Speaker Profiles

In 2018, Chris Drieberg joined Hitachi Vantara Australia & New Zealand as Director, Pre-sales and Chief Technology Officer for the region. For two years, Chris led the technical sales strategy and pre-sales team across the region in support of sales objectives and alignment of Hitachi Vantara products and solutions to market opportunity.

In August 2020, Chris stepped into the newly created role of Global Director, Collaborative Solutions. Chris now leads a team focused on designing solutions that suit the real-world, multi-vendor, multi-cloud environments of organisations of all sizes, bringing Hitachi Vantara customers the benefits of its range of offerings, as well as solution sets co-created with technology vendors within its ecosystem.

Chris strives to act as a driving force behind collaboration between technology vendors because these joint solutions, designed with customer outcomes in mind, make modernisation and deployment simpler for partners and customers.

In this role, Chris will lead all of Hitachi Vantara’s Core Storage offerings and solutions for Block and File as well Unified Compute Platform (UCP) Solutions (CI/HCI), VMWARE, Cisco CVD-related technical sales efforts, and other collaborative alliance partner offerings and initiatives for Hitachi Vantara. With an engineered solution focus for On-premise and Hybrid CLOUD offerings.

With his field experience, technical knowledge and an ecosystem-building track record built over three decades in Australia’s technology sector, Chris brings skills and perspective that are invaluable to the role of Global Director, Collaborative Solutions.

Chris Morris is the Vice President for IDC’s Asia/Pacific excluding Japan  (APeJ) Cloud Services and Technology group and of the APeJ Partner and Alliances program. He is also a member of the IDC Worldwide Cloud Services research team and the worldwide Partner and Alliances research team.

As the leader of research into the Cloud Services markets in APeJ he manages the regional research into all facets of public and private cloud. This includes the IT-focused technology and services as well as the implications for digital business.

Working closely with IDC analysts in emerging markets, Chris brings thought leadership content and advisory expertise to other IDC research teams, the IDC Consulting team, as well as IDC’s clients in the region. He drives business development efforts, delivers custom research projects for clients, and works closely with IDC’s Consulting Group to manage and provide advice in strategic engagements.

Chris also implemented the Partner and Alliance Program in APeJ. This program supports regional ICT vendors as they adapt their business activities and relationships with their channel partners and their strategic alliances. The major focus of this research area is the transformation of traditional partners to being digital-ready.

Chris comes to IDC with more than 25 years of extensive IT research and more than 35 years of industry experience. Prior to joining IDC in 2007, Chris worked as an independent IT industry researcher and consultant for six years. Some of his key clients included the Australian Taxation Office, the University of New South Wales (UNSW), as well as vendor. Prior to 2002, he was Gartner’s Group Vice President and Director of Research for the Asia/Pacific region with responsibilities ranging from business development to research delivery to client engagement activities. Beginning his tenure in Gartner in 1992, Chris was the first research analyst in the Asia/Pacific region for the organization. Previously, he worked for a number of technology vendors including Fujitsu, Amdahl, and Hitachi Data Systems, in a variety of technical, product marketing, and management roles.

Chris holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Christopher heads the delivery organization in Hitachi Vantara APAC within the Digital Solutions practices. His role is to build a strong delivery team that will be able to deliver the projects with the Insights and Modernization pillars. These 2 pillars include traditional DW and custom applications solutions as well as Big Data, IoT, Cloud, App Modernisation and Product Engineering within the Hitachi Social Innovation initiative.

Christopher has extensive experience in presales, customer engagement and setup of business models through implementing customers’ data and process requirements within the traditional Oracle ERP, EPM, eCommerce and BI framework as well as new Digital and Cloud native technologies.

Christopher has experience project managing large, reference-able, multi-year ERP, EPM, eCommerce and Big Data implementations with key Hitachi Consulting clients within both the private and public sectors, as well as partnering with top management consulting companies.

Helder Queiros is the VMware Global Partner Development Sales for Hybrid Cloud in Asia Pacific and Japan

Technology Driven Product marketing leader with technical know-how, customer empathy and a strong sense of financial ownership, holding previous APJ senior roles in Product Management and business Development with a strong focus in GTM/RTM with the right partnerships and Alliances

KC is the lead for data infrastructure solutions at Hitachi Vantara Asia Pacific. He leads a team of technical experts and specialists responsible for creating, articulating, and driving innovative cross-portfolio Hitachi Vantara solutions that solve customers’ and industry challenges. He is the advocate for industry-leading solutions at customer, industry, and audience-specific forums.

KC’ s key focus is working with customers to realize their digital and data infrastructure transformation. All-flash storage, software-defined data infrastructures are some of the key topics that KC devotes his time to.

Prior to his appointment in Hitachi Vantara, KC has driven and led teams covering public sector enterprise sales, product management and marketing, as well as SMB sales and channel roles.

KC joined Hitachi Vantara in April 2017. Over the last 25 years, he has worked with Veritas, VMware, Microsoft, and IBM.

KC graduated from the National University of Singapore with a Computer Science degree.

Rajnish Arora is vice president for IDC’s Enterprise Computing research group in Asia/Pacific. Based in Singapore, Rajnish leads a pan-regional team of high-profile analysts who are responsible for market sizing, forecasting, competitive analysis, and segmentation of the Enterprise Computing, Storage Systems, Networking, Converged & Hyperconverged systems, and Cloud Infrastructure markets. With more than 20 years of deep technology industry experience, Rajnish is widely regarded as an authority for his strong market advisory, customer advocacy and consulting expertise in the enterprise systems and infrastructure space. Rajnish is highly sought-after by technology vendors and sellers to help them build and refine their market entry and expansion strategies, bulletproofing their sales and marketing plans, and fine tuning their messages to customers and partners.

Mr. Arora’s key focus is around digital transformation and how IT infrastructure is playing a pivotal role in helping businesses successfully compete in IDC’ s 3rd Platform era. Convergence, disaggregated infrastructure, Linux for mission-critical applications, all-flash storage, software-defined, server workloads, and platform migration are some of the key hot button topics that technology suppliers engage Mr. Arora for messaging and communicating to CIOs and technology decision makers. He is a frequent keynote speaker at industry forums and technology vendor sponsored customer and partner events. His passion for technology sees him moderating and hosting many a panel discussion, CIO roundtables, and fire-side chats at customer events.

About IDC
International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. With more than 1,100 analysts worldwide, IDC offers global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries. IDC’s analysis and insight helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community to make fact-based technology decisions and to achieve their key business objectives. Founded in 1964, IDC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of International Data Group (IDG), the world’s leading tech media, data and marketing services company. About IDG – IDG connects the world of tech buyers with insights, intent and engagement. IDG is the world’s largest media, data and marketing services company that activates and engages the most influential technology buyers.

Rob DeCesaris joined Hitachi Vantara in 2019 and is currently responsible for Hitachi & CISCO joint engineered solutions. He provides Global leadership for sales and technical stakeholders across the regions and supports sales objectives and alignment of Hitachi Vantara products, solutions and go to market opportunities.

With the customer and business value at the forefront of his thinking, he collaborates, identifies and designs enterprise solutions for both on-premise and Hybrid Cloud consumption.  

In this role, Rob leads a virtual team of Technical Experts and is also responsible for solution education, continuous improvement and stakeholder management.

He was a pioneer in hybrid cloud computing and XaaS which resulted in core business improvements, enhanced customer experience and significant total cost of ownership savings.

Today, Rob maintains a key focus on customer perspective, core business outcomes and market competitive industry solutions.  He also continues to leverage his extensive customer and vendor experience that are invaluable to his Global Solutions role.

Based in Melbourne, Australia, Rob is married with 2 children  (aged 18 & 14 ) . He is also a Restaurateur/Coffee,Food,Wine Lover and his interests include spending time with his family and fishing.

Technical sales leader, strategist, enterprise and network architect, and customer-facing executive with a wide range of experience in a significant number of technologies and management disciplines.

Joined Hitachi Vantara in 2016 and applies his experience and knowledge to the development of global technical strategies to help bring transformative technologies and solutions to Hitachi Vantara customers as leader of the global technical sales team.

Has over 30 years of experience that has taken in programming, systems administration, network engineering, virtualisation technologies, security, high level consultancy, architecture methodologies and executive leadership.

Prior to joining Hitachi Vantara was the Vice President of Systems Engineering for APAC at Juniper Networks after working in a number of roles there including Global Leader for the Data Center Virtualisation and Automation team as well as Business Development Director for Service Provider Edge Solutions spearheading the edge router and SDN/NFV efforts of the APAC theater.

Before joining Juniper Networks was the CTO for FPT Telecom, a leading Vietnamese Telco and broadband provider focussed on leveraging their IP networking assets to disrupt the telecommunications industry.

Prior to moving into APAC, had spent 15 years delivering IT and Network Solutions to organisations as diverse as the Telecommunications, Department of Defence, State Government, Education Sector, and Australia’s Largest Banks.

Simon is responsible for best-in-class training program development for Commvault reseller partners across APJ, enabling the partner community to help our customers do amazing thing with their data.

He has been working within the IT space for over twenty years focusing on the Data Storage industry. A subject matter expert on all things data at Commvault, Simon held several technical and engineering roles within the company for the last 15 years.

Seen as a “Data movement specialist” within the Data Storage industry, Simon will always take an end-to-end integrated approach to data storage, ensuring customers receive specialist advice about the data path from source to its final destination no matter where it is.

Simon has continually provided business-focused outcome architectures that cost-effectively provide protection with data management. His deep experience in the Data Storage Industry is varied and focused on integrating software and hardware into one solution to produce a known outcome.

Sudharsan is the APAC Solution lead for Data Intelligence and Content, with a focus around Hybrid cloud, Big Data Analytics, High Performance SDS, for unstructured data using Object & File. 

In his previous role he was the APAC solution lead for Business Critical Application and Converged solution focusing around architecting resilient, scalable, agile infrastructure for workloads such as SAP HANA, Oracle, Hybrid Cloud, & Containers.

He has been with Hitachi Vantara for about 9 Years now spanning various roles, and has worked closely with customers to spearhead their Data Center Modernization efforts, and various Digital Transformation Initiatives.

Suraj Kotipalli is APAC Business Leader for Content and Data Intelligence solutions at Hitachi Vantara with a focus on helping customers modernize their applications and accelerate their overall digital transformation. Suraj and his team of Solution Experts help customers solve the unprecedented Data challenges and drive business outcomes through very innovative solutions and use cases.

Suraj has more than 2 decades of rich versatile experience where he held several Technology and Sales leadership roles in APAC region and prior to Hitachi Vantara, he worked for Microsoft Corporation for 14 years. An Engineering graduate in Computers, Suraj is passionate about technology and obsessed with customer and partner success.

Suranjan is the Vice President of Financial Services at Hitachi Vantara, based out of London, applying innovation, industry expertise and engineering to address some of the biggest challenges in the financial services world today.

Kicking off his career with the Big 4, Suranjan has been working for over 2 decades in the Data and Analytics space. Suranjan has worked exclusively with banks, insurers and asset managers in the last decades. He has architected some of the largest Risk, Regulatory and Performance Management solutions for some of the largest banks in the world. This includes building the world’s first real-time risk solution for a large American bank to large middle-office regulation platforms for BCBS 239 and BASEL III compliance.

From “FinTech” to “RegTech”, he is working with some of the largest names in the Financial Services space, looking at a wide range of solutions from Big Data, Blockchain, IoT and Artificial Intelligence to solve implementation challenges for our Top Tier banking customers. Today, Suranjan is responsible for the portfolio of Hitachi’s strategic financial services accounts across the globe.

Tam Chek San is the technology practice lead for data protection solutions, covering the Asia Pacific & Japan region, where he oversees the data protection and appliance products features, requirements, awareness and skill levels among the Technical Sales, Services and functional groups. He also covers the emerging product offerings that compliments the enterprise data protection solution stacks.

Since 1996, Chek San has held various roles in several areas of IT including technical support, training, solutioning, specialist sales and pre-sales, focusing in areas of networking, data storage, information management, security and virtualization spaces.

Chek San has a Bachelor Degree in Applied Science (Information Technology).

Chek San is based in Singapore.

Thomas is a strategic, multidisciplinary technologist with a focus on business model innovation and leading-edge technology application.

With over twenty years of experience in financial services, spanning senior roles in consulting firms Booz & Co and PwC, a venture backed FinTech in Silicon Valley and a number of leading banks, including JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank and Citi.

Thomas is an active member of the FinTech community which includes being a founder member of Level39 one of largest FinTech hubs in the world, as well as participating in a number of incubators and corporate innovation programmes.

Prior to joining Hitachi Vantara as CTO for Financial Services, Thomas founded Digital Strategy Associates, where he consulted for a number of clients, covering FinTech start-up’s, investment banks, Fortune 500s, challenger banks and venture firms undertaking projects to develop digital strategy, drive innovation and enable top line growth.

Thomas has been with Hitachi Vantara for 11 years where he has grown the business to about 20% of the overall Digital Infrastructure business.

With over 25 years in the IT Industry, he has an extensive experience in Compaq, Sun Microsystems and other large MNCs over the years, responsible for leading teams in product management, presales consultancy roles,  channel management roles around Enterprise Software, Data Management & Protection, Cloud Environments, System and Networking solutions.

His current focus is to collaborate using Hitachi Vantara offerings with the most strategic global vendors to bring to market the best-in-class technologies and deliver highly desirable solutions for customer environments.