Paul J. Walsh has been a leader in the technology space with more than 20 years with the experience across a variety of roles in some of the most respected tech brands in the industry including Lenovo, Visa, Dell, Amazon, and Microsoft. Walsh has always been dedicated to delivering on digital transformation and driving outcomes through richer customer experience, greater asset reliability, lower operating costs, reduction in risk, and acceleration in operational performance.

In this role as Lenovo’s Global Chief Digital Officer (CDO), Walsh will help Lenovo harness the disruptive technologies fueling Intelligent Transformation that will shape the company’s customer experience for the next decade.

Walsh will focus on driving improvements to the entire customer experience, from channels and processes to data, operating models, and culture. Through developing innovative MarTech systems and tools, enhancing the sales motion and services systems, Lenovo will improve the end-to-end customer journey. Additionally, Walsh will have global responsibility for customer research and insights, customer journey mapping, and driving improvement of company-wide customer engagement and experience.

Prior to Lenovo, Paul served Senior Vice President, Platform Strategy & Innovation for Visa Inc., responsible for leading Visa’s transformation to an open platform initiative. In this role, Walsh oversaw the definition, delivery and operations of the Visa Platform that provides open access to Visa technology, products and services and allows developers at merchants, financial institutions, technology companies and startups in over 200 countries to build unique commerce experiences. In 2018, this platform has had tens of thousands of applications built on it and the API usage has increased by north of 15,000%.

Walsh also served as the Global Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Dell. As Dell CIO, Paul transformed Dell IT, to move beyond just operations and infrastructure, to become a valued part of the business creating and sustaining value through simple, agile and innovative solutions. His role at Dell drove profitable growth, effective transition, and predictive delivery through a four-part strategy; 1) Unified Omnichannel Commerce Journey, 2) Back-office Standardization, 3) Infrastructure efficiency, and 4) Organization effectiveness. Under his leadership, his team grew Dell’s Online properties to north of $15.7 billion in 2015 web sales, No. 3 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500.

21 Patents filed with 14 awarded to date including xCommerce platform; Identity; Location aware personalization; Enterprise Payment Platform; Non-reliable fulfillment sources; biometric and geolocation transactions

As senior director of channel sales, Tom Blankenhorn is responsible for the health and prosperity of Microsoft’s US relationships with key Global Device Partners, including Lenovo. In pursuit of this effort, Blankenhorn is furthering the Microsoft and Lenovo partnership by blending Lenovo’s focus on Intelligent Transformation with Microsoft’s goals around Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge.

Prior to joining Microsoft in the fall of 2018, Blankenhorn spent six years with Ingram Micro. Here, Blankenhorn made notable impacts on the success of Ingram Micro’s $2.1b global relationship with Microsoft, their shared cloud transformation and the company’s global relationship with Dell.

Prior to joining Ingram Micro, Blankenhorn led global teams with TE Connectivity. From 1998 to 2005, Blankenhorn served as a United States Marine where he deployed globally as an infantry (reconnaissance) officer.

With a bachelor’s degree in business administration from University of San Diego and a Master of Science degree from San Diego State University, Blankenhorn makes his home in southern California. He enjoys spending time outdoors, surfing, running and weight lifting.

Ajit Sivadasan manages the Global Web strategy for Lenovo across 90+ countries. In his role he manages Lenovo's substantial online sales and marketing across its B2C and B2B channels globally. Over the last 12 years he has architected and built Lenovo's web capabilities working with an internal team spread across 15+ countries, growing the business over 6x and profits by over 10x. Lenovo.com has won several awards for Usability and Design globally.

Ajit holds a bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering from India, a MS in Industrial Management from Northern Illinois University and an MBA from Claremont Graduate University's Peter F. Drucker School of Management.

Eric has spent his career in the high-tech industry building go-to-market business models focused on delivering customer needs while driving top line revenue growth and bottom line profitability. In his current role as Vice President of Digital Media GTM & Sales he is responsible for growing and retaining a $3B+ business across the Americas region.

Prior to his current position, Eric has held various Business, Strategy and Operations roles across Adobe. Some of his past responsibilities include the transformation of Adobe.com into a benchmark example of an ecommerce solution built on top of Adobe’s own Digital Experience technologies, and the operationalization of Adobe’s Data-Driven Operating Model (DDOM).

Before joining Adobe in 2003, Eric held various leadership positions at Visio Software, Microsoft Corporation and Hablador, a content management solution start up in Seattle Washington.

Scott Di Valerio is the Chief Operating and Financial Officer at Spiceworks, overseeing the continued scaling of Spiceworks revenue and finance organizations as well as the company’s day-to-day operations. Scott has more than 30 years of executive management, operations, and finance experience at leading technology brands, such as RetailMeNot, Outerwall, Lenovo, Microsoft, The Walt Disney Company, Mindwave Software Inc. and PricewaterhouseCoopers (pwc).

Liz Ronco is the Executive Director of Data Product Management at Spiceworks. Liz strategically drives the use of Spiceworks data and effectively converts it to products that solve business needs and scale with company growth. Liz has nearly 10 years of experience in a variety of technical management and financial operations roles in the technology industry.

Doug is a Senior Director of Strategic & Analytics within the Oracle Marketing Could working to drive effective and efficient online marketing strategies with clients such as The North Face, JC Penney, Comcast, Levis, Citi, and more.

Doug has over 18 years of Digital marketing and CRM experience on both the client and agency side, along with his experience working across the entire digital landscape and a variety of verticals has positioned him to be able to drive innovation and results to help clients achieve positive business outcomes and grow revenue. Before joining Oracle Doug worked as the Senior Director of Client Services and Director of Digital Strategy at Merkle providing digital strategy consulting to Fortune 500 clients, Director of Marketing for Overstock.com responsible for Search, Email and Testing & Analytics.

Doug has been a panel member and industry speaker at several marketing events and publications including eTail, Shop.Org, and InternetRetailer. He lives in Colorado and likes to kayak and spend time with his family.

Michael joined the WW eCommerce team in October 2017 and is responsible for the strategic direction and performance of the WW SMB segment with the goal of transforming it into a $1B business in the next 2 years. Michael joined Lenovo in October 2016 as director of SMB Segment for NA region, where he was responsible for strategy and performance across all routes to market.

Prior to joining Lenovo, Michael worked for CommScope as Director of Enterprise Wireless Networks, and at Tyco Electronics, where he served in a number of roles, including Director of Global Channel Sales, Director of Global Sales and Marketing, Global Account Manager and Operations manager.

Mike earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh, and an MBA from McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, Austin. He currently lives in Raleigh, NC with his wife and 2 children.

David McBride is Senior Vice-President, Digital Solutions and Consulting at Course5 Intelligence. He has been in the analytics industry for 13 years and has led analytics teams at Comcast and American Eagle Outfitters. David has also built technology and analytics products at Dell, Intel and IBM Watson Marketing. He holds an MBA from The Anderson School at UCLA and is based in San Francisco.

Matt Zilli joined Adobe as vice president of go-to-market through the acquisition of Marketo in 2018 to lead the Commercial go-to-market organization, which includes sales, customer success, professional services, partners and solutions consulting. Previously, Matt served as Marketo’s chief customer officer where he spearheaded efforts to transform Marketo’s approach to customer success and championed the customer-first strategy that contributed to one of the MarTech industry’s biggest acquisitions. During his time at Marketo, Matt also served as interim chief marketing officer as well as group vice president of product and solution marketing.

Before joining Marketo, Matt spent time in both start-ups and large organizations, including Texas Instruments and Rovi Corporation. He has over 15 years of experience in building leadership teams, go-to-market execution, marketing strategy, thought leadership, messaging and positioning, sales enablement, and pricing and product launches.

He has a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Santa Clara University and a Master of Business Administration from the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California in Berkeley.

Ryan Sullivan is Chief Strategy Officer at Performics, leading the agency’s solutions and services development processes and strategic planning efforts. Ryan works across teams and disciplines within the agency, and aligns partner, agency, and broader Publicis Groupe initiatives to bring innovative and leading performance marketing solutions to clients. His focus areas include partnerships, joint business planning, mergers and acquisitions, and commerce/retail media. Ryan also works with some of Performics’ top clients as a channel advisor and performance marketing expert.

Ryan joined Performics in 2008 as an organic search specialist, writing technical recommendations for several leading brands. He went on to take leadership positions in operations, business development and client management before joining the U.S. Executive Team in 2014 and launching the Performance Services division in 2016. Prior to his current role, Ryan led strategy, planning, execution/buying, production, and partner management across all performance media and content disciplines, as well as coordination with the agency’s other major practice areas in the U.S. and beyond.

Ryan earned his Bachelor of Science in computer science from Pennsylvania State University with minors in Business and Information Science.

Expertise
Technology Disruption, Strategy, Innovation, Change, Design Thinking, Culture and Organization Learning.

Corporate Experience
During his 18 year corporate career, Tony held several strategic leadership positions. He was a founding member of IBM Global Service’s Strategy and Change consulting practice. In that role, he consulted with business leaders around the world on creating sustainable competitive advantage in an increasingly global, networked and knowledge-enabled economy. He also served as a member IBM’s Almaden Services Research group where he investigated the changing roles of leadership, innovation, and collaboration as enterprises become more global, virtual, open and digitally mediated. At both IBM and Nortel Networks, Tony had responsibility for crafting learning and human performance strategies at the enterprise-level.

Tony’s work has been published in Harvard Business Review, Strategy and Business, CLO Magazine and Dialogue. He writes a regular column for Training Magazine called “Learning Matters.” He has also published two books on Organization Performance and Learning: Achieving Desired Business Performance, and Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration.

Academic Experience
Dr. O’Driscoll served on the faculty of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management. At Fuqua, Tony played a key role in redesigning the Cross Continent MBA (CCMBA) program and served as Executive Director of Fuqua’s Center for Technology Entertainment and Media (CTEM), a research center dedicated to understanding the strategic, structural, and business-model issues with these vibrant and volatile industry sectors. At Poole, Tony was a founding member of NCSU’s Technology, Education, and Commercialization (TEC) Program established to educate graduate engineering and management students in the areas of new product and service development via the incubation and commercialization of emerging technologies.

Dr. O’Driscoll has authored and co-authored articles for academic journals such as Management and Information Sciences Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, Performance Improvement Quarterly, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management.

Current Research
Tony’s current research examines how emerging technologies are rapidly disrupting existing industry structures and business models. He is focusing specifically on how organizations and their leaders adapt and evolve in increasingly turbulent and uncertain business contexts.