Bios

R “Ray” Wang is a Partner with Altimeter Group and the author of the popular enterprise software blog “A Software Insider’s Point of View”. The blog focuses on enterprise apps strategy, vendor selection, software contract negotiations, and emerging business and technology trends. As an enterprise strategist, Ray focuses on bridging the gap between today’s enterprise landscape with an emerging class of enterprise business solutions adopting the spirit of social technologies and Enterprise 2.0 concepts. Research topic areas often include ERP, CRM, Project Based Solutions, Order Management, Master Data Management, and SaaS.

For software vendors, he provides strategic guidance in go to market strategies; reviews and designs software licensing, pricing, support, and maintenance policies; delivers competitive assessments; evaluates software partner ecosystems; and researches business processes such as the perfect order and continuous customer management for the enterprise and SMB markets.

Publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Fortune, Inc., The Associated Press, CIO Magazine, Information Week, ComputerWorld, Financial Times, eWeek, IDG News, ZDNet, and TechTarget frequently seek Ray’s point of view. He has appeared on several video outlets, including CNBC. In both 2008 and 2009, Ray was recognized by the prestigious Institute of Industry Analyst Relations (IIAR) as Analyst of the Year and in 2009 he was named as one of the most important analysts for Enteprise, SMB, and Software.

Vinnie Mirchandani, is a former technology industry analyst (with Gartner where he analyzed the ERP software – and related services market) and outsourcing executive (with PwC, now part of IBM, where he helped clients across the globe plan and implement avariety of packaged application software). He is founder of Deal Architect Inc. a technology advisory firm which was recognized in the Black Book of Outsourcing as one of the top boutique sourcing advisory firms.

He also writes 2 widely read technology blogs: Deal Architect which focuses on disruptive trends (third party maintenance, SaaS, global outsourcing, cloud computing etc) and economics of technology and New Florence. New Renaissance on innovation in a wide range of technologies from telemetry to web services to virtualization. Last year The Industry Standard rated the Deal Architect blog as one of its best technology blogs.

Frank Scavo is Managing Partner at Strativa, a management consulting firm that offers business leaders independent advice for business and technology decisions. Since 2000, he and his team at Strativa have assisted numerous clients in defining IT and applications strategy, benchmarking IT spending levels, evaluating software vendors, implementing enterprise systems, and improving business processes around the use of such systems.

Frank authors the Enterprise System Spectator. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and is a Certified Fellow in Production and Inventory Management (CFPIM). He is also the President of Computer Economics, an IT research and advisory firm founded in 1979.

Oliver Marks provides seasoned consulting guidance on the effective planning of social business collaboration strategy, tactics, technology decisions and roll out.

With extensive senior management practical experience in international enterprises, Oliver previously managed the Sony PlayStation ‘WorldWide Studios’ collaboration extranet, and has worked with the American Management Association, Sun, Docent/SumTotal Systems, Harvard Business School and McKinsey & Company on major initiatives around knowledge transfer and change management. Oliver has dual US/UK citizenship and has worked on Asian, European and American global enterprise collaboration, and spoken at various conferences. He is based in San Francisco. Oliver writes the influential Collaboration 2.0 blog on ZDNet, and his personal blog.

Dennis Howlett is a 38 year IT veteran, mostly centered on financial systems with smaller and medium sized businesses. He served as partner to a British firm of Chartered Accountants for 10 years following 10 years in a variety of senior finance related roles including a stint alongside what today is Deloitte Consulting, Inchcape and Johnson Matthey. Since 1993, Dennis has been consulting and providing analysis on enterprise application selection, negotiation and implementation. Dennis is a fervent believer in the value that SaaS can bring to enterprise. He is currently providing his unique take on enterprise matters at ZDNet, maintains his own sponsored weblog and provides consulting and content services to ICAEW’s community efforts. He undertakes a limited number of consulting engagements each year.

Dennis holds a 1st class honors degree in social sciences from the University of Leeds.