CONNECTING PACIFIC THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

Hon. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum

Attorney-General, Minister for Economy, Civil Service and Communications

Chief Guest

Hon. Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum is Fiji's twice-elected Attorney-General, Minister for Economy, Civil Service, and Communications.

As the Minister responsible for climate change the Attorney-General is also a global proponent of climate adaptation and increasing access to climate finance. His driving philosophy --that development finance equates to climate finance -- has propelled Fiji to the forefront of developing partnerships with the private sector to develop insurance and finance solutions to build climate resilience. The Attorney-General currently serves as a Commissioner on the Global Commission on Adaptation and is a panelist of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Environment of Peace 2022 (EP 2022). At COP26 he is serving as the Pacific’s High-Level Champion on Oceans.

The Attorney-General holds a Masters in Law from the University of Hong Kong and a Bachelor of Arts in political science and development studies from the Australian National University. He is admitted to the Supreme Court of New South Wales and the High Courts of Australia and Fiji. He lives in Suva with his wife, Ela, and their three young children – Ibrahim, Idris, and Imaan.

Satyen Singh

Chief Executive Officer

Satyen has over 20 years of business development and management experience in ICT industry in Dubai/UAE, India, Fiji and South Pacific markets. He is committed to sustainable, inclusive and profitable growth of all the stakeholders

Chris Usserman

Director of Security Architecture

Mr Chris Usserman leverages over 32 years of experience in the U.S. Intelligence Community to help clients understand and incorporate cyber business intelligence to improve cyber security programs. Chris has also served in several leadership roles, including Senior Director, Applied Intelligence and Director, Government Programs at iSIGHT Partners (Mandiant), Lead Research Scientist (Cyber Operations) at Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Laboratories and served 14 years in the U.S. Air Force conducting intelligence and cyber operations activities.

Usserman also brings a public/private perspective to enhance the security posture of multiple sectors and communities of interest. He regularly speaks at domestic and international conferences on understanding cyber-attack methodology to build more effective and mature cybersecurity programs.

Usserman hopes to use the summit to engage with delegates to understand how to build a solid foundation, leverage the capabilities they already have in a more competent manner, and understand attacker methodologies rather than just the attacks to proactively prevent network incursions and contain threats before they become operationally impactful.

At the Fiji Tech Summit, delegates will be treated to his presentation on “Cyber Security Matured Program to a Cyber World—Three Critical Steps Towards.”.

Steve Chen

Senior Manager of Product Management, AI Platforms

Mr Steve Chen, with over 24 years of experience in the IT industry, has developed professional exposure in Artificial Intelligence, Online Advertising, and the Internet of Things with roles in Production Management, Program Management, and Engineering Services.

During the Fiji Tech Summit, Mr Chen will present and share Alibaba Hybrid Cloud Solutions capable of Cutting-edge, DevOps, SysOps, and AI-enabled Platform and Workloads.

Francois Rizk

Regional Manager ANZ – Public Sector

Mr Francois Rizk, with over 20 years of experience in direct and team quota-carrying roles and management experience, supports transformation initiatives in government to help departments improve complex and large-scale digital transformation programmes.

Francois R is a highly trained and successful individual who focuses on technology-oriented solutions and markets for building organisations’ ecosystems.

In the Fiji Tech Symposium, Mr Rizk will present and share insights on Automate with Newgen’s Digital Transformation & Low-code platform that helped the Public Sector in Australia and globally.

Ronald Prasad

Chief Commercial Officer at Vodafone Fiji

Ronald has over 25 years of experience working in the public and private sectors and has demonstrated expertise in Strategy, Leadership, Business Development and Sales. Currently, Mr Prasad is the Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) at Vodafone Fiji Limited and executed Samsung’s enterprise brand portfolio for the Fiji and South Pacific region.

Ronald holds various qualifications, including a Master of Business Administration from the University of the South Pacific, for which he was accorded the Professor Nowak’s Prize for Academic Excellence and Executive Education in Leadership, Strategy & Organization from Stanford University, USA.

At the Fiji Tech Summit, Ronald will highlight the importance of Digital Transformation, Trends, and Challenges in the Modern World from Samsung’s point of view.

Johann Ramchandra

Senior Director of APJ Channel Sales

Johann leads the Channel and Alliances business for the Asia Pacific and Japan at Proofpoint. In his 12 years in the cyber security industry, Johann has been a strong advocate for the adoption of cyber intelligence programs for organisations from a wide spectrum of industries and sizes Having worked with brands such as Symantec, Check Point, and now Proofpoint, Johann brings with him comprehensive industry experience bolstered by a range of cyber industry certifications.

At the Fiji Tech Summit, Johann will share the importance of creating a cyber intelligence strategy considering the way attackers are playing offence. He will share some unique perspectives on the changing threat landscape and how organisations can get ahead by taking a people-centric approach to Threat Protection, Information Protection and Compliance.

Norman Box

Distribution Channel Manager ANZ

Norman Box brings 20 years of Industry experience serving in roles within IT Distribution and at several Major Vendors prior to joining SolarWinds in 2020 as ANZ Region Channel and Distribution Manager. He has been a vocal supporter of the development of a strong channel strategy to support partners such as Datec Fiji in conjunction with SolarWinds premier distributor in the Pacific Islands region M-Tech.

Responsible for Australia, New Zealand and Greater Pacific Islands Region, Norman is focused on bringing SolarWinds class-leading offering to customers in conjunction with regional reseller partner Datec Fiji. SolarWinds enjoys an enviable customer footprint across the region and values its numerous customers in Fiji, both big and small.

SolarWinds in conjunction with M-Tech and Datec Fiji will be highlighting a range of ITOM and ITSM solutions headlined by our Hybrid Cloud Observability platform offering that brings more features than ever before to meet customer needs in ever more complex environments.

Darryl Tyson

Senior Systems Engineer

As a Senior Systems Engineer at Fortinet, Darryl is dedicated to decreasing cybersecurity risk in global enterprises and single-site organisations through cybersecurity technologies and strategy.

Darryl has 20+ years of experience working in IT across various environments, including Europe, NZ and Fiji. The last six years have been spent specialising in Networking and Cyber Security, working with Fortinet’s broad security portfolio.

Delegates can expect an overview of the real-life security risk scenario from Mr Tyson. He will be also presenting some insights related to the guideline on how to decrease cybersecurity risks.

Matt Harrison

Client Director

As a Client Director at Fortinet, Matt works with the New Zealand & Islands team and is responsible for key clients and partners across Fiji and the South Pacific Region. With a deep understanding of today’s threat and defence landscape, Matt works closely with organisations across healthcare, government, law enforcement, emergency services, and SMBs, to help security operations centres take a more proactive approach to cybersecurity. Matt has 25 years of experience in IT and business development across NZ and internationally. Before joining Fortinet in 2016, Matt worked closely with many large commercial and public sector organisations in his roles at IBM New Zealand and Veeam Software - and has also held positions with various leading IT organisations in the UK and Germany.

In the symposium, Mr. Harrison will be talking on the business protection concept from Zero Trust to Cybersecurity Mesh. Participants can expect to hear from him on the required key components in ensuring the security hygiene of organisations. The importance of Zero Trust & Cybersecurity has sharply increased in light of the “work from anywhere” readiness environment.

Carlin Diprose

HP Product Evangelist

Carlin Diprose, with 6 years of experience working with HP, is the Product Evangelist and an excellent Storyteller. With his presentation skills and business acumen, he gives a brilliant message in an EPIC way for all modern end-users.

Mr Diprose thinks that managing a much more distributed post-pandemic workforce is like making the office relevant for next-gen people with the ability and the freedom to work from home or anywhere. HP is consistently applying cutting-edge technologies to make life easier for customers.

Carlin is excited to be part of the Fiji Tech Summit and eager to speak on the HP Product Portfolio in making Hybrid Work, Work.

Darshan Patel

Senior Technical Engineer

Darshan Patel has been working with Dahua NZ for more than one year and overall has ten years of experience in a similar industry. Dahua Technology is a world-leading video-centric Smart IoT solution and service provider that enables a Safer Society and Smarter Living.

Mr Patel will talk about the New Technology Trends with IP-based products and a comprehensive snapshot of the surveillance security solutions for Smart Cities, Smart IoT, and Smart Governance.

Antony Nicholson

Partner Presales Engineer

Antony works with distribution and partners covering the ISG (Infrastructure Solutions Group) portfolio for the channel as a Partner Presales Engineer (PSE) for New Zealand. Antony has worked in the New Zealand IT industry for 20+ years, with the last 10+ years working for managed service providers and distribution as a Solutions Architect. Data protection has been part of his profile with implementing backup and DR solutions and performing testing/failover to systems.

As a full stack solutions architect, Mr Nicholson has had the unique opportunity of being able to work from edge to core and had opportunities to design entire green field installations as well as modernise existing solutions. Mr Nicholson holds various certifications from the data centre, protection, and security vendors. Likewise, as a datacentre full-stack generalist, Antony has worked with multiple technologies, cloud offerings, and designing or building solutions to meet customer needs from inception to completion.

In the tech symposium at Fiji Tech Summit, Mr Nicholson will be talking about Cyber Resilience & Recovery Strategies and cost-effective next-gen enterprise storage solutions. He believes that natural disasters or man-made misadventures take a more extended period to recover.  He would like to discuss issues that people are facing with recovering from an incident and being confident with the data that we are bringing back.

Mr. Nicholson is looking forward to listening to what obstacles people have been having and discussing with them how Dell might be able to help them out with a broad range of products as a resolution.

Simon Perry

Security Strategist & Sr Product Marketing Manager - Advanced Network & Security Business Group

Simon Perry has over 35 years of experience in enterprise IT systems with a background in system operations automation and mainframe systems programming. Since 1998 he has been focused on enterprise systems information security with experience including SIEM/SOAR, NDR, EDR, malware prevention and systems hardening, IAM, as well as the human aspects of effective security programs. Simon has extensive experience in effectively communicating emerging cyber risks to all levels of the business and has served as a founding member of the steering committee of ENISA. He is VMware APJ’s principal contributor to cyber-related policy development for regional governments.

Simon expects to educate attendees regarding better cyber risk management. He looks forward to the opportunity to raise awareness of current cyber security trends that affect the region without resorting to Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD). This will allow organizations’, both small and large, both public and private sector, to best plan for how to invest in people, processes, and technology that will reduce their risks of suffering a material cyber incident and allow them to plan their ongoing technology innovations projects with confidence.

At the Fiji Tech Summit, Simon will bring up Global and regional cyber trends and speak about how they shape VMware’s strategy.

Mark Junkovic

Enterprise Account Executive,
VMware Security Business Unit

With 17 years of experience in Information Technology & Communication with a background in infrastructure and security transformation, Mark is passionate about helping organisations enhance their security posture and visibility while reducing operational complexity. Mark has extensive experience and is a thought leader in enterprise security solutions, including Network, Infrastructure, Endpoint and Cloud Security, and biometric and physical access.

Mark will be speaking on securing data centre, endpoint, and cloud workloads with VMware Security.

Veronica Patterson

Technical Solution Specialist - Cloud Infrastructure and Software

Veronica started her career in IT as a Network Specialist for IBM in Italy.  Several years later, she did her Overseas Experience (OE) and eventually landed in New Zealand. She worked in IT distribution for a few years before joining an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, where she managed five Data Centres.  She then started with Cisco as a Technical Solution Specialist for the Cloud Infrastructure and Software Group (CISG), looking after the New Zealand and Pacific Islands region.

Veronica is very passionate about technology and has embraced the excellent work culture of the Pacific.  She enjoys opportunities to visit beautiful places and connect with amazing people.

At the Fiji Tech Summit, she will bring her experience and speak on managing a modern data centre with nexus cloud.

Jay Shaw

Infrastructure Account Executive
Australia SMB/Mid-Market Segment Leader & QLD/NT/Pacific

Jay Shaw has been with Lenovo for over 6 years as an Infrastructure Account Executive and SMB/Mid-market Segment Leader for the Queensland and Northern Territory of Australia and the Pacific region. With his over nine years of experience in building modern IT Data Center Group Infrastructure Solutions for customers with on-premises and hybrid cloud-to-the-edge workloads, he works with the services geniuses of Lenovo TruScale and Lenovo MSPs to move workloads on As-a-Service Models.

Jay will bring at the summit excellent insight into Hyper-converted Infrastructure Solutions for simplifying IT infrastructure to focus higher-level value on security, operations, and growth, along with a TruScale Infrastructure-as-a-service.

Matthew Adams

Smart Collaboration Solutions Executive

Matthew Adams has been with Lenovo for over 10 years as a Solutions and Client Executive, looking after Global, Large Enterprise, Education and Government customers. During his tenure with Lenovo, he has worked with Datec on many successful projects across several customers and countries.

Matthew, as part of the Lenovo Smart Collaboration team, will bring his experience of Hybrid Workplace challenges and solutions. He is delighted to attend the Fiji Technology Summit to understand more about how the approach to hybrid work is changing and provide an overview of how Lenovo and our Partners are addressing some of the challenges in a hybrid world.

Andrea Martin

Position: New Zealand and Pacific Islands Territory Manager

With over 25 years of experience in the IT Industry, Andrea’s expertise spans channel & account management, business development, product management and marketing.

As New Zealand and Pacific Island Territory Manager, Andrea is focused on ensuring that businesses use best practices to protect their data, their most valued asset, from any disaster and threat. Being a creator of long-term business value through enhanced communications, business planning, and thinking outside of the square, ensures the companies that Andrea works with remain agile to grow and thrive during the challenging and changing times.

Andrea will speak on Arcserve ransomware-proof backup and disaster recovery.

Karl Thomson

APAC Pre-Sales Director

Karl has been part of the Arcserve team for over eight years; he has used and implemented the solutions across Private, Public and Hybrid Clouds for over a decade and has extensive knowledge of the product and solution portfolio. Prior to joining Arcserve, Karl was a senior engineer for several New Zealand reseller organisations. By drawing on this technical expertise, Karl brings added know-how to the pre-sales process. His ability to understand what solutions engineers require for implementations enables greater cohesion from sales to the solution.

Karl will speak on Ransomware-proof backup and disaster recovery using Arcserve UDP.

Graham Walshe

Executive Chairman

Graham Walshe, Executive Chairman of Brother International (NZ) Limited, FNZIM, is known to be a passionate believer in the future power of the printed page despite the advances in digital technology.

Scheduled to speak on “Transformation of Print” on the summit’s opening day, Mr Walshe will address the growing concerns about the cost of doing business and the need to spend responsibly.

With the expectation to establish “C” level (Executive management level) engagement with change agents, he will also focus on Brother’s approach to Managed Print Services that put the customer at the centre - assessing and understanding their requirements, recommending right-fit solutions to suit their needs, providing them with everything they need, and nothing they don’t.

Mr Walshe has led Brother NZ and Pacific team as Chairman for 40 years, 13 years as Brother Group Leader for Corporate/Marketing Asia Pacific Middle East Africa, and 11 years as Deputy Chair Of PCF. Brother NZ team has won numerous Brother Global President awards for Management -Marketing.

Marco Palozzo

Hybrid Cloud Systems
Channel & Alliances Director, Pacific Islands

Marco has been focused on Oracle Technologies for over 13 years in driving consistent growth across Oracle with strategic and volume Oracle Parents and Alliances. He firmly believes that Oracle delivers a modern data platform, which is built on a single converged database alleviating challenges around integration and complexity with management. Private Cloud enables customers to significantly reduce data centre costs by moving to a cloud-like state via Private Cloud Appliance.

During the Fiji Tech Summit in the Oracle presentation, Mr. Palozzo will speak on how a modern data platform helps customers manage the complexities of different data stores and devilment methodologies. He expects to identify Fiji prospects for Oracle Database and Private Cloud Appliances.