PLENARY PANEL

Plenary Panel
Tuesday, 4 May 2010

"The Promises of Cloud - Facts & Fallacies"
Moderator: Dr. Leong Mun Kew (Deputy Chief Information Officer, National Library Board)
Panelists: Vamsicharan Mudiam (Leader IBM Cloud Labs, India), Alvin Kok (Chief, Alatum), Chris Whitney (Managing Director, HP Labs Singapore), Dr. Chew Tat Leong (National Technology Officer, Microsoft)

Biodata of Dr. Leong Mun Kew
Leong Mun Kew is CTO and Deputy CIO of the National Library Boad where he is responsible for ensuring the alignment of IT to business strategy, and for looking at future technology directions. Prior to that, Mun Kew was Principal Scientist and Programme Director for Services Research at the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research. From 1999 to 2001, Mun Kew was VP and CTO at an IT startup delivering custom distributed deep search technologies and services. His personal research was in information retrieval, mobile and social information management, educational technologies, digital libraries and distributed multilingual search systems. He has published and patented in these areas, and is an invited speaker at many talks. Mun Kew received his PhD from Stanford University. He has more than 20 years of R&D and commercial experience in IT. He serves as a member of the Advisory Board for the School of IT at Temasek Polytechnic, the advisory board of the AIRS Symposium series, and was formerly Adjunct Assoc. Prof at the National Institute of Education.

Biodata of Vamsicharan Mudiam
Vamsi Mudiam is part of the IBM Software Group in India and works at the India Software Lab in Bangalore. He currently heads the IBM Cloud Lab at Bangalore. He spends most of his time helping clients with Cloud computing strategy and implementation, with a special focus on the benefits of Private Cloud for test and development efficiencies.

He began his tryst with Cloud computing in September 2007, working on IBM's very first cloud computing venture with Google. Since then he has been in the forefront of the IBM Cloud Computing initiatives as a part of the worldwide team and more recently as the leader of  the IBM Cloud lab in Bangalore.

Vamsi manages a team of developers and architects who are part of the IBM Cloud Labs global team of developers helping IBM roll out new cloud offerings and capabilities to meet client requirements.  He has been part of the India software lab for the past 9 years and has been involved with core product development activities and more recently in promoting IBM's new and emerging technologies.

Vamsi holds a bachelors degree in Engineering from Mysore University and has over 13 years of IT industry experience.

Biodata of Alvin Kok
Alvin has 27 years of experience in the IT industry.  His experience spans from software development and implementation, consulting, sales and marketing to management of business operations.  He has been involved actively in developing markets for large U.S. and European Multi-National Software Companies in many Asia Pacific countries; including Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Korea, India, China and Taiwan. He was the first Asian to be appointed Corporation Vice-President, Asia Pacific for JD Edwards & Company, a US $1 Billion Company listed in NASDAQ. During his career, he serviced both international and national customers in these countries.

His career portfolio gave him a strong foundation in understanding the challenges of all aspects of business solutioning; including Technical, Pre-sales, Project Management, Response Centre, Customer Training and Sales.  In his various management positions, he was responsible for setting the strategic direction for revenue growth as well as profitability.

Biodata of Chris Whitney
Chris Whitney is managing director of HP Labs Singapore. He has been involved in service automation and integration since joining BT Labs in 1985 where he was responsible for developing algorithms and prototypes of intelligent service and network management systems for use in public and private communications networks.

Previously, Whitney managed HP Services' research and innovation group, focused on developing new services and solutions for HP Consulting, Integration, Outsourcing and Support organizations.

From 2000 to 2005 he held vice president roles at Exodus Communications and at Cable & Wireless, where he developed lights-out, virtualized, automated data center solutions. He also founded ActiveReasoning, a California-based startup company developing data center compliance and management software.

Earlier roles included work in HP’s Customer Relationship Management Operation, where he led the research and development organization in developing automated call center and customer management software.

Whitney first joined HP Labs in 1994, developing automated service-management capabilities for HP’s OpenView and other products. He received his bachelor of science in computer science from Teesside University and a master of science from South Bank University, London.

Biodata of Dr. Chew Tat Leong
As National Technology Officer (NTO), Tat Leong is responsible for engaging current and next generation policy makers on technology trends and policy. He drives Microsoft’s efforts to promote the use of innovative technologies for the community.

Tat Leong has 21 years of working experience. Prior to joining Microsoft, Tat Leong was previously Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Renault Retail Group (RRG), Paris, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Renault-Nissan. At Renault, he worked on IT systems across all domains of car manufacturing, from assembly line, production planning, car sales and distribution. Before France, Tat Leong was in Singapore where he worked on the Port of Singapore Authority’s ship and yard planning project for which he received the National Science and Technology Award in 1993.