Red Hat Summit: Connect 2024

Mark Carter is an international keynote speaker, trainer and coach. He has over 25 years experience as a global learning and development professional with his first role being developing leaders for Contiki Holidays. His TEDx talk was the movie trailer for his second book, ‘Add Value’, published globally by WILEY. Mark is the creator of a learning management system for SME’s and a media contributor. He regularly consults businesses around critical business pillars including: culture, leadership, value, adaptability and sales. His keynotes and rich academy of training programs all have a common thread specialisation in people and behaviour Born in England, raised in Scotland, nurtured by Europe and several round world trips he’s called Australia home since 2002. Mangoes, after all, don’t grow in Edinburgh.

Enzo Compagnoni is the regional vice president and general manager for Red Hat in Australia and New Zealand. In this role, Enzo is responsible for leading the Red Hat business growth in the region by helping drive digital transformation success of customers and partners with open source technology. 
Enzo has more than 25 years of experience in the enterprise IT industry. He has been with Red Hat Australia and New Zealand since 2016, most recently as senior director for enterprise sales, and eventually rising up to take the general manager role for the region. 
As a leader, Enzo believes in leading by example, and showing people the way through action. He is passionate about building strong teams and prioritises good execution focused around the success of Red Hat customers above all else. 
Prior to Red Hat, Enzo has held various leadership roles in technology companies including EMC, PeopleSoft and PTC. 
Enzo holds a bachelor's degree in Business from Western Sydney University. 
Away from work, Enzo spends his time with his family that includes wife Clarissa, and their two boys, Dante and Diego. Enzo is an avid reader and also a cyclist with the St Kilda Cycling Club. 
 

Fytos Charalambides is the Senior Director and leader for the Red Hat OpenShift Platform in the APAC region. In his role, Fytos is responsible for driving the growth strategy for the Red Hat product portfolio including Red Hat Openshift, Cloud Services, AI, and the Application Services portfolio. 

Fytos has over 30 years of experience in the IT industry. He has been with Red Hat since 2013 and has been instrumental in the development of Red Hat’s emerging technology businesses.  

Before Red Hat, Fytos held senior leadership positions with Microsoft, InterSystems, and Satori Group. Fytos holds a Master of Business and Technology from the UNSW Australian Business School and is accredited by the Institute of Learning Management as an Executive Coach, a mentor, and a coach for aspiring and developing leaders at Red Hat.  

Away from work, personal interests include national and global business, watching, playing, and coaching sports, reading, traveling, and spending time with a busy growing family, wife of 15 years Sally, and their three children.

Mandi Buswell as a Principal Specialist Solutions Architect with Red Hat New Zealand. She is the Technology Award Winner in the 2021 Women in ICT NZ Awards and has seen, overseen and driven transformative change with over 30 years of experience in the industry and across the globe. Mandi has worked in the finance, hospitality, media and telecommunications sectors. 
Today she works with Red Hat customers across all sectors and is a subject matter expert on transformation, containers and application development.

Laura Kalra is a Strategic Account Manager for Red Hat based in Melbourne, Australia. In this role, she drives the adoption of Red Hat's solution portfolio to support the technology transformations of our enterprise customers.  

With over 20 years of experience in the enterprise technology industry, Laura has served as a vendor, implementation partner, and customer. She joined Red Hat in 2022 and previously held senior advisory roles at ServiceNow, SAP, AMD, and BNY Mellon. Having consulted for over 400 unique businesses worldwide, Laura excels at finding the "lightbulb moments" for her customers—turning vague concepts into viable solutions. 
 

Ameeta is Senior Director for Solution Architecture & Adoption for Red Hat Asia Pacific and is responsible for providing Technical leadership and direction to a team of Solution and Customer Success Architects and Executives that are engaged with clients to bring the power of Open Source technologies to Enterprises . Ameeta has spent several years in the industry in client facing roles where she has helped clients architect, design, build and troubleshoot software systems.

Benjamin Blasco is a Senior Solution Architect working with customers and partners to get the best from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, automation, and containers. With a history in services and telecommunications, he understands the importance of testing, consistency, and repeatability in managing enterprise environments at scale. He enjoys running, live music, and being a father to his young son and two cats.

With over 20 years of experience in F/LOSS adoption, Joel has been a leading advocate for Open Source adoption, particularly within the telecommunications industry. He possesses a unique blend of technical expertise and business acumen, fostered by a diverse background in psychology, social sciences, visual effects, and data science. This provides a unique insight in how to bridge the gap between cutting-edge technologies and the complex challenges faced by modern organizational culture. Joel's passion lies not only in pioneering solutions like large-scale Open routing and compute architecture based private cloud deployments, but also in fostering collaboration and improving open methodologies across different domains through understanding and involvement with upstream community projects and governance. If you don't run Linux on your preferred workstation, expect Joel to offer to help 'fix' that for you ;)

Brian Stinehart is a Specialist Solution Architect at Red Hat. He works with organisations on their automation practices and strategies, building robust systems from open source technology. He is enthusiastic about bringing teams together to deliver services across the IT landscape. 
Brian has been in the industry for 15 years with a background in infrastructure, security, and containerisation, and he now focuses on automation with Red Hat. Outside of work, he and his wife spend time trying to soak up as much of their 3 year old daughter as possible. He peppers in runs with the dog and failed DIY projects around the house as well.

Simon Delord is a Solution Architect at Red Hat. He works with enterprises on their container/Kubernetes practices and driving business value from open source technology. The majority of his time is spent on introducing OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) to teams and helping break down silos to create cultures of collaboration. Prior to Red Hat, Simon worked with many Telco carriers and vendors in Europe and APAC specializing in networking, data-centres and hybrid cloud architectures. Simon is also a regular speaker at public conferences and has co-authored multiple RFCs in the IETF and other standard bodies.

Bryon Baker is a Specialist Solution Architect for Red Hat Asia Pacific. Having previously held managerial, engineering and architecture positions at National Australia Bank, Rational Software (USA), Ivar Jacobson International, and Siemens Research (UK), Bryon brings over 30 years of diverse experience in the IT industry. 

Bryon’s experience spans embedded systems, electronics engineering, systems engineering, enterprise architecture, AI/ML and product management. Bryon is most passionate about machine learning and distributed system architectures. 

Bryon holds a Bachelor of Science from Deakin University with majors in Mathematics and Computer Science.

Ramy ElEssawy is a Specialist Solutions Architect for Red Hat, the world's leading provider of enterprise open-source solutions. A veteran software engineer with a lifetime involvement in software development. During his career, he has been involved in the development of various exciting projects like telecom billing & rating systems.  Before he joined the world of Open Source Software, he spent 10 years in the telecom industry working for companies like Ericsson & Vodafone. He has a broad perspective on the development lifecycle and on what works (and does not work) when it comes to software projects. Whenever he has some free time, Ramy likes to play squash or enjoy a friendly game of cards.

UD leads Microsoft Azure cloud sales organisation for Australia and New Zealand based out of Sydney. Azure brings the best of Microsoft’s innovations across AI, Cloud Infrastructure and security platforms that help our enterprise customers accelerate their Digital Transformation agenda across industries.  

UD brings over 17 years of enterprise sales experience working across different regions including Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Asia Pacific regions at Microsoft. He has diverse experience working across multiple functions including Finance, Operations and leading Billion dollar business across Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Productivity cloud.  

Prior to his current role, UD lead the Microsoft Productivity Sales Organization for the Asia Pacific region before returning back home to Australia in his current role. Udaiya holds a post graduate degree in Business Administration and IT from University of South Australia, Australia.

Akhil Bhaskar (he/him) leads the Asia-Pacific & Japan team of Compute Specialist Solution Architects in the WWSO (Worldwide Specialists Organization) at Amazon Web Services. The WWSO Solution Architects are the leading technical experts across AWS’ entire portfolio of Compute services.

Prior to joining AWS, Akhil has worked in a variety of application development, architecture, and executive roles at both Fortune 50 companies and startups in the United States, Europe, and across Asia-Pacific & Japan. In his spare time, he volunteers at a startup accelerator mentoring startups in the energy, finance, and AI/ML space.