SPEAKERS

2019 Speakers will be announced soon. Check back for updates. In the meantime, take a look at last year’s speakers to better understand Phorum’s content.

2018 KEYNOTE SPEAKER

NICK CARR
Writer and Speaker

Nick Carr is a compelling writer and speaker whose work focuses on the intersection of technology and culture. A journalist by trade, he is the author of the acclaimed book The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us (2014), which examines the personal and social consequences of our ever-growing dependency on computers, robots, and apps. His previous work, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010), was a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations (W.W. Norton & Company, 2016) uses a collection of Carr’s seminal essays to further explore the Internet’s impact on society.

Carr is also the author of two other influential books, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (2008), which the Financial Times calls “the best read so far about the significance of the shift to cloud computing,” and Does IT Matter?: Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (2004). His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Carr has written for The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Wired, Nature, and MIT Technology Review, among others. His essays, including “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “The Great Forgetting,” have been featured in several anthologies, including The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best Spiritual Writing, and The Best Technology Writing. In 2015, he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association.

Carr is a former member of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors, was on the steering board of the World Economic Forum’s cloud computing project, and was a writer-in-residence at the University of California at Berkeley’s journalism school. He also maintains the popular blog Rough Type.

Earlier in his career, he served as executive editor of the Harvard Business Review.

Carr holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English and American Literature and Language, from Harvard University.

2018 SPEAKERS & MODERATORS

{Visit again soon for more 2018 speakers}

PETER ANGELINE, PHD
Strategic Futurist
The Hershey Company

Dr. Pete Angeline is a Strategic Futurist at The Hershey Company in Hershey PA and runs the Hershey Digital Innovation Lab at the University of Pennsylvania Pennovation Center. He earned a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning from The Ohio State University, and has been applying various forms of these technologies to industrial problems for more than 25 years. Dr. Angeline is a Senior Member of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society and was the Founding General Chairman of the IEEE Conference on Evolutionary Computation and is the author of numerous scientific publications on Evolutionary Computations, Neural Networks, Artificial Life, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

JULIE ASK
Vice President, Principal Analyst
Forrester

Julie serves eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals. Her nearly 30 years of work experience is balanced between the engineering and management consulting work she did in the first half of her career and her work as an analyst for the past 17 years. The combination of technical and business expertise positions prepared her well to work with business leaders to identify new opportunities offered by mobile technology and to develop strategies to engage with consumers on mobile devices. She has worked with hundreds of clients across retail, travel, banking, insurance, CPG, healthcare, and more to advise and guide the development of their mobile strategies.

Julie’s research and analysis have been widely cited in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and The Onion, as well as on Bloomberg, CBS, NBC, and PBS. Prior to becoming an analyst, Julie worked at a contextual services mobile startup in San Francisco and prior to that at Booz Allen & Hamilton.

Julie holds a B.S.E.E. and a Master of Science in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She also holds an MBA from the University of Michigan.

PATRICK COZZI
Principal Graphics Architect
Cesium

Patrick founded the next generation of 3D geospatial: he started Cesium and 3D Tiles, and co-created glTF. He supports everything from recruiting to software development to partnerships.

Patrick is active in the graphics and geospatial communities—a facilitator of ecosystems and a frequent conference presenter and organizer. He is the Chair of the Khronos 3D Formats Working Group and was Program Chair for FedGeoDay 2016. Patrick has contributed to eight books on 3D globes, WebGL, OpenGL, rendering, and games.

Patrick also teaches graphics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned an MS in computer science. Oddly enough, he is a huge Sixers fan among other things like home remodeling, riding motorcycles, and before Cesium, boxing.

PETER COFFEE
VP for Strategic Research
Salesforce

Coffee has been with the company for ten years. His global work supports Salesforce efforts in CIO strategies, security practices, and delivery of connected product and “big data” solutions through collaboration with account teams in many industries.

Prior to joining Salesforce, Peter spent eighteen years as a technology analyst, columnist, and editor for IT publications including eWEEK and PC Week, while also contributing to other journals including Computer Language and AI Expert. He has written widely on cloud security and privacy, and was a chapter contributor to Prentice Hall’s Nanotechnology: Science, Innovation, and Opportunity. He previously served as the first Manager for Desktop Computing Planning at The Aerospace Corporation, where he also worked in space-asset applications of AI techniques. Before that, he held project management roles at Exxon Corporation including arctic resource development.

Peter received his engineering degree from MIT in 1978 and an MBA from Pepperdine University in 1985; he has held college faculty appointments in expert-systems programming, IT management, and business analytics, while also lecturing at Stanford, CalTech, Harvard Business School, and the Sloan School of Management at MIT as well as other institutions in Europe, Asia and South America. He advises on curriculum and degree program planning in analytics and “big data” initiatives for three U.S. universities.

AMOD DANGE
Product Design Manager, Business Applications
Facebook

Amod Dange leads Facebook’s Business Applications design team. His work spans multiple domains, with products that are interconnected, and increasingly invisible. Aside from being a technologist, Amod has been a musician and filmmaker in the past, so he naturally applies his storytelling experience to the craft of product design. His disregard for the constraints of a particular medium allows him to reimagine designing for the enterprise. Amod cites his mission at work to be “to remove friction from people’s lives, so they do less of what they need to do, and more of what they want to do.”

CHARLIE HERRIN
Executive Vice President, Chief Customer Experience Officer
Comcast Cable

Charlie Herrin serves as Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer for Comcast Cable. In this role, Charlie serves as a customer advocate, partnering with leaders across all business units to transform the customer experience and ensure that customers are at the center of every business decision. Charlie leads a Customer Experience Services organization that includes the National Customer Service Operations, Technical Operations, and the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and his team, who work collaboratively to promote a consistent experience for customers across the company.

Charlie previously served as Senior Vice President of Product Design and Development, where he was responsible for all aspects of the design of Comcast’s Xfinity products from conception through consumer testing and deployment. Charlie led the design team behind the X1 Platform, the Company’s next-generation television experience, and was the driving force behind the Company’s initiative to deliver a consistent user experience across platforms. For their work, the team received a 2011 Emmy Award for outstanding achievement for the Xfinity TV iPad app and a 2013 Emmy Award for the X1 user interface.

An 18-year veteran of Comcast, Charlie has held a variety of business and product development roles since he joined the Company in 1999, serving as VP of Business Development as well as VP of Product Development for Comcast Interactive Media (CIM). During his tenure, Charlie has led the development of key platforms and industry firsts, including user self-installation, national retail agreements, and the widely adopted Comcast homepage and mobile applications.

Charlie graduated with honors in Economics from the University of Washington.

CHRIS HUFF
Executive Head of Engineering – Watson Marketing at
IBM Watson

As head of engineering, Chris is responsible for all aspects of engineering, quality, delivery, and AI enablement for the Watson Marketing Automation products. IBM is ranked a leader in Mobile Engagement Automation, AI-Powered Marketing Clouds, and Cross-Channel Campaign Management. Chris is an innovator with several patents pending in the mobile and edge compute space. He also serves as Chair for the IoT Leadership Council with the Metro Atlanta Chamber.

Previously, Chris was vice president of mobile and consumer app development at The Weather Channel©, where he was responsible for engineering and delivery of consumer applications on all digital platforms. The Weather Channel has one of the most used and downloaded apps of all time. Chris also worked at The Home Depot for 12 years, where he was responsible for mobile and online engineering. He also led numerous development teams during his tenure, including International, SAP and Enterprise Services.

He holds an MBA from Georgia State University and a bachelor’s degree in marketing and logistics from The University of Georgia.

SALEEM KHAN
Vice President of Data Innovation
Dun & Bradstreet

Saleem is tasked with identifying novel new sources of content and employing advanced analytic techniques to improve and extract insights from the world’s largest commercial database. As part of his responsibilities, Saleem has been tasked with leading Dun & Bradstreet’s strategy for internet of things, social media, machine learning and distributed ledger technologies to name a few.

Saleem is a pragmatic innovator and thought-leader with a proven ability to influence business and technology strategy. He has spent that last 14 years working in various roles from technologist to entrepreneur and product strategist to innovation leader. His background spans startups, large multi-national IT firms and financial services companies.

Saleem holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Fordham University.

SANDEEP KUMAR
Managing Director, Capital Markets, New York Office Head
Synechron

Sandeep Kumar is a proven business operations strategist and technology expert with over 25 years’ experience in capital markets consulting. He has worked with some of the world’s largest buy- and sell-side firms to design and implement transformative, global technology solutions that enhance operating models, streamline data capabilities and increase revenue.

Sandeep has been instrumental in the conception of Synechron’s blockchain accelerators which streamline operations, simplify complex data synchronization and consolidate fragmented business functions and in Synechron’s artificial intelligence accelerators helping clients to understand how they can bring techniques like natural language processing, robotic process automation, and machine learning into their businesses.

SEAN LANE
Founder & CEO
CrossChx

Sean is a lifelong technologist who grew up in a small, rural town in Ohio and started his career in the U.S. intelligence community, holding leadership positions in the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency. Sean served five combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was awarded the Defense Meritorious Service Medal and Bronze Star Medal for his service. After government service, Sean started his life as an entrepreneur, and has founded several technology companies dealing with big data, advanced analytics, entity resolution, and most recently, artificial intelligence. Sean has raised over $40M in venture capital, and is now a leading expert in applying Al to healthcare.

Sean received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award and an honorary doctorate in recognition of his work.

JOE McCABE
Head of Solution Development
SEI Wealth Platform

In this role, Joe leads a team of individuals responsible for establishing the strategic vision, development, and deployment of the SEI Wealth Platform into the Private Banking market. This entails coordinating input from clients and prospects, identifying industry trends, and working closely with the Platform Development and Processing Organizations to define, design, build and deploy solutions that will provide a transformational, holistic wealth management platform to clients.

Previously, Joe held various positions in SEI’s Private Banking unit both as a relationship manager working directly with Private Banking clients, as well as a team leader with overall business line responsibility for maintaining and growing specific segments of the U.S. Private Banking market. Before joining SEI, Joe worked as Head of Sales and Marketing for PMG Systems, a software and consulting company that specializes in providing complex probability measurement solutions to financial institutions. Prior to PMG, Joe was Senior Vice President and head of First Union Capital Markets’ International Corporate Banking Division; following a number of leadership positions in domestic and international corporate banking with both First Union and its predecessor, CoreStates Bank.

Joe graduated from the University of Delaware with a Bachelor of Science in Finance.

Rose Ritts, MS, PHD
Executive Vice President, Chief Innovation Officer
Jefferson Innovation

As Jefferson’s Chief Innovation Officer, Dr. Rose Ritts leads the Jefferson Innovation Pillar and is a member of the President and CEO’s senior management team, along with the leaders of the Jefferson Clinical, Academic and Philanthropy Pillars. Jefferson’s four Pillars work in synch to strategize and implement programs and investments to transition the academic medical enterprise from the current hospital-centric operation model to a transformed future state as a consumer health entity. Dr. Ritts also manages the commercialization staff for the Office of Technology Transfer and the Jefferson Accelerator Zone which designs educational and programmatic entrepreneurship initiatives and experiences for Jefferson faculty, staff and students. In addition to her role at Jefferson, she is an active early stage investor.

Dr. Ritts joined Jefferson in 2016, after spending 8 years in a similar role at Duke University with a team that grew innovation revenue from $3M to $35M/year and saw dramatic increases in entrepreneurial involvement at every level of the Duke enterprise. Prior to her academic gigs, Rose invested in and managed several early stage tech startups, served as the Director of Biotechnology and Materials at Sarnoff Corporation, was a member of the US Congressional Staff, and served as Program Manager in the chembio warfare defense program at the US DoD DARPA. While at DARPA she also served on a number of government think tanks and review panels across DoD, NIH, NSF and DOE. Dr. Ritts received her undergraduate degree from Duke University and earned both her PhD and MS degrees from Stanford University.

SCOTT SNYDER, PHD
Partner, Digital Transformation and Innovation, Heidrick Consulting
Senior Fellow, The Wharton School

Scott Snyder is a recognized thought leader in technology and innovation.He has more than 25 years of experience in business leadership, strategic planning and technology management for Fortune 500 companies and startup ventures.Scott is currently a Partner at Heidrick Consulting, leading the Digital Transformation and Innovation Offerings for global companies.Prior to Heidrick, Scott was the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Safeguard Scientifics (NYSE:SFE), which provides capital and relevant expertise to fuel the growth of technology-driven businesses in healthcare, financial services and digital media. Prior to Safeguard, Scott was President and Chief Strategy Officer at Mobiquity Inc., a leader in delivering innovative mobile and digital solutions for enterprises, where he continues to be Chairman of Mobiquity’s Advisory Board.Scott has held executive positions with several Fortune 500 companies including GE, Martin Marietta, and Lockheed Martin, has been the CEO of a leading strategic planning firm, Decision Strategies International, and has also started business ventures in software including OmniChoice, a CRM/Analytics applications provider.He also serves on the Board of Directors for Fulton Financial Corporation (FFC).Scott has authored a book entitled, “The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution”, and has been a long-time thought leader in the mobile and digital space.In addition, he is a chapter author in the books “The Network Challenge: Strategy, Profit, and Risk in the Interlinked World” and “Inside the Minds: Small Business Growth Strategies: Goals for Successful CEOs.” Scott is a Senior Fellow in the Management Department at the Wharton School, an Adjunct Faculty Member in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and has lectured at MIT, Babson, Duke, Georgia Tech and INSEAD on Digital Innovation, Decision-making, Business and IT Strategy, Next Generation Wireless, Product Design and Development, and Business Intelligence.Scott founded and directs the Game Changer Collaborative, which is made up of leading companies focused on cross-sector digital innovation opportunities.He also holds two patents for on-line decision aids and has been quoted as a thought leader in numerous publications including the CIO Magazine, WIRED, Forbes, [email protected], Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Business Journal.Scott earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.in Systems Engineering from University of Pennsylvania.

PAUL WALTON
Senior Research Analyst
London Stock Exchange Group

Paul Walton is a Senior Research Analyst at FTSE Russell in New York, with an interesting in technological innovation in the financial services industry. He has previously worked at Qlytics LLC Financial Services Principal, Managing Director), Optimal Asset Management, Inc. (Sales & Marketing Director), Ross Jeffery & Antle (Ross Jeffery & Antle LLC) and at various hedge funds, asset managers, banks and brokers in a 35 year career.

ANDREAS WELSCH
Machine Learning Business Development
SAP New Ventures & Technologies

Andreas Welsch leads Business Development for SAP Leonardo Machine Learning in the U.S. and helps SAP’s customers and partners uncover opportunities for automating business processes and changing or creating new business models through the use of intelligent enterprise applications. As a trusted innovation advisor to C-level executives, senior management, and domain experts, Andreas frequently covers a broad spectrum of customer-centric activities that drive business outcomes – from leading joint ideation workshops aimed at developing machine learning use cases to co-innovating with customers on early-stage products that help businesses generate insights from their data with machine learning.

Throughout the past 16 years in the industry, Andreas has held several roles spanning corporate strategy and M&A, board office staff, new business incubation, and IT project management. Andreas holds an MBA from Europäische Fernhochschule Hamburg and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Wilhelm Büchner Hochschule in Germany.

AGENDA

DETAILED SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Take a look at this year’s preliminary agenda to gain an understanding of how the conference operates.

Thursday, April 04, 2019
7:30 AM – 4:30 PM
Sugarhouse Event Center  1001 North Delaware Avenue, Philadelphia

7:30AM

Registration and VIP Networking Breakfast

8:30AM

Conference Kick-off
Scott Snyder and Dean Miller

8:45AM

Emerging Technology Trends

Featuring Forrester

Speakers: TBD

9:15AM

Emerging Technology Panel 1

AI Breakthroughs

Enterprise: TBD
New Entrant: TBD
3 Lightening talks plus Q&A

Moderator – TBD

10:15AM

Networking Break / Demo Pit

10:30AM

Emerging Technology Panel II

Blockchain/Security Breakthroughs

Enterprise: TBD
New Entrant: TBD
3 Lightening talks plus Q&A

Moderator – TBD

11:30 AM

Keynote Address

Todd Hewlin, Co-Author, Goliath’s revenge (Wiley, 2019)

12:30PM

Networking Lunch / Demo Pit

1:30PM

Hyper-Personalized Experiences Panel

Enterprise: TBD
New Entrant: TBD
3 Lightening talks plus Q&A

Moderator – TBD

2:30PM

Closing Session – Rethinking Organizations and Talent

Speakers:

Claudia Crummenerl, Capgemini Invent

3:30PM

Networking Reception

PHORUM SHOWCASE

The Phorum Showcase provides a space for cutting-edge technology companies to meet and demo their product with key enterprise decision makers. If you’re interested in this unique opportunity to showcase your company, products, and services at one of the hottest gatherings of enterprise decision makers on the East Coast, please contact [email protected]

Come join the Phorum Showcase to meet and demo your products and services with key enterprise decision makers.

2019 Phorum Showcase Companies include:

Phorum Demo Pit

We are currently recruiting companies for the 2019 Phorum Demo Pit. Early stage companies, with a product in early commercialization, are encouraged to learn more and apply.

The 2019 Phorum Demo Pit will be announced in the coming months. Check back for updates.

Check out the 2018 Demo Pit Companies.

Aerial Applications is a web application designed for infrastructure companies that makes storing, viewing, and sharing drone-based data easy and intuitive. It functions as a system of record for inspections and physical asset information, and empowers users to interact with their assets in an annotatable, accurately measurable 3D environment. It supports a wide range of file inputs and outputs, and can securely store critical operational information for entire asset portfolios – from full networks of energy/communications transmission lines, to tens of thousands of cell towers. Aerial’s interactive mapping environment makes finding information about your assets faster and easier than ever before.

aerialapplications.com

Apprentice.io provides industrial augmented reality solutions designed for operation in complex lab and manufacturing environments that deliver a positive ROI and satisfies industry demand while meeting regulatory compliance standards. The GMP/GLP compliant platform utilizes the latest in augmented reality and artificial intelligence to enhance human ability and create a synergistic relationship between humans and technology that empower engineers and scientists. Users gain with hands-free access to remote troubleshooting tools, process and workflow aids and intelligent data capture through smart glasses, ushering in usher in a new age of industry efficiency, safety, audit readiness and mobility that allows organizations to better connect and compete globally. Apprentice.io has global product deployments in pharma, biotech, cosmetic, consumer goods and chemical facilities across the U.S., Asia, Europe and South America.

apprentice.io/

Buildings have become increasingly intelligent, yet the fastest growing source of energy usage —devices distributed throughout buildings — remain disconnected from any centralized point of control. Energy solutions companies lack the tools to provide their customers a way to manage, or even understand this massive energy expenditure.
Bert® provides the end-to-end solution: innovative technology that empowers organizations to have seamless control over the ‘everything else’ in buildings. Using patented technologies and a facility’s existing Wi-Fi network, Bert® remotely measures, controls and schedules plug load energy use at both the device and circuit level.
A trusted service partner, Bert® takes complete responsibility for each aspect of energy management, from survey to completion. Energy solution companies can be confident their guarantees of efficiency and building intelligence will be realized, and their customers will experience the full potential of Bert’s technology, every single time.

bertbrain.com

Boost Linguistics offers an editing tool designed to help writers create marketing content (articles, blogs, social media posts, etc.) that inspires audience engagement every time. Our text editor does this by using natural language processing to analyze your text for the five basic emotions. Once the analysis is complete the writer selects a target emotion for their content (joy, sadness, etc.). With the target emotion selected, the editor will recommend changes to your wording to help elicit the target emotion in your audience. Understanding and eliciting the correct emotion in your audience has improved conversion/engagement rates across several industries.

boost-ling.com

Dash has drastically lowered the compliance burden in healthcare. Dash Compliance Automation Suite transforms the manual and time intensive HIPAA compliance process. As the industry’s first solution to connect administrative controls to technical safeguards in the AWS cloud, Dash empowers healthcare vendors to commercialize faster and market their solutions to health systems. In turn, those very health systems leverage dash to ensure data security and minimize 3rd party risk. A recurring software revenue model ensures high margins, and our leadership team has the hands on expertise to solve the problems in compliance at both the engineering and business levels.

Dashsdk.com

HeavyWater built a transactional AI platform (AIVA), to automate manual processes in the financial industry. AIVA’s first application is in the mortgage industry: automating loan production from mortgage intake to processing to servicing. Compared to competitive robotic process automation (RPA) tools, AIVA is 2x+ more accurate and an investment in a platform for automating future, higher value job functions (i.e., beyond repetitive and redundant tasks). Today, AIVA is in production, automating processes for 1M+ loans across: (a) mortgage intake (top 3 credit bureau), (b) mortgage processing (several leading originators) and (c) mortgage servicing ($20B insurance broker/advisor). In the future, HeavyWater aims to leverage the data we are processing to train AIVA to automate across the mortgage production value chain, including high-level cognitive functions that today ‘require’ human judgment – ultimately creating a “black box” that can run an entire back-end mortgage process with little-to-no manual intervention.

Heavywater.com

HiveIO’s Software Defined Data Center solution provides the value and simplicity of the Public Cloud to private data center clients and MSPs at half the cost and twice the performance. HiveIO’s unique zero-layer architecture natively includes built-in security and eliminates the need for proprietary hardware, which allows customers the ability to leverage commodity computing. Our unique Message Bus Architecture is Artificial Intelligence ready. Hive Fabric™ architecture is used by customers across multiple verticals with diverse workload types including VDI, VSI, Grid compute and Hadoop environments. Hive Fabric™ replaces expensive hardware, complex licensing and vendor bloat with streamlined and disruptive Swarm-based nodes that predictively scale and auto heal. The value of Hive Fabric™ is that organizations of all sizes can implement a holistic, easy to use an end-to-end stack that provides computing at a significantly reduced cost.

Hiveio.com

indico is an enterprise AI solution for unstructured content. Our focus is on helping to automate tedious back-office tasks, improving the efficiency of labor-intensive document-based workflows, and extracting valuable insights from unstructured content, including text and images. Our breakthrough in solving these challenges is an approach known as transfer learning, which allows us to train machine learning models with orders of magnitude less data than required by traditional content analysis techniques. With indico, enterprises are now able to benefit from the dramatic advantages of machine learning at a fraction of the time.

indico.io

Slyce is the market-leader in image recognition for retail, powering visual product search for retailers such as Macy’s, Home Depot, Best Buy, JCPenney, Neiman Marcus, and Tommy Hilfiger. Slyce’s service can identify virtually any product from an image, and enable customers to snap a photo to buy something, add it to a wish list, find it in store, or create another retail moment.

Slyce.it

At Translator, we believe that getting Diversity & Inclusion right can enable a better workplace and prevent potential damage. We created the first and only 360 platform for enterprise Diversity & Inclusion, providing companies and their employees with the best technology right at their fingertips. Through chat support, interactive learning tools, and virtual reality, employees can more easily navigate challenges at work and embrace differences. By offering a unique combination of the best technology and the right people, Translator lets companies build a better culture, and ultimately, improve their bottom line. Founded in 2016, Translator is on a mission to spread empathy and equality through #EqualityTech.

translator.company

Vognition provides patented technology and software tools delivered through a SaaS operating environment with voice user interface middleware to manufacturers seeking to capitalize on the exploding voice driven IOT market (home and industrial).

Vognition.com

ABOUT PHORUM DEMO PIT

Win in the Pit

Past Phorum Phoward Winner – RedOwl

PHORUM DEMO PIT – APPLICATIONS OPEN

The 2019 Phorum Demo Pit features the region’s hottest early-stage companies that are providing cutting-edge innovation that enables Digital Disruption. The Demo Pit was created to allow startups to connect with C-level enterprise decision makers attending the Phorum conference. In addition to showcasing their technology in the Demo Pit, each Demo Pit participant will present their company on the Demo Pit stage to a panel of judges and the Phorum audience. One will be named “Best in Show” and will receive the 8th annual Phorum Phorward Award. Since our inaugural event, past Phorum Phorward Award winners have gone on to raise more than $50M in capital, with three of the seven successfully completing exits to strategic acquirers.

2018 Participants

Aerial Applications is a web application designed for infrastructure companies that makes storing, viewing, and sharing drone-based data easy and intuitive. It functions as a system of record for inspections and physical asset information, and empowers users to interact with their assets in an annotatable, accurately measurable 3D environment. It supports a wide range of file inputs and outputs, and can securely store critical operational information for entire asset portfolios – from full networks of energy/communications transmission lines, to tens of thousands of cell towers. Aerial’s interactive mapping environment makes finding information about your assets faster and easier than ever before.

aerialapplications.com

Apprentice.io provides industrial augmented reality solutions designed for operation in complex lab and manufacturing environments that deliver a positive ROI and satisfies industry demand while meeting regulatory compliance standards. The GMP/GLP compliant platform utilizes the latest in augmented reality and artificial intelligence to enhance human ability and create a synergistic relationship between humans and technology that empower engineers and scientists. Users gain with hands-free access to remote troubleshooting tools, process and workflow aids and intelligent data capture through smart glasses, ushering in usher in a new age of industry efficiency, safety, audit readiness and mobility that allows organizations to better connect and compete globally. Apprentice.io has global product deployments in pharma, biotech, cosmetic, consumer goods and chemical facilities across the U.S., Asia, Europe and South America.

apprentice.io/

Buildings have become increasingly intelligent, yet the fastest growing source of energy usage —devices distributed throughout buildings — remain disconnected from any centralized point of control. Energy solutions companies lack the tools to provide their customers a way to manage, or even understand this massive energy expenditure.
Bert® provides the end-to-end solution: innovative technology that empowers organizations to have seamless control over the ‘everything else’ in buildings. Using patented technologies and a facility’s existing Wi-Fi network, Bert® remotely measures, controls and schedules plug load energy use at both the device and circuit level.
A trusted service partner, Bert® takes complete responsibility for each aspect of energy management, from survey to completion. Energy solution companies can be confident their guarantees of efficiency and building intelligence will be realized, and their customers will experience the full potential of Bert’s technology, every single time.

bertbrain.com

Boost Linguistics offers an editing tool designed to help writers create marketing content (articles, blogs, social media posts, etc.) that inspires audience engagement every time. Our text editor does this by using natural language processing to analyze your text for the five basic emotions. Once the analysis is complete the writer selects a target emotion for their content (joy, sadness, etc.). With the target emotion selected, the editor will recommend changes to your wording to help elicit the target emotion in your audience. Understanding and eliciting the correct emotion in your audience has improved conversion/engagement rates across several industries.

boost-ling.com

Dash has drastically lowered the compliance burden in healthcare. Dash Compliance Automation Suite transforms the manual and time intensive HIPAA compliance process. As the industry’s first solution to connect administrative controls to technical safeguards in the AWS cloud, Dash empowers healthcare vendors to commercialize faster and market their solutions to health systems. In turn, those very health systems leverage dash to ensure data security and minimize 3rd party risk. A recurring software revenue model ensures high margins, and our leadership team has the hands on expertise to solve the problems in compliance at both the engineering and business levels.

Dashsdk.com

HeavyWater built a transactional AI platform (AIVA), to automate manual processes in the financial industry. AIVA’s first application is in the mortgage industry: automating loan production from mortgage intake to processing to servicing. Compared to competitive robotic process automation (RPA) tools, AIVA is 2x+ more accurate and an investment in a platform for automating future, higher value job functions (i.e., beyond repetitive and redundant tasks). Today, AIVA is in production, automating processes for 1M+ loans across: (a) mortgage intake (top 3 credit bureau), (b) mortgage processing (several leading originators) and (c) mortgage servicing ($20B insurance broker/advisor). In the future, HeavyWater aims to leverage the data we are processing to train AIVA to automate across the mortgage production value chain, including high-level cognitive functions that today ‘require’ human judgment – ultimately creating a “black box” that can run an entire back-end mortgage process with little-to-no manual intervention.

Heavywater.com

HiveIO’s Software Defined Data Center solution provides the value and simplicity of the Public Cloud to private data center clients and MSPs at half the cost and twice the performance. HiveIO’s unique zero-layer architecture natively includes built-in security and eliminates the need for proprietary hardware, which allows customers the ability to leverage commodity computing. Our unique Message Bus Architecture is Artificial Intelligence ready. Hive Fabric™ architecture is used by customers across multiple verticals with diverse workload types including VDI, VSI, Grid compute and Hadoop environments. Hive Fabric™ replaces expensive hardware, complex licensing and vendor bloat with streamlined and disruptive Swarm-based nodes that predictively scale and auto heal. The value of Hive FabricΓäó is that organizations of all sizes can implement a holistic, easy to use an end-to-end stack that provides computing at a significantly reduced cost.

Hiveio.com

indico is an enterprise AI solution for unstructured content. Our focus is on helping to automate tedious back-office tasks, improving the efficiency of labor-intensive document-based workflows, and extracting valuable insights from unstructured content, including text and images. Our breakthrough in solving these challenges is an approach known as transfer learning, which allows us to train machine learning models with orders of magnitude less data than required by traditional content analysis techniques. With indico, enterprises are now able to benefit from the dramatic advantages of machine learning at a fraction of the time.

indico.io

Slyce is the market-leader in image recognition for retail, powering visual product search for retailers such as Macy’s, Home Depot, Best Buy, JCPenney, Neiman Marcus, and Tommy Hilfiger. SlyceΓÇÖs service can identify virtually any product from an image, and enable customers to snap a photo to buy something, add it to a wish list, find it in store, or create another retail moment.

Slyce.it

At Translator, we believe that getting Diversity & Inclusion right can enable a better workplace and prevent potential damage. We created the first and only 360 platform for enterprise Diversity & Inclusion, providing companies and their employees with the best technology right at their fingertips. Through chat support, interactive learning tools, and virtual reality, employees can more easily navigate challenges at work and embrace differences. By offering a unique combination of the best technology and the right people, Translator lets companies build a better culture, and ultimately, improve their bottom line. Founded in 2016, Translator is on a mission to spread empathy and equality through #EqualityTech.

translator.company

Vognition provides patented technology and software tools delivered through a SaaS operating environment with voice user interface middleware to manufacturers seeking to capitalize on the exploding voice driven IOT market (home and industrial).

Vognition.com

2017 Participants

51maps allows organizations to easily enable their entire application portfolio to run on consumer devices. Our architecture provides access in a manner that is more secure than locked down PC’s behind the firewall. This delivers a seamless, native feeling, role based experiences on any device.

Our application bus technology securely integrates any application (legacy, custom, cloud, or native) without changing source code. This allows employees to pass information between disparate applications.

Our audit capability allows organizations to gain visibility, down to individual key strokes, around all user activity. This can be used for fraud investigation, productivity improvement, training, time & motion studies, and much more. This functionality makes 51maps the first source of organizational Big Data on processes, activities, and outcomes across the enterprise.

51maps.com

DivvyCloud software enables organizations to achieve their cloud computing goals by simplifying and automating security, compliance and cost optimization of public and private cloud infrastructure. Using DivvyCloud, customers can leverage programmatic Bots to identify and remediate common cloud problems in real time. DivvyCloud was founded by seasoned technologists who understand first hand what is necessary to succeed in today’s fast-changing, multi-cloud world.

divvycloud.com/

Fishtown Analytics is building a modern workflow for data analysts. Its product, dbt (data build tool), helps analysts write modular, high-quality analytic code by borrowing elements of the software development workflow. dbt is open-source, and used in production today by analytics teams at Casper, Seatgeek, Credible, and dozens of other companies.

Fishtownanalytics.com

Journey Sales makes it easier for your customers to buy with Smart Rooms, an Account-Based Selling solution built on Salesforce®. Smart Rooms are private customer experiences built for each account and opportunity, where buying and selling teams can engage, collaborate, and build consensus. With Smart Rooms, enterprises create personalized buying experiences for their strategic accounts at scale and build deeper relationships for improved cross-sell and upsell opportunities. In addition, track the digital body language of your customers to understand who is most engaged and what they are engaging with. Executives receive deep insight into accounts to predictably close more valuable deals.

journeysales.com/

Focusing on rare disease, cancer and patient reported outcomes, Pulse Infoframe, a data insights and precision knowledge company, delivers real-time analytics and visualization to advance knowledge, improve outcomes, generate real-world evidence and accelerate time-to-value. Pulse Infoframe uses their software to capture and aggregate data from multiple sources, making it available to relevant stakeholders and offering numerous benefits including dramatically improved efficiency, productivity and collaboration, which are required for value-based care. Pulse is a 21st Century asset for healthcare.

pulseinfoframe.com

RiskLens is the leading provider of cyber risk quantification software. RiskLens empowers large enterprises and government organizations to manage cyber risk from the business perspective by quantifying it in dollars and cents. Our customers leverage RiskLens to understand their cyber risk exposure in financial terms, prioritize their risk mitigations, measure the ROI of their security investments, and optimize their cyber insurance coverage. RiskLens is the only cyber risk quantification software purpose-built on FAIR, the only standard quantitative model for cyber security and operational risk.

risklens.com

TimelinePI is a SAAS-based analytics and visualization platform that provides a new approach to understanding operational data in the context of its related business processes. Using its patent-pending Timeline Analysis approach to analyzing event data, TimelinePI accepts event data from any number of systems and automatically reconstructs the underlying business process logic behind the data. A variety of pre-built analyses to quantify process performance, identify process execution issues and perform root cause analysis are available to users. The TimelinePI platform also supports operational monitoring through its continuous assessment of new event data to determine if any adverse conditions occur and can immediately notify business operations personnel so they can take action.

timelinepi.com

Your organization will only ‘touch’ your customers in three or four situations – retail, website, service delivery and your contact center. And when your customers call, send emails or start chat sessions, they are usually telling you what’s wrong with your products, policies, pricing and competitors. Are you listening?

TopBox’s cloud-based application analyzes your customer interactions by automatically transcribing, interrogating and categorizing them to reveal the root cause of customer experience, product, sales, marketing and operational problems.

With a subscription pricing model, easy installation, unlimited user licenses, and an intuitive user interface, TopBox is unlike anything on the market. Founded by customer experience industry veterans, TopBox was created to fill the void of customer contact analytic solutions that yield truly actionable insights and a clear ROI.

topbox.io

VitalTrax is transforming how clinical trials are run by putting patients and investigators at the center. VitalTrax delivers a complete patient engagement and data collection solution for clinical trials comprising of a cloud based enterprise platform and a mobile application for patients. For clinical study teams, VitalTrax delivers an enterprise platform to design and run trials efficiently. For sites, VitalTrax makes it easier to recruit and communicate with patients during the trial. VitalTrax mobile app solution, Wing, is a world-class patient engagement tool that provides a way for patients to search for trials, apply to become a volunteer and participate in the trial.

vitaltrax.net

Widget Brain is passionate about creating smart solutions that have a real impact on daily life: algorithms that lower CO2, improve recycling rates, deliver faster, prevent critical failures and decide autonomously.

We are ambitious in achieving our vision of the future. In that future, we see a connected universe of things, capable of outperforming everything else in the analogue world in terms of superior service, lowest costs, and compatibility with other smart devices. We cover the full digital ecosystem, including smarter cities, smarter factories, and smarter supply chains.

Our customers use Widget Brain software to monitor their water pumps to detect leaks, forecast fill rates in waste containers to optimize service routes, and collect usage data to monitor equipment and predict maintenance moments.

widgetbrain.com

Wylei is a next generation AI Machine Learning company and is the pioneer of Predictive Content, which is digital content that automatically assembles itself in real-time for each impression with deep and precise predictive intelligence. Wylei leverages its AI engine by ingesting 1st, 3rd, and real time contextual data to determine the best combination of content to serve to a consumer. Wylei can optimize content in real-time for any channel, enabling 1:1 personalization at scale across any channel including email, web, mobile and video. Our predictive cloud does the heavy lifting and automatically defines dynamic micro segments, testing and predicting to achieve the highest ROI.

wylei.com

2016 Participants

AlphaPoint

AlphaPoint is a financial technology company that powers digital asset exchanges and provides institutions blockchain-enabled solutions to store, track, and trade digital assets. Its secure, scalable, and customizable platform enables customers to deploy blockchain technology to innovate, differentiate, and transform their businesses. AlphaPoint powers over 20 digital asset exchanges on 5 continents, and is led by a seasoned team with 50+ years in financial technology. AlphaPoint has offices in New York City, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.

www.alphapoint.com

Boxter

Funnl, a SaaS product created by Boxter, answers questions about the top of your sales funnel. It’s an intelligent analytics solution for online businesses. Funnl enables fast ROI measurement and optimization for growth channels like Facebook ads or content marketing. The innovative semantic user interface allows you to quickly get detailed answers from websites and online marketing efforts without needing any technical training. The software brings powerful enterprise grade functionality to small and medium-sized businesses. Requiring less than an hour in training and setup time to get started.

www.boxter.co

Cloudamize

Cloudamize is an analytics software company that helps companies get the most out of their investments in cloud computing. Our SaaS-based analytics platform helps our customers and partners make confident, data-driven decisions at each stage of the cloud journey – from assessing options, to planning migrations, to managing cloud deployments for maximum value. With Cloudamize, companies have experienced significant monthly savings on their cloud deployments, while simultaneously increasing performance.

www.cloudamize.com

DryDock

Mobilizing digital content is the easy part but getting your sales teams to adopt mobile in their sales process is challenging. The DryDock mobile platform helps engage field sales, making their sales process more productive and efficient.

DryDock is a mobile app and content management system rolled into a single product. Instead of forcing reps to search for content in online repositories or web portals, sales teams quickly access your curated content in a secure mobile app. Plus, DryDock does not charge by seat license because everyone who can increase revenue should benefit from high impact sales information.

www.drydockinc.com

MLeads

MLeads is a comprehensive SaaS mobile platform for leads and event management process automation. MLeads allows event organizers, exhibitors, business owners, and sales and marketing professionals to manage leads and organize events from any devices anywhere, increasing productivity, efficiency and opportunities. The platform allows users to capture and collect leads, research leads, perform follow-up, and measure and manage ROI across sales and marketing teams. The platform is feature-rich, affordable, and easy to use compared to other solutions.

www.myleadssite.com

OpsDataStore

OpsDataStore is the Real-Time Data Fabric for IT Operations. We collect data from your strategic platforms (VMware) and tools (AppDynamics, Dynatrace, ExtraHop) and combine these disparate streams of data into real-time topologies. You can prevent problems that affect online service quality, solve the remaining problems more quickly, and achieve dramatic increases in capacity utilization.

We also make the combined data available to any BI or query tool, which turns the analysis and consumption of IT data into a self-service problem through tools like Tableau and Qlik. Gartner recently recommended the IT Operations become “data driven” and we are the only open and real-time platform that allows modern enterprises to achieve this. In summary we protect your online revenue and save you time and money in the operation of your environment.

www.Opsdatastore.com

PeopleLinx

PeopleLinx drives results throughout your sales funnel to create, nurture, and win deals. Founded by early LinkedIn employees, we activate social selling for B2B sales teams through individualized guidance. Reps are guided to create presence, networks and engagement with buyers. The result? Quality leads, faster sales cycles, and a higher close rate, all measureable through your CRM. Customers include Fortune 500 leaders in high-tech, finance, manufacturing and professional services.

www.Peoplelinx.com

Pneuron

Pneuron enables organizations to rapidly solve business problems challenged by highly disparate and distributed sources of value. By deploying a non-invasive “fabric” to build, deploy, and execute intelligent workflows, Pneuron’s platform sidesteps traditional and costly prerequisites and delivers solutions in less than half the time and cost of multi-product approaches.

www.pneuron.com

RedOwl

RedOwl provides information security teams a single platform to proactively monitor insider risk across the enterprise. The RedOwl platform analyzes all observable interactions between employees, contractors, devices, and applications within your organization. Only RedOwl analyzes structured and unstructured data to provide immediate and unparalleled visibility into human risk to combat intellectual property loss, detect compromised accounts, monitor privileged users and enhance forensics.

www. Redowl.com

2015 Participants

Boxly

Boxly is a touch-based dynamic document platform which allows business users to visually relate and interpret information. The dynamic document creates an app-like experience where one can share information using mobile devices without the need to write code. Boxly transforms disparate, static data into a meaningful, interactive experience.

www.boxly.com

Collected

Collected instantly finds related content from your business’ documents and presentations as you work in apps like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, helping you and your team rediscover and get more value from your content than ever before.

www.collected.io

Livegenic

Livegenic helps organizations enhance customer service support capabilities by reducing costs, improving customer satisfaction, and mitigating business related risks. They achieve this by enabling businesses to see what the customer sees during the very first customer contact over the phone. Using real-time video streaming, they provide an ability to triage incoming issues during the first customer contact, capturing remote information, resolving user issues, and improving customer experience.

www.livegenic.com

MongoSluice

MongoSluice takes the time-consuming and expensive slog out of working with big data. It figures out what an unstructured or NoSQL database would look like if it were SQL – and then actually turns it into (and streams it to) SQL or any other RDBMs datastore. This new patent-pending technology exponentially expedites the time it takes to bring big data into business intelligence systems, providing clients with near real-time insight.

www.mongosluice.com

Nfoshare

Nfoshare is the easiest way to increase employee engagement. Each week, the tool checks in with employees using 10 second anonymous email surveys to gauge real-time employee morale & collect feedback. At the end of the month/quarter, simple, personalized research-based suggestions are sent to managers/HR to hit their goals & increase company morale.

www.nfoshare.com

SETVI

The SETVI™ Platform is a SaaS sales enablement solution for field sales forces. Our mission is to create a more efficient sales process, which enables organizations to close more deals and increase sales revenue. Version 1.0 of the product contains an intuitive content management system; a robust, but user-friendly presentation tool; and a powerful tracking system that delivers insightful analytics.

www.setvi.com

Shibumi

Shibumi is a cloud-based application that provides a secure, central location to manage initiatives and deliver better results. Whether driving new sales opportunities, executing cost optimization or managing a change portfolio, Shibumi helps teams collaborate, communicate goals and develop actionable plans so they can spend less time reporting and more time focusing on execution.

www.shibumi.com

Tesorio

Tesorio enables companies to self-finance their daily operations, streamlining early payments on invoices so suppliers get paid early and buyers optimize returns on cash. By forgoing a small percentage on their invoice, a supplier can get paid weeks earlier than typical 30 – 90 day terms. Tesorio’s algorithm calculates this percentage to be win-win: fair for the supplier to forgo and valuable for the buyer to earn given their respective costs of capital.

www.tesorio.com

2014 Participants

Rescufy (AppItUP Winner)

Rescufy was created by David and Rachel Edwards who were inspired by their son, Sammy, to simplify the standard anaphylaxis action plan. Sammy has a life threatening tree nut allergy, and they developed Rescufy so they would have a simple, fast, and reliable tool to streamline getting help in the event of anaphylaxis.

With the touch of a button, Rescufy will send critical information including geo-location, medical condition, medical history, medications, and contact information to first responders and emergency contacts. It will also auto dial 911 with a voice recording of the same information should the user be impaired by his/her condition. Rescufy simplifies the process of notifying first responders and emergency contacts, compresses time, creates redundancy, offers peace of mind, and simplifies the action plan which in turn will saves lives!

www.rescufy.com

AppItUP is a new mobile application idea challenge designed to gather the best app ideas from the Penn community and connect them with the funding and technical expertise necessary to make them a reality. AppItUP is a brain child of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Technology Transfer and UPstart program.

www.appitupchallenge.com

BuyerMLS

BuyerMLS™ is the real estate industry’s first and only real-time buyer marketplace. As an enterprise platform, we help brokerages and their agents increase productivity by transforming their anonymous buyer data into an asset, leading to more transactions and new listing opportunities.

www.BuyerMLS.com

Canvas

Canvas is a cloud-based software service that allows businesses to replace expensive and inefficient paper forms with powerful apps on their smartphones and tablets. Canvas enables users to collect information using mobile devices, share that information and easily integrate with existing backend systems. Canvas also offers the first business-only application store of its kind, with 13,000+ pre-built, fully customizable apps that work on all mobile platforms and serve 30+ vertical markets.

www.gocanvas.com

CLUTCH

As the premier platform for, “Consumer Lifecycle Success” (CLS), Clutch is the first and only system that helps Brands create, unify, manage, and measure success across increasingly complex marketing efforts and technology ecosystems. The goal of every retailer is optimizing the lifetime value of consumers at each stage of the lifecycle. We provide a comprehensive set of modular solutions to drive loyalty, increase consumer spend and reward brand advocacy by unifying the currently fragmented consumer experiences, wherever your customers are – in-store, online, and through mobile and social channels. We feed the customer experience, the experience feeds the brand loyalty, and the loyalty feeds the revenue.

www.clutch.com

Grassroots Unwired

The Grassroots Unwired platform is a mobile sales enablement platform for anyone conducting customer acquisition and engagement in the field and used in conjunction with their existing CRM.

The integrated SaaS platform combines a mapping system, mobile application and web portal that run in conjunction with a GPS-enabled mobile device for tracking, reporting and analytics – all in real-time.

www.grassrootsunwired.com

RJMetrics

RJMetrics helps online businesses make smarter decisions with their data. We provide the kinds of deep insights that were formerly only accessible by large companies willing to invest in full-time data scientists. With RJMetrics, any company can become truly data-driven.

www.rjmetrics.com

SocialLadder

Brands recognize traditional marketing tactics are becoming less and less effective with the Millennial consumer. SocialLadder is mobile technology, white-labeled for brands, giving them the ability to speak the language Millennials respond to – true Product Discovery rather than marketing hype.
SocialLadder is deployed by brands as either a new mobile app or embedded into their existing mobile platform. Consumers discover the brand in a gamified environment. Rewards and experiences are unlocked through a score composed of two primary components:

Influence – calculated from the size of a user’s social voice/reach
Engagement – calculated via content creating challenges
Brands build a community of influencers virally, while driving valuable word of mouth impressions and retaining ownership of the media, data and conversations generated.

www.SocialLadderApp.com

tapCLIQ

tapCLIQ offers the industry’s first responsive marketing solution that meaningfully engages mobile users at moments when they are most receptive.
Our holistic approach harnesses the value lost in disparate marketing tactics. The platform offers products for Advertising, Communication, Support, Feedback, and Research. tapCLIQ’s opinion based engagement products, generates the most authentic user data. This includes preference & intent data of highest relevance, which is not being captured today.
tapCLIQ’s mission is to enhance user experience by improving the relevance, context, and timeliness of engagement. We are reinventing how customer engagement can be and should be on mobile devices.

www.tapcliq.com

Yorn

YornÂ® – (Your Opinion. Right NowÂ®) is a real-time feedback platform for healthcare settings with early traction and compelling evidence that it helps organizations understand and improve the customer/patient experience. Optimized for mobile, patent pending and HIPAA compliant, Yorn enables providers and payers to identify root causes of potential problems and make appropriate operational changes that improve experience, satisfaction, and compliance with care plans. Yorn delivers clinical and economic benefit that can correlate to higher quality ratings on performance.

www.yorn.com

About PHORUM

Phorum will take place at SugarHouse Event Center – North Entrance

Address:
SugarHouse Event Center | North Entrance | 1001 N Delaware Avenue | Philadelphia, PA 19125

FREE ON-SITE PARKING. SugarHouse provides free, on-site parking. Park in front of the North Entrance or use the garage with direct access to the Event Center from Level 2.

Click here for directions

About Phorum

Phorum is an enterprise technology conference for business and technology executives. It focuses on how enterprises can maximize the business value of specific technologies and innovation.

Industry thought leaders as well as hands-on practitioners will provide engaging content through keynotes, panels, and interactive discussions to help executives understand not just the technology but how the technology can be pragmatically applied to transform the enterprise and achieve strategic business goals.

In addition to keynote speakers and panels, the conference will also feature the Phorum Showcase exhibition area, and the always popular “Phorum Demo Pit” where conference attendees can experience, first-hand, some of the most innovative technologies being developed in the Greater Philadelphia area.

Each year top executives from around the country gather at Phorum in a highly entertaining and collegial atmosphere.

About PACT

Driving Innovation and Growth for Businesses and Entrepreneurs in the Philadelphia Region

Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies (PACT)’s vision is to be the go-to resource for fast growing companies and a driver of entrepreneurship and innovation in the Philadelphia region.

At PACT, we provide our members with valuable content and connections to capital, coaching, and customers that will accelerate their growth and success, and to collaborate with other organizations to drive innovation and entrepreneurship in the region.

Learn more about PACT

Advisory Board

Scott Snyder, PHD – Chairman
Partner, Digital Transformation and Innovation, Heidrick Consulting
Senior Fellow, The Wharton School

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottsnyder5g

Scott Snyder is a recognized thought leader in technology and innovation.He has more than 25 years of experience in business leadership, strategic planning and technology management for Fortune 500 companies and startup ventures.Scott is currently a Partner at Heidrick Consulting, leading the Digital Transformation and Innovation Offerings for global companies.Prior to Heidrick, Scott was the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at Safeguard Scientifics (NYSE:SFE), which provides capital and relevant expertise to fuel the growth of technology-driven businesses in healthcare, financial services and digital media. Prior to Safeguard, Scott was President and Chief Strategy Officer at Mobiquity Inc., a leader in delivering innovative mobile and digital solutions for enterprises, where he continues to be Chairman of Mobiquity’s Advisory Board.Scott has held executive positions with several Fortune 500 companies including GE, Martin Marietta, and Lockheed Martin, has been the CEO of a leading strategic planning firm, Decision Strategies International, and has also started business ventures in software including OmniChoice, a CRM/Analytics applications provider.He also serves on the Board of Directors for Fulton Financial Corporation (FFC).Scott has authored a book entitled, “The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution”, and has been a long-time thought leader in the mobile and digital space.In addition, he is a chapter author in the books “The Network Challenge: Strategy, Profit, and Risk in the Interlinked World” and “Inside the Minds: Small Business Growth Strategies: Goals for Successful CEOs.” Scott is a Senior Fellow in the Management Department at the Wharton School, an Adjunct Faculty Member in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and has lectured at MIT, Babson, Duke, Georgia Tech and INSEAD on Digital Innovation, Decision-making, Business and IT Strategy, Next Generation Wireless, Product Design and Development, and Business Intelligence.Scott founded and directs the Game Changer Collaborative, which is made up of leading companies focused on cross-sector digital innovation opportunities.He also holds two patents for on-line decision aids and has been quoted as a thought leader in numerous publications including the CIO Magazine, WIRED, Forbes, [email protected], Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Business Journal.Scott earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D.in Systems Engineering from University of Pennsylvania.

Allen Born
Fairmount Partners

[email protected]
http://www.linkedin.com/in/allenborn

Allen Born is a Director at Fairmount Partners. Allen focuses on originating and executing middle-market investment banking transactions in the Internet and Cloud Computing sectors. He has advised on exclusive sale assignments, buy-side transactions, financings, and various other strategic advisory assignments and has completed more than 50 transactions totaling over $13 billion in consideration.

Jeff Burk
Dell Boomi

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreyburk

Jeff Burk is Director of Research and Development for Dell Boomi, responsible for all product development and product strategy. Jeff has performed and managed most of the roles of a modern software product organization, including product management, software development, product marketing, user interface design, usability engineering, technical writing, software testing, and engineering management.

An Agile practitioner and leader, Jeff has written extensively about Agile product development for publications such as InformationWeek. During his career, he’s worked at Monster and other high-profile Boston start-ups and more recently, he’s helped technology product companies deliver highly scalable consumer cloud platforms and products.

Jeff earned a B.S. degree in Technology from the University of Massachusetts and is the Technology Director for Philly Startup Leaders.

Peter Coffee
Salesforce

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/petercoffee

Peter Coffee, VP for Strategic Research at Salesforce, has been with the company for ten years. His global work supports Salesforce efforts in CIO strategies, security practices, and delivery of connected product and “big data” solutions through collaboration with account teams in many industries.

Prior to joining Salesforce, Peter spent eighteen years as a technology analyst, columnist, and editor for IT publications including eWEEK and PC Week, while also contributing to other journals including Computer Language and AI Expert. He has written widely on cloud security and privacy, and was a chapter contributor to Prentice Hall’s Nanotechnology: Science, Innovation, and Opportunity. He previously served as the first Manager for Desktop Computing Planning at The Aerospace Corporation, where he also worked in space-asset applications of AI techniques. Before that, he held project management roles at Exxon Corporation including arctic resource development.

Peter received his engineering degree from MIT in 1978 and an MBA from Pepperdine University in 1985; he has held college faculty appointments in expert-systems programming, IT management, and business analytics, while also lecturing at Stanford, CalTech, Harvard Business School, and the Sloan School of Management at MIT as well as other institutions in Europe, Asia and South America. He advises on curriculum and degree program planning in analytics and “big data” initiatives for three U.S. universities.

Sean Dowling
Osage Venture Partners

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/seandowling1

Sean Dowling joined Osage full time as an Associate in 2011, after interning with Osage as a Summer Associate in 2010 while pursuing his MBA. Prior to business school, Sean spent five years at the Monitor Group in London, UK and Boston, MA where he served as a senior case team leader and member of Monitor’s marketing strategy group, m2c. At Monitor, Sean focused on integrating marketing strategy and organizational design to enable Fortune 500 multinational companies to achieve sustainable growth, primarily in the consumer packaged goods and life sciences industries.

Sean serves as a board member of Brazen, ExecOnline and redIQ. He is also an observer of Canvas, Collections Marketing Center, Pneuron, Phone2Action, RackWare, Sidecar and Wylei.

Sean completed his MBA, with honors, from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with a degree in Economics.

Sean currently serves as the Treasurer of the Board for Community Partnership School, a pre-K to fifth grade independent school in Northeast Philadelphia that serves low-wealth, low-income students from the surrounding neighborhoods. He is also a member of the investment committee for Wharton Impact Investing Partners, a student run impact investing organization at Wharton.

David Egan
Comcast Business

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidegancomcast

David Egan is the Senior Director of Enterprise Services for Comcast Business in the Freedom Region, which includes PA, NJ and DE. David is responsible for all sales and service delivery activities for both the Enterprise and Mid-Market segments for Comcast Business in the Region. Under his direction, David’s team is charged with leading one of the company’s largest growth opportunities to further differentiate Comcast from the competition in the tri-state area.

Prior to joining the Freedom Region in 2014, David spent over 10 years with Comcast Business in the Chicago Region in a variety of management and sales roles before moving to Philadelphia.

David has a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from Northeastern Illinois University and a MBA from Lake Forest Graduate School of Management.

Dennis Hancock
Pfizer

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hancockdennis/

Dennis Hancock leads the Global Commercial Solutions organization for Pfizer Business Technology and has responsibility for strategy and delivery across three centers of excellence: Mobile and Emerging Technologies, Digital Marketing, and Sales Force Enablement.

Mr. Hancock and the teams he leads have received a number of awards: including the #10 spot on InformationWeek’s Elite 100, a CIO 100 award for Innovation, and consistent accolades for execution in the areas of Digital, Mobile, and Embracing SaaS and Cloud solutions at an enterprise level resulting in repetitive annual savings to Pfizer of > $50MM.

Mr. Hancock has been with Pfizer for 20 years, and was recently elected to the Board of Directors for the Greater Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technology.

Ryan Hicke
SEI

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-hicke-8109103

Ryan is the head of SEI’s Wealth Platform. In this role, Ryan is responsible for the technology resource and delivery teams driving the creation, deployment and continuous innovation of SEI’s global Wealth Platform solution.

Ryan began his career with SEI in 1998 at the corporate headquarters in Oaks, PA before moving to the UK in 2001. During his tenure in the UK, Ryan held many leadership roles including running the SWP UK business from 2012-2014.

In his current role, Ryan is also a member of SEI’s corporate Executive Committee.

Ryan has a Finance degree from St. Joseph’s University and lives in Bryn Mawr with his wife and five children.

Michael Janke
Pfizer

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeljanke/

Michael is a Senior Analyst in Emerging Technologies at Pfizer. He is focused on identifying the latest start-ups and new products that can be leveraged to meet business needs at Pfizer. These findings are
communicated throughout the company via a web site, newsletter, social media, and podcast, as well as on site events and global webcasts. Further work is done through research, experimentation, and hackathons that lead to full scale projects. Recent projects have focused on virtual reality, voice assistants, and chatbots.

Michael earned an MBA from Penn State and a B.S. in Computer Engineering, also from Penn State. Prior to business school, he was a software engineer at Lockheed Martin.

Nate Lentz
Osage Venture Partners

[email protected]
http://www.linkedin.com/in/nvlentz

Nate joined Osage Venture Partners in 2008 and as Managing Partner oversees investment and portfolio management activities. He serves on the Board of Directors of BA-Insight, Canvas, InstaMed, FieldView, OpsDataStore, PeopleLinx, Pneuron, Phone2Action, RackWare and Sidecar. He is also a board observer of 51Maps, Brazen, ExecOnline, Identropy and ResiModel and formerly was on the board of Carnegie Speech and Medallion Analytics. He is a member of the Technology Investment Advisory Board for Ben Franklin Southeast Pennsylvania. Nate is a frequent speaker and panelist at venture events and is actively involved with numerous venture focused organizations including PACT, NJTC, MAVA, GCV, and Early Stage East.Prior to joining Osage, Nate was President and CEO of Verticalnet, Inc., a publicly traded SaaS solutions provider, which was sold in January, 2008 to Italy-based BravoSolution. He served as the Malvern, PA- based Verticalnet’s CEO for over five years and was attributed with leading the transformation of Verticalnet from an online operator of web portals to a proven software solution provider, while navigating the company through a financial turnaround. Prior to Verticalnet, Nate was a Partner at Mercer Management Consulting and led both the San Francisco and the Hong Kong offices. During his time at Mercer, he worked closely with multinational companies and high growth emerging businesses both in the U.S. and in over fifteen countries across Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Nate began his career at Chemical Bank in New York providing lending and structured finance services to mid-size companies. He is a graduate of Brown University and of the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he graduated with honors.

Suzanne Lentz
LiquidHub

[email protected]
http://www.linkedin.com/in/suzannelentz

Suzanne Lentz is Partner at LiquidHub, LiquidHub is a digital integrator that partners with businesses to improve customer engagement and drive growth. With operations in North America, Asia, and Europe, LiquidHub empowers the leading global healthcare and financial services companies through technology innovation. Suzanne and her team focus on creating clear communications with LiquidHub clients and partners, optimizing business processes, and growing LiquidHub’s brand. Suzanne brings a strong combination of skills to LiquidHub having served in marketing and sales leadership roles with both technology companies and marketing consultancies. She earned a BS in Engineering from University of the Pacific.

Jason Mahoney
Pfizer

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmahoney/

Jason is a Director of Regulated Program Delivery at Pfizer Inc. He has a passion for building operationally effective teams immersed in cutting edge technology tailored for practical business applications. Jason is a creative leader who delivers high quality cost effective processes and business systems.

Jason has been focusing on mobile application Software Medical Devices (SMD) bringing Pfizer’s first mobile SMD to market. He also established a regulated mobile delivery capability to efficiently and compliantly deliver future programs. Previously, he was a Program Manager leading Pfizer acquisition and divestiture initiatives. He started his career at Accenture in their technology consulting practice.

Lisa McCann
Vanguard

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-mccann-612a946

Lisa McCann is a principal in Vanguard Information Technology, where she leads Vanguard Enterprise Shared Services. Before this role, Ms. McCann led Vanguard’s Center for Excellence, driving Six Sigma/Lean practices and continuous process improvement. She also launched and led Client Insight, which focuses on providing business intelligence and insight through disciplined research, decision science, data mining, and strategic analytics for the enterprise.

Other roles held by Ms. McCann at Vanguard include strategic technology planning for Vanguard’s Institutional business, Corporate Strategy, and a variety of leadership positions across the Information Technology Division. Ms. McCann joined Vanguard in September 2000 as Head of Technology Engineering.

Before her employment with Vanguard, Ms. McCann served in a variety of technology leadership positions with Bank One, CIGNA, and Shared Medical Systems. As VP of Strategic Technologies, and acting CIO at Intracorp, a subsidiary of CIGNA, Ms. McCann led the organization and the Information Technology department through significant change, introducing web technologies and new business models to meet evolving client needs.

Ms. McCann is a Leadership Philadelphia alumnus and remains active in the community, serving as chairman of the Pennsylvania Advisory Board for Devereux. She also serves as a board member of the Main Line Chamber of Commerce and for PACT.

Ms. McCann earned an M.B.A. from Villanova University and a bachelor’s degree in Information Systems and Accounting from Shippensburg University.

Chris McNabb
Dell Boomi

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-mcnabb-a555325

Chris is the Chief Executive Officer of Dell Boomi where he is responsible for all operations and strategic direction. Chris brings over 20 years of software development and line of business experience from a diverse set of prior roles that include software development, professional services, LOB leader and consulting. In his role at Dell Boomi, Chris is constantly engaged with customers and partners to ensure alignment between business needs and Dell Boomi’s strategy and operations.

Chris joined the Dell Boomi team in 2011 following a 12 year career with SunGard Higher Education. In his prior roles, Chris was SVP of worldwide software development and had responsibility for all software execution, delivery and quality to over 1600 customers. Chris spent two years as a management consultant at a subsidiary of Pennsylvania Blue Shield advising on project management and quality assurance initiatives to improve development execution. Chris started his career in software development in the financial services sector holding various engineering and management roles.

Chris attended Indiana University of Pennsylvania (MIS) and Villanova (Business).

Dean Miller
President & CEO, PACT

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/deanmiller/

Dean serves as President and CEO of PACT (Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies), the largest resource in the Philadelphia region for investors and healthcare and technology entrepreneurs.

Dean also serves as Managing Director of the PCOM Primary Care Innovation Fund, a venture capital fund focused on healthcare innovations, particularly those focused broadly in the field of primary care. Dean brings close to 20 years of investment experience to the PCOM Fund.

Dean was previously Managing Director at Novitas Capital where he focused on venture capital investments across healthcare and technology. He led investments in and served as Chairman or Director of Agile Therapeutics (NASDAQ: AGRX), Cernostics, Inc., Renal Solutions (acquired by Fresenius (NYSE: FMS)), Incurrent Solutions (acquired by Online Resources (NASDAQ: ORCC)), LearnNow, Inc. (acquired by Edison Schools), and VIPDesk (acquired by International SOS).

Previously, Dean served as the Chief Financial Officer of Adaptiv Learning Systems, a venture-backed start-up company that was spun out of the University of Pennsylvania. Dean began his career at the Chubb Group, where he held a variety of senior management positions. He holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Business Administration and Psychology from Franklin and Marshall College and he graduated with distinction from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with an MBA in Private Equity.

Sanjay Sharma
SEI

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanksha/

Sanjay K. Sharma has 20+ years of Global financial solutions delivery, IT Strategy and implementation experience spanning across 11 countries with the delivery of USD 2 billion+ ITFS programs.

Sanjay is currently Chief Technology Officer of SEI Investments where he is responsible for SEI Wealth Platform (SWP) delivery to keep pace with business, operations, technology and regulatory trends and growth objectives. Sanjay is also responsible for SWP technology strategy, global workforce management, DevOps, vendor management, quality assurance and performance engineering.

Before joining SEI, Sanjay held several key global delivery positions, including Head of Delivery, Europe for a global ITFS consulting company; Head of Delivery ITFS Solutions, North America for a global top 10 IT consulting company; and Head of Implementation, ITFS Solutions for a global top 10 IT consulting company.

Currently Sanjay is also a member of ‘Client Advisory Board for Digital’ for a Global IT firm and a member of ‘SEI Advisory Board for Diversity’.

Sanjay has a master of engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India, specializing in systems engineering, Business English Communication from the Cambridge University, UK, Machine Learning from the Stanford University, Business on Board leadership development program through Arts & Business Council of Philadelphia and have attended the Wharton School Fellows program.

Dave Spencer
SAP North America

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davespencersap

Dave Spencer is the managing director for the East region of SAP North America. He is responsible for driving the go-to-market operations for all lines of business, strategic planning, field team development, customer satisfaction, and growing the region’s pipeline.

Since joining SAP in 2006, Dave has held a number of management and executive leadership sales roles. Most recently, he was chief operating officer for the East Region, and before that was global VP of sales for SAP’s cloud organization, overseeing the go-to-market activities for the Customer, Money, and SAP® Business ByDesign® field sales teams.

Previously, Dave was vice president of SAP Strategic Customer Program (formerly SAP Premier Customer Network) in the northeast, successfully managing and developing top-performing account teams responsible for some of SAP’s largest customer companies. Just prior, Dave served as a global account executive within the same organization soon after beginning his SAP career with the professional services team, generating new software sales with new and existing customers.

Before joining SAP, Dave held several senior sales leadership positions at companies such as Ruesch International (acquired by Travelex), Gelco Information Network (acquired by Concur), and Moore Business Forms & Systems.

Dave graduated from Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, with a bachelor’s of science degree.

Dianne Strunk
PACT

[email protected]
http://www.linkedin.com/in/diannestrunk

Dianne Strunk is the Vice President of PACT (Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies) – the go-to resource for capital and connections for fast growing companies, and a driver of entrepreneurship and innovation in the Philadelphia region. PACT is an association that provides members with connections, capital and content that will further their growth and success and to collaborate with other organizations to drive innovation and entrepreneurship in the region. Strunk also served as the CEO of Eastern Technology Council.

Previously, Strunk worked as a commercial real estate banker for Latimer & Buck in Princeton, New Jersey. Latimer & Buck represented elite insurance companies that made $5-$150 million investments in first mortgages of commercial properties. Prior, during a decade of employment in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Strunk worked in Pittsburgh’s economic development sector, specifically for the Economic Development Committee of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development.

Harry Vitelli
Bentley

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/harryvitelli/

Harry joined Bentley in 2008 and was appointed to senior vice president of project delivery in 2016. He is responsible for product strategy, product development, and pre/post-sale support of Bentley’s portfolio of ProjectWise applications. In previous roles with Bentley, Harry served as vice president of construction and vice president of platform product management. Prior to Bentley, he held several senior management positions at Adobe Systems. Harry has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Spring Garden College.

Ken Weirman
AMETEK

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenweirman

Ken Weirman is the CIO for AMETEK Inc, a $4B manufacturer of electronic instruments and electromechanical devices. He is a seasoned IT executive with extensive experience within the manufacturing and distribution industries. He has held this role since 2010.

Prior to joining AMETEK, Ken spent 16 years with Keystone Foods, a $6B international food manufacturer and distributor, where he held positions as Vice President of US Distribution as well as global CIO. Mr. Weirman also has held operating and information management positions with several leading companies, including Astra Merck, ICI Americas, CDI, and Arthur Andersen and Company.

Mr. Weirman holds a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA with an emphasis in Information Systems. Both degrees are from Penn State University.

Chris Wilhelm
EPAM

[email protected]
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-wilhelm-9669001

Chris is Vice President of Business Consulting for EPAM Systems, responsible for advising clients on business solutions, as well as the benefits and cost savings that can be realized by applying leading-edge business practices, industry trends, innovation, automation, analytics, and digital solutions to create new business and operating models.

With over 20 years of experience in professional services, Chris has worked with various Philadelphia-area and other Fortune 500 clients to solve their most challenging business problems in verticals such as telecommunications, utilities, life sciences, and consumer products/ services. He is an alumni of North Highland Worldwide Consulting, Andersen, and the Hay Group, where he drove firm growth via delivery of management and technology consulting services, thought leadership, relationship management, and recruiting.

Chris has a B.A. in Economics from William & Mary, and was a Hermes Scholar at Columbia Business School, where he received an M.B.A. in Finance.