolution of datacenter design, placement and management strategies as well as the exploitation of rapidly evolving technologies in the areas of Big Data and Cloud. He develops IDC's viewpoints on the workloads driving adopting of converged and software defined IT solutions as well as strategies to enable more effective use of public and private cloud solutions. He advises clients on the impact of new IT consumption models and technologies on organizations' infrastructure, deployment, procurement, and management practices.
Chuck Kaplan, Vice President, Business Development, Ciena
Chuck Kaplan is currently responsible for business development for Ciena’s Blue Planet software product lines, focused on incubating new capabilities to capture emerging market trends that will benefit from advanced applications on top of the Blue Planet orchestration suite. These include service assurance and applications assurance / QoE solutions, analytics and AI-based functions, and edge cloud solutions for network operators, data center operators, and enterprises. With more than 30 years of experience in the telecom industry, Mr. Kaplan has previously worked as chief operating officer at Narad Networks, a venture-capital funded Ethernet company, and additionally has 20 years in and product/solution marketing across the telecom space. He has served as vice president and general manager of communication products at Philips Electronics; vice president of marketing of subscriber products at Scientific Atlanta; and director of product management at Hitachi Telecom USA. He started his career at Bell Telephone Laboratories in switching systems development. Mr. Kaplan earned a bachelor’s of science in mathematics from Emory University and a master’s of science in computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology.
