You can’t take the cowboy out of our founder, Mike. He’s a problem-solving wrangler, collaborating driver and an honest, hard working bronco-buster. Mike rounds ’em up and moves ‘em out every year at his family’s ranch in Idaho. He gets things done and isn’t afraid to try. Now Mike’s taking cancer by the horns.
A 25-year computer software industry veteran, Mike is a vice president at VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure. Previously Mike was general manager and vice president at BEA Systems. A former IBM business unit executive, Mike is an inspirational business developer and visionary. He graduated from University of Idaho with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and earned a master’s degree in business administration and finance from Texas A&M University.
John Fritz Director, Big Data, Analytics and Visualization Alliances and Solutions, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.John directs AMD’s partnerships with leading virtualization, cloud computing, and big data companies. He previously worked in business development and consulting roles at Borland, Gartner Group, 3Com and complex adaptive system start-ups Bios Group and Icosystem.
John graduated from the University of Wyoming with a degree in anthropology and from the Thunderbird School of Global Management with a master’s degree in international management. John maintains everything he knows about corporate politics he learned from working with gorillas, orangutans and a particularly disrespectful pair of mandrills at the Rio Grande Zoo. John, whose grandfather and father-in-law died of cancer in the same year, advises the Clayville Foundation on current and emerging big data, analytics, data visualization and computational technologies to accelerate research and treatment of cancer.