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2019 Information Technology Awards Categories Judging Committee

COMMITTEE CHAIR:

Vladimir Kaladan Petkov, Chief Technology Officer
A Data Pro, Sofia, Bulgaria

Vladimir joined A Data Pro as CTO in 2011, bringing on board over a decade’s experience in digital media and business development, gained at Economedia, Bulgaria’s top news publisher. Under his leadership, the company has transformed into a fully integrated human-technology ecosystem, both in terms of service line-up and infrastructure. He also serves as CEO of A Data Pro’s artificial intelligence research and development hub, Identrics.

Beyond his work at A Data Pro, Vladimir is a vocal advocate for digitalization and the adoption of new technologies by businesses in Bulgaria. He currently presents а popular podcast on media and technologies, and has served on the boards of the Bulgarian Web Association and the local branch of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). He also lectures on online business and digital media-related topics at Sofia University and New Bulgarian University.

COMMITTEE

Balaji Angiya Nagarajan, Senior Business Analyst
Mphasis Corporation, New York, New York, United States
I am a lead business analyst/product manager with Mphasis corporation with around 16 years of work experience. I am currently working with one of the largest banks in the United States in the area of capital markets and investment banking. I have successfully executed key assignments and have followed agile methodology. My responsibilities include requirements gathering, process management, coaching, domain SME, data analysis and quality assurance. I also support the pre-sales team, supporting RFPs and solutioning. My hobbies are Chinese Kung Fu and reading.

Bilal Awan, CEO/CTO
Fortwell Business Systems, Smithfield, Dublin, Ireland
Bilal Awan is an award-winning entrepreneur, who has been accredited as an All-Ireland Thought Leader in Business and IT Security, in addition to winning Best Start-up of 2018 in Dublin, Ireland. Bilal has been working in the IT industry for nearly 2 decades and has led major PPP projects in Ireland and abroad. He has also delivered thought-provoking lectures on international stages, including IEEE Congress 2017 Sarajevo and LEAP Summit 2019 Zagreb to name few, in addition to providing mentorship to young students and professionals. Bilal believes in providing opportunities to those who lack the opportunity in this practical world.

Nehal Bharodia, Principal Analytical Consultant
SAS Institute Inc., Cary, North Carolina, United States
Nehal specializes in delivering risk business consulting and technology for Market Risk, Credit Risk and ALM. He is a seasoned professional with deep expertise in CECL/IFRS9, and Stress Test (CCAR/DFST). He has been in the industry for 10+ years serving various financial institutions delivering business expertise and end to end risk architecture for large scale risk and finance transformations. Nehal is hands on with developing the risk and finance systems with qualitative and quantitative background. He has demonstrated leadership and excellence in solving risk and finance problems in a cost effective way with easy to adopt changes. Specialties include: Market Risk, Credit Risk, ALM, CECL, Stress Test, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence.

Vimal Bhatt, Senior Business Analyst, CSPO®, CSM®, CBAP®
Mastech Digital Inc, Malvern, Pennsylvania, United States
Vimal Bhatt has 13 years experience in Information Technology. He is a Certified Scrum Product Owner® (CSPO®), Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM®) and Certified Business Analysis Professional™ (CBAP®). He also passed the Chartered Financial Analyst Level II exam from CFA institute, USA. As a software consultant, Vimal has worked with many financial companies such as The Vanguard Group Inc., Citibank, and Royal bank of Scotland. He has worked in teams which are geographically dispersed in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and India. His forte is to execute large software development projects in the financial domain. He is well versed in Agile as well as waterfall software development methodology.

Vamshi Krishna Boga, Project Manager / Technical Lead
SalinetCRGT, Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Vamshi Krishna Boga has been project manager and BI solutions architect at SalientCRGT since 2009. He is a results-oriented and dynamic leader, able to build team cohesion and inspire individuals to strive towards even higher levels of achievement. He has many years of proven experience delivering business intelligence solutions to enterprises from small to Fortune 50 Company size. He has exceptional client relationship management skills and the ability to relate and interface easily with all levels in a business. He has excellent interpersonal and communication skills, and is goal-oriented with a commitment to continuous quality improvement and technology/business alignment. He has been responsible for logical flow, system flow, and maintenance in different production environments such as complete Systems Development Life Cycle processes (Waterfall, Spiral) and Agile Software Development (Scrum). He has a strong technical background in Databases, Data Analysis, Computer networks, operating systems and software engineering concepts.

Satishkumar Boguda, Software Engineer
Applexus Technologies, San Diego, California, United States
Satish Kumar Boguda is a multi-faceted IT software engineer with more than 12 years of experience across a wide range of industries, including Healthcare, Telecommunications, Finance, Energy, Manufacturing, Transportation, etc. He has specialized skills in machine learning and high-dimensional data analysis. Satish is a data scientist, a Scrum Master, product owner, and a data science executive.

Moonmoon Chakraborty, Senior Consultant ERP
Cognizant Technology Solutions, Chicago, Illinois, United States
Moonmoon Chakraborty has over 10 years experience in professional services on the overall design, configuration, and delivery of software and data solutions to meet customer requirements. She is also engaged in Data Management, with a focus on Data Architecture, Data Modeling, Data Integration, Data Conversion, and Data Quality. She has worked with different database platforms such as Oracle, Teradata, PostgreSQL, DevOps, and AWS Cloud. Her passion is to interact with business teams in all stages of the implementation life-cycle, and to translate client desires into a solution. Moonmoon holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science & Engineering and a Master of Science Degree in Information Technology. She holds many Oracle database certifications, Prince2 foundation, Agile Scrum Master, ITIL foundation and expert.

Chezhian Elamvazhudi, Systems Consultant
Freelance, Owings Mills, Maryland, United States
System Consultant with 15 years demonstrated history of working in Marketing Technology. Skilled in TOGAF, Solutions Architecture, Cloud Technologies, AWS and GCP Cloud, Big Data, Analytics and Agile Methodologies. 8+ years with Investment major - AVP in T. Rowe Price, USA. Past working experiences with RR Donnlley USA and Tata Consultancy Service.

Brooke Greenwald, President & CEO
Cornerstone Communications, LTD, Rockville, Maryland, United States
Brooke Greenwald is the President and CEO of Cornerstone Communications, LTD.  For over two decades she has grown and managed Cornerstone, a company that has worked with some of today's top tier technology companies.  With a focus on  technology, healthcare, consumer and government, her expertise has helped grow numerous organizations worldwide.  A former journalist, Ms. Greenwald has worked for NBC, ABC, FOX, CBS, and The Washington Post.

Revant Kapoor, Software Engineering Technical Lead
Pinterest, San Francisco, California, United States
Revant Kapoor is an Entrepreneurial Engineer currently working on the Growth team at Pinterest [200M+ monthly active users], where he leads the user retention effort. Previously he was a founding engineer at Highlight, a startup which was acquired by Pinterest. Before that he was at Zynga where he was a founding engineer on Cityville, one of Zynga’s largest games [100M+ monthly active users], where he was also granted 2 patents. Revant is passionate about startups, Artificial Intelligence and large-scale Distributed Systems. At Pinterest he is currently building machine learning pipelines to predict churn and help users get relevant content.

Rich Kay, Senior Program Manager, Coach and Author
SmallSimpleChanges.com, Woodbridge, Virginia, United States
Rich originally hails from New York. He served in the U.S. Marines and then obtained a commission as a U.S. Naval Officer. He held leadership positions at Perot Systems, start-ups, the U.S. Mint, and Unisys as a Senior Program Manager. Rich holds many certifications from PMP, PMI-RMP, ITIL Expert in IT Service Management, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, as well as certifications in Fitness, Nutrition and Wellness. He is the author of the book "Small Simple Changes" and many Project Management and Organizational Development articles. Rich encourages all he meets to keep moving and keep smiling.

Jason King, Chief Executive Officer
Telenor Bulgaria, Sofia, Bulgaria
For almost 20 years, Jason has been a senior technology, media, and telecoms executive. He has worked for various groups, including Deutsche Telekom, Telenor and UPC Liberty Global, and Veon. Jason has either worked or has led business directly in over 30 countries and has previously held commercial P&L responsibilities in the $500M-$1B range.

Pratik Kothari, IT Delivery Manager
John Deere, Pune, Maharashtra, India
Pratik is a results-oriented IT leader having more than 17 years of experience in Software Development where he has designed, developed, and managed small to highly complex software solutions for various industries. As a Portfolio Manager, he has managed large projects through Agile Portfolio Management, and he is passionate about solving complex business problems in new and innovative ways through technology.  He is a Fellow Member of the prestigious British Computer Society.

Deepak Kumeri, Senior Software Engineer
Kairos Technologies Inc, Irving, Texas, United States
I am a Senior Software Engineer and a skilled practitioner dedicated to helping customers leverage modern content management systems, business intelligence tools and technology to formulate data-driven strategies. I have over 14 years of experience in Content Management Systems, Business Intelligence and Data Science. I have worked for several large organizations, including Wells Fargo Bank, Stein Mart, Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Stayer University, and Kairos Technologies Inc.

Paritosh Maheshwari, Solution Design IT Specialist
TD Bank, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada

Georgy Manvelishvili, Digital Marketing Executive for Central Eastern Europe
Dyson LLC, Moscow, Russia
Georgy Manvelishvili is an experienced Digital Marketing Manager and Entrepreneur with an expertise in leading corporate development efforts, operational strategies and improvement initiatives to optimize business performance, expand market share and realize significant revenue enhancements. His impacts have been felt all over Eastern Europe, most notably in countries including Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Croatia, Greece, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria, and Czech Republic. He is currently working as a Digital Marketer at Dyson where he is imbuing Digital Marketing best practices and has drastically improved Dyson’s digital direct sales channels share across CEE countries in less than a year.

Rishit Mishra, Manager
PricewaterhouseCoopers, Dallas, Texas, United States
Rishit Mishra is a Manager in the PwC - Digital Risk Solutions practice. For over 9+ years Rishit has been leading, delivering and managing a diverse range of multinational SAP security and GRC Access Control projects for Fortune 100 clients across various industries. Rishit’s project experiences include: SAP Security Design/Redesign, SAP GRC-AC implementations, SAP Security/GRC Assessments & SAP Security Remediation. Rishit’s experience includes catering to a wide array of clients in the Energy, Industrial Products and Consumer Products industries. Rishit holds a Masters degree in Management Information Systems from Texas A&M University.

Sourav Mukherjee, Database Administrator
KSN Technologies, Inc, Chicago, Illinois, United States
Sourav Mukherjee is a Senior Database Administrator and architect based out of Chicago. He has more than 12 years of experience working with Microsoft SQL Server Database Platform. Being a Consultant, Sourav worked with different Chicago-based client projects. He has helped many clients in designing and maintaining their high availability solutions and providing query performance tuning to improve the overall SQL Server performance. He is passionate about SQL Server Database and the related community, and contributes articles in different SQL Server Public sites and forums helping the members. Some of his articles have also been published by Cornell University and other reputed journal sites.

Ihab Naguib, Specialist Team Unit Lead
Microsoft, Cairo, Egypt
Ihab Naguib is passionate about technology and its application in business. With 20+ years of experience in Sales, Marketing, and Services in IT Industry, he works as an agent of change for Enterprise Entities capitalizing on his long experience in building IT roadmaps and leveraging Digital Transformation concepts. Ihab Started his career in 1997, working in the IT Services Department serving Enterprise Customers at Fujistu Egypt. He later moved to Presales & Marketing. In 2006, Ihab joined the Microsoft Egypt sales team as Account Technology Strategist, then Public Sector Solutions Manager. He returned to Marketing for a few years as Open Source Strategy Lead, and in 2017 went back to Sales, leading the Technical and Solution sales team. Ihab obtained an MBA degree from the Arab Academy for Science & Technology – Marketing Major in 2003. He also obtained his B.Sc. of Electronic Engineering – Computer major from Cairo University Faculty of Engineering in 1995. To serve the community, Ihab works as a consultant for Openness Egypt group, helping young developers and entrepreneurs to choose the right platforms and tools to build their IT solutions and form their own start-ups. Ihab is a member of Maadi Sporting Club & Yacht in Cairo. His main hobbies are traveling, Sports (ex-professional football player, swimming, squash) and reading.

Ivelin Nikolaev, Head of Engineering and Operations
HeleCloud, Sofia, Bulgaria
Ivelin has 18 years of professional experience in IT, Finance, Banking, Forex, Insurance, Healthcare, Aviation and Rail, Digital Media, and Fleet Management.  He has managed various teams including Software Developers in Java, .NET, JavaScript, Php, Visual Basic, Delphi, Assembly, C/C++, Cobol, RPG, PL/I; Quality Assurance engineers (manual and automation); Database developers and administrators in MS SQL Server, Oracle, DB2; Data and Delivery Analysts; DevOps engineers and consultants. Under his supervision, hundreds of IT projects have been successfully completed based on Web Development technologies, Desktop, Batch, Web, Mobile and Analytical Applications, Web Services, Database and Data warehouse projects, Decision Support Systems, High Traffic-High Throughput communication channels, custom protocols and file formats on both Cloud, PC and Mainframe architectures. Ivelin is a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and AWS Cloud Practitioner.

Vijay Pandey, Director of Technology
Intueor Consulting, Inc., Irvine, California, United States
Technology Leader with responsibility for shaping Intueor’s technology products, solutions and services to in a way that maximizes business value for Intueor clients; responsible for IP creation, customer engagement with new product ideas, product sales, competency and capacity building specializing in the areas of Enterprise Architecture, Technical Architecture, Business Architecture, Application Architecture, SOA, JEE/Java, Security, Modeling and Performance Engineering.

Erwin Pfuhler, Key Account Manager
noris network AG, Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Erwin Pfuhler, MBA, is passionate about IT and Information Security and dedicated to serve his customers. IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are the topics he discusses with his customers, when they consider IT-Outsourcing, Cloud Services or Colocation. He sees Digital Identity as the core element for digitisation on a national level. Therefore he founded a group of renowned experts to push and to consult the German government. He is also a senior analyst for Wikistrat, contributing to geopolitical and technological consulting projects. Road cycling helps him to cool down after a fully packed week and get inspiration for new endeavours.

Adriana Popova, Chief Intelligence Officer
DEEP I/O, London, United Kingdom
Adriana is a serial entrepreneur and currently Chief Intelligence Officer of the UK data intelligence and business consulting firm DEEP I/O. She is a strategy consultant in technology, telecommunications, finance, healthcare and media sectors and has acted as an advisor on economic, international and security affairs, and was Chief of Staff in a number of Bulgarian governments. Adriana is a strategic intelligence professional with over a decade of experience in public affairs, business intelligence, analytics, cyber security and data governance, risk & compliance, AML/KYC research, artificial intelligence research and development, strategic communications, and crisis management. She is Board Member and Executive Director of the Bulgarian project management association IPMA Bulgaria, and she is a co-founder of business and media intelligence company A Data Pro.

Mohammad Rizvi, Manager
PwC US, Dallas, Texas, United States
Mohammad Raza Rizvi is an Information Technology professional with 17+ years of international experience with multinational firms. He has experience across the U.S. and Europe working with many Fortune 500 customers and helping them succeed in their IT & Business Transformation programs and Digital implementations across Finance, Telecom, Automotive and Printing Solutions industry segments. He has helped customers with IT Strategy, Solution Roadmaps, Business/IT Alignment, Program Plans, CRM Consulting, System Integration, Solution Blueprinting, and Transition for on-premise and cloud products. He holds a Master’s Degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India.

Oleksandra Rostovtseva, Business Manager
GBKSOFT, Kyiv, Ukraine
Oleksandra is Business Manager at GBKSOFT with more than 8 years of experience in business analysis, tech, sales, and project management. As the person responsible for the company’s business growth, Oleksandra is able to capture the big picture and always takes a strategic approach to projects. As a result, she effectively helps clients solve complex business problems through innovative solutions and advanced digital products.

Svetlana Stavreva, Communications Manager
IBM, Vienna, Austria

Ashish Tanwer, Senior Software Engineer
Cisco Systems, Inc., Sunnyvale, California, United States
Ashish Tanwer is the founder of Gravity Uni and has been Lead Architect of Cisco Cloud Object Storage since 2015. He has more than 8 years of experience in product design, business processes, and software development. A graduate student, lead innovator, and research scholar from Stony Brook University, he specializes in cloud and distributed systems and provides consulting to businesses for product architectures.

Rajiv Tiwari, Forbes Council/Co-Chair-IEEE Future Direction Digital Committee
FORBES and IEEE, Princeton, New Jersey, United States
Raj is an industry-renowned global leader in business transformation and digital technologies. He has 24 years of experience reshaping the business process systems of multiple leading companies in the United States and around the world. With a global career spanning more than 19 countries across 6 continents, Raj brings unique international perspectives to his work. He has diverse expertise in technology and business process re-engineering at various levels of work function, and has played critical roles in global projects with leading companies such as Johnson & Johnson, IBM Global Services, SAP, and Abbott Pharmaceuticals. He has led multiple global projects and roll-outs in USA, Europe and Asia Pacific regions. Rajiv is currently working as IT ERP Environment Manager with Johnson & Johnson, the premier healthcare company. He previously worked with Pfizer, Merck, GE Healthcare and Abbott. Raj is accelerating digital transformation and shaping the future of health-tech trajectory via leveraging technology innovation. Raj plays an active role in various industry boards and is regularly featured as a Judge, Panelist, or Keynote Speaker at International and national conferences such as AWE, VRX and Technology Time Machine.

Veda Prakash Vaddadi, SAP Architect /Subject Matter Expert & Delivery Lead
Microsoft/Accenture, Frisco, Texas, United States
Veda Vaddadi is an SAP Consulting Professional with 20 years industry experience, which includes 14+ years of exclusive SAP consulting and IT work supporting complex applications for global clients in an Onsite and Offshore delivery model. Adept at business process consulting, project management, and delivery of large-scale and complex SAP deployments and outsourcing deals. Has deep industry experience in Professional Services, Manufacturing, Construction, Utility, Oil & Gas, Chemicals, Automotive, etc. in implementing SAP solutions for global cutting-edge technology companies in the United States, Middle East, Europe, and in India. He is a Subject Matter Expert and SAP Project System Solutions Architect with significant experience implementing Commercial Project Management, Contract-to-Cash business processes, and Procure-to-Pay integration work. Veda holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India, and is a graduate in Architecture and Construction Management.