Alakh Verma is Director of Product Development (Platform Technology Solutions) at Oracle USA, headquarters at Redwood Shores, CA, USA. He has over 20 years of experience in the high technology industry blended with academia. Verma spearheads and evangelizes emerging-technologies-based solutions and services among global partner ecosystem and envisions major shifts in IT trends with cloud, social, mobile, big data, and predictive analytics.

Verma is engaged in Product Management of technology platforms (cloud, social, mobile, big data, and predictive analytics) at Oracle, and has traveled all across the U.S., Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Europe, Middle East, and African countries as a business and technology delegate in global forums and symposiums.

He is currently engaged in managing a wide range of technical and business responsibilities, including product management, marketing, evangelism, technical enablement, and global alliances and channel management.

He is distinguished speaker, author, and mentor in the area of business and technology. He has published several papers in journals and regularly writes blogs on the emerging technologies.

Verma is a postgraduate in management from Jamnalal Institute of Management Studies (JBIMS) in Mumbai, India, and has a Master of Science in Systems Management from Notre Dame de Namur University (NDNU) in Belmont, California. He is an adjunct faculty and advisor at the University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, Santa Cruz–Silicon Valley Extension, and offers lectures and thought leadership in the field of Cloud and Big Data.

Rodney Heisterberg serves as Professor in the School of Business and Management at Notre Dame de Namur University. He teaches courses on the application of information technology (IT) for enabling strategic management decision making in virtual enterprises for the Master of Business Administration and Master of Science in Systems Management degree programs. He applies the learnings of those principles and practices as Managing Partner of Rod Heisterberg Associates for clients who are IT users and vendors.

Dr. Heisterberg has over 25 years of experience in the field of IT. He holds BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue University, studying industrial engineering, computer science, and business administration. He has worked and consulted for numerous Global 500 companies, including British Aerospace, Eli Lilly, Ford, General Motors, Lockheed Martin, Mitsubishi, Procter & Gamble, Sunbeam, South African Breweries, and US Steel, as well as the U.S. Department of Defense at the Pentagon. Career highlights include serving as Program Director for a personal computer industry initiative sponsored by the U.S. Department of State to establish a PC manufacturing industrial base for economic development of the government of Iraq.

He was Director of Information Technology Management Consulting for Gartner in San Jose, where he performed technology product forecasting and led engagements for eBusiness transformation strategy and applications architecture development. His responsibilities focused on strategic planning for collaborative commerce, including formation, implementation, and operation of businesses as virtual enterprises.

This role leveraged his decade of experiences as a virtual enterprise architect for Lockheed Martin. This provided the credentials for him to be appointed as U.S. industry advisor to NATO, where he continued to work as virtual enterprise architect for a collaborative ecosystem of multinational government-industry programs. He is known as an international thought leader based on his early work in cloud computing serving as the co-chair of the joint government-industry group that authored the first U.S. standard for providing content management applications software-as-a-service.

Dr. Heisterberg is active in the travel industry as a destination and event marketing professional. He conducts research and develops products for delivering visitor experience management solutions, including social media and mobile technology featuring marketing apps integrated with streaming video. He serves the Destination Marketing Association International on the Technology Committee, where he is leading initiatives for integration of cloud computing with social, mobile, and video applications to produce big data analytics solutions for destinational ecosystem competiveness, as well as past chair of the Student Educator Advisory Council.

He is distinguished as an entrepreneur with active business and technology endeavors spanning the past three decades serving in the role of Chief Technology Officer. He performed market research and managed advisory programs that focused on collaborative commerce applications for building Internet communities using Web 2.0-enabling technologies incorporating cloud computing, social media, and mobile marketing technologies. He continues to be active as the graduate student faculty advisor at NDNU for mentoring prospective start-ups. In this role, he has also conducted workshops on developing business plans and investor presentations for undergraduate and graduate student entrepreneurs, as well as alumni start-ups.

As an internationally recognized speaker and writer, Dr. Heisterberg authored the collaborative commerce chapter of John Wiley & Sons' award winning Internet Encyclopedia in 2003. He contributed a chapter featuring interactive travel marketing solutions for The Handbook for Technology Management that was published by Wiley in 2010. His latest book, titled Creating Business Agility: How Convergence of Cloud, Social, Mobile, Video, and Big Data Enables Competitive Advantage, published by Wiley in 2014, provides a business case and game plan for integrating technology to build a smarter, more customer-centric digital business for a successful business ecosystem. The focus is on Business Agility Readiness (BAR) in terms of the five major developments transforming the IT environment. It describes how BAR is achieved by utilizing data-driven platforms enabling reengineered decision-making processes, which leverage digital relationships with a social business model to drive innovation and collaboration.

Interested in employing BAR strategies for implementing Systems of Engagement to sustain a competitive advantage for your digital business? Get started with the Ecosystem Hub Roadmap for Virtual Enterprise Integration so you can “raise the BAR” for business ecosystem leadership. To receive a copy email [email protected].