Speakers

George Kurian is CEO at NetApp and a member of the Board of Directors. George joined the company in 2011, bringing his passion and relentless focus on execution. He was named CEO in June 2015.

In his previous role as NetApp executive vice president of Product Operations, George was responsible for the strategy and development of NetApp’s product and solutions portfolio. Before that, George was senior vice president of the Data ONTAP Group, overseeing development of the Data ONTAP operating system.

George joined NetApp as senior vice president of the Storage Solutions Group, where he was responsible for the solutions portfolio and joint partner technology integration.

Prior to joining NetApp, George was vice president and general manager of the Application Networking and Switching Technology Group at Cisco Systems. George’s diverse background also includes the role of vice president at Akamai Technologies, management consulting at McKinsey & Company, and leading software engineering and product management teams at Oracle Corporation. He is also an independent director on the Board of global health services company Cigna Corporation.

Syam Nair is Chief Product Officer at NetApp, where he leads the company’s product and engineering teams to accelerate innovation in hybrid cloud and AI offerings and advance NetApp’s strategic vision for data-driven business growth. Mr. Nair is renowned as a disruptive innovator in the industry, bringing over 25 years of experience in scaling cloud platforms and driving hyper-growth.

Mr. Nair has an exceptional track record in incubating new technologies from the ground up and leading large teams through transformations at scale. During his tenure at Microsoft, Mr. Nair was part of the leadership team that built and expanded globally distributed Azure data services. At Salesforce, his leadership pioneered industry-defining innovations including Salesforce Data Cloud, the next generation Agentic platform.

Prior to joining NetApp, Mr. Nair doubled the scale of the world’s largest inline security cloud as Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Research & Development at Zscaler.

Mr. Nair holds a master’s degree in computer science and applications engineering from Goa University in India and an MBA in strategy and leadership from Indiana University – Kelley School of Business.

Sandeep is a driven, passionate, and creative business leader with a proven track record of leading business and product strategy, building innovative products, managing high performance organizations, and delivering business results at startups and Fortune 500 technology companies.

Sandeep is the Senior Vice President and General Manager for Enterprise Storage at NetApp. Sandeep is responsible for a multi-billion data infrastructure portfolio spanning flash, block, object, and storage as a service. Prior to joining NetApp, Sandeep spent four years at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in multiple roles, including Vice President of Product Management for Data Infrastructure and Vice President of Product Marketing for HPE Storage. Sandeep joined HPE from Pure Storage, where he led product marketing for FlashArray, and helped the company scale from pre-IPO $100M run rate to a public company with greater than $1B in revenue. Prior to Pure, Sandeep led product management and strategy for 3PAR, an enterprise storage company, from pre-revenue to greater than $1B in revenue – including four-year tenure at HP post-3PAR acquisition. Sandeep holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from UC, San Diego and an MBA from Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

Pravjit (Prav) Tiwana is a technology executive with over 23 years of experience in building highly scaled cloud powered products, services and businesses. He is senior vice president and general manager responsible for accelerating NetApp’s Cloud Storage business across the three hyperscalers Azure, AWS & GCP. He is responsible for product, engineering, and PnL of NetApp’s cloud business.

Before joining NetApp, Pravjit was the Global Chief Technology Officer and CEO of APAC for Gemini, a Web3 company. During his time at Gemini, he transformed Gemini’s technology organization into a world-class product and engineering organization. Prior to Gemini, Pravjit spent almost 7 years at Amazon Web Services where he was a senior executive leading AWS Edge Services, which included Amazon CloudFront, AWS Edge Computing, and AWS Data Transfer Operations. Earlier in his career, he held product and engineering leadership roles both at Microsoft and Disney spanning close to 10 years.

Pravjit holds a master’s in business and engineering degree from India. He resides in Seattle with his wife (Payal), two daughters (Malika & Sanya), and their family dog (Nemo). In his spare time, Pravjit enjoys running, hiking, golfing and traveling the world.

Bret Hull is the Senior Vice President and Global Head of Platform Engineering at NetApp. He leads a worldwide engineering organization bringing the NetApp Platform to life through such products and services as ONTAP, StorageGrid, E-Series, and Console.

Bret joined NetApp in June 2026. Previously, he spent over 15 years at Cisco and Meraki, starting as an early engineer and rising through a variety of engineering and leadership roles. For much of his tenure, he led the Meraki Engineering team, helping grow it into one of Cisco's largest and fastest-growing businesses.

Prior to Cisco, Bret was a researcher at MIT where he developed large-scale wireless distributed systems to advance research in database systems, delay-tolerant wireless networking, and opportunistic mobile sensing.

Bret earned his Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering & computer science from U.C. Berkeley and a Masters and Ph.D. in computer science from MIT. Bret currently resides in San Francisco.

Priyadarshi (PD) Prasad is the Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Storage Business Unit at NetApp. A seasoned technology executive, PD operates at the convergence of AI, infrastructure, and cybersecurity, helping global organizations fortify their competitive moats and elevate customer experiences.

Prior to NetApp, he was the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at LightBeam.ai, where he pioneered identity-centric data security and automated privacy governance. PD also previously headed the core storage portfolio at Nutanix as VP/GM, driving massive product transformations across core data paths, business continuity, and disaster recovery. He holds a Bachelor of Technology from the National Institute of Technology, Calicut, and an MBA from the S. P. Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai.

Ivan Iannaccone is a technology executive with over 20 years of experience driving enterprise transformation at global scale. He is vice president and general manager at NetApp, leading Product, UX, Engineering, and Fleet Operations for the company's As-a-Service Business Unit (Keystone) —overseeing strategy and delivery across as-as-service platforms, enterprise storage, and converged infrastructure, and embedding AI to optimize performance and enhance customer outcomes.

Before joining NetApp, Ivan spent over 8 years across the hyperscalers—Amazon, Google, and AWS—leading product, UX, and engineering organizations for e-commerce subscriptions, cloud capacity, and storage devices, including building the largest subscription platform on earth and leading development of the AWS Nitro SSD. Earlier, he spent nearly a decade at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, including as Vice President and General Manager.

Ivan has deep expertise in IT infrastructure, hardware development, cloud computing, supply chain, and e-commerce, and is recognized for aligning technology, people, and strategy to deliver measurable business impact.

He holds a master's degree in Computer Science from the Università degli Studi di Perugia in Italy, and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Kris Cornwall leads product marketing for the company’s Data Intelligence & AI portfolio, helping shape how organizations turn data into business value. With more than 25 years in the storage industry, Kris has held leadership roles at Sun Microsystems and EMC/Dell Technologies, building deep expertise at the intersection of enterprise infrastructure, data management, and emerging technologies. Kris holds a degree from the University of Washington and an MBA from The Wharton School.

Darnell Fatigati is Principal Product Marketing Manager for AI at NetApp. She leads product marketing initiatives that help enterprises make their data visible, governed, and ready for AI across complex hybrid environments.

Martin Chovanec, PhD, is an advanced computing executive and Associate Professor specializing in high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence, and enterprise IT infrastructure. As a Chief Technology Officer and academic leader, he bridges the gap between cutting-edge research and enterprise-grade tech deployment. His work focuses on driving digital transformation, scalable data technologies, and cybersecurity innovation while advancing high-tech workforce education.

Gary Grider is the Senior Director for Computing Technologies at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Gary helps shape the direction of technologies to be used at the laboratory for all HPC and AI endeavors. Until recently, Gary was the longtime Leader of the High Performance Computing (HPC) Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Los Alamos’ HPC Division operates one of the largest governmental supercomputing centers in the world focused on US National Security for the US/DOE National Nuclear Security Administration. Gary is responsible for managing the R&D portfolio for keeping the new technology pipeline full to provide solutions to problems in the Lab’s HPC/AI environment, through collaboration with university and industry partners. Gary has 30 granted patents in the data high performance data management area and has been working in HPC and HPC related storage since, 1984.

Jason Hardy is vice president of storage technology at NVIDIA, where he drives storage architecture and ecosystem alignment for accelerated computing and enterprise AI. With more than 20 years of experience spanning enterprise data infrastructure and AI platforms, he has led the development and scaling of high-performance storage systems as well as AI solutions supporting analytics, enterprise, and industrial workloads. Jason works across engineering, product, and industry partners to advance storage architectures designed for scale, performance, and reliability in modern AI environments. Previously, he served as vice president and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, where he led global technology strategy, platform innovation, and AI initiatives across the portfolio.

Rodger is the Storage Service Owner at Ford Motor Company, responsible for global service planning, delivery and strategy for File, Block, Object and Data Protection.

Has a proven track record of simplification and transformation driving transformational changes, operational efficiencies and reduced time to customer.

Matt Williams is Director of Compute Operations at News Corp, with 22 years of experience in enterprise storage and infrastructure. Leading global operations across storage, backup, virtualization, and data center environments to power mission-critical operations.