CloudNOW Announces Top Woman In Cloud Award Winners 2016

Mountain View, CA (PRWEB) - CloudNOW, the executive consortium for the leading women in cloud and converging technologies, today announced that Rupal Patel, CEO and Founder of VocaliD, and Erica Brescia, COO of Bitnami are the 2016 winners of the Top Woman in Cloud Innovation Award. Patel and Brescia were selected from among the winners of the CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Award, all of whom were chosen based on their leadership in using technology to solve real-world business problems, their significant contributions to society and innovative approaches to moving the industry forward.

Patel, Brescia and the other Top Women in Cloud Award winners were honored at the CloudNOW fifth annual Top Women in Cloud Innovation Awards event on December 7, 2016, which was produced in conjunction with Office of the Cloud and hosted at Google headquarters.

Presenters at the CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud event were all recipients of the CloudNOW Top Women Award 2016 and included (in alphabetical order):

• Julia Austin, CTO, DigitalOcean
• Syamla Bandla, Vice President Global Cloud Operations & DevOps, Qualys
• Erica Brescia, COO, Bitnami
• Tara Hernandez, Director of Systems and Build Engineering, Linden Lab
• Dianne Marsh, Director of Engineering, Netflix
• Madhura Maskasky Co-founder, VP Product, Platform9 Systems Inc.
• Monique Morrow, CTO, New Frontiers Engineering, Cisco
• Shaheeda Nizar, Senior Director Engineering, GoDaddy
• Rupal Patel, CEO and Founder, VocaliD
• Megan Rossetti, Senior Cloud Engineer, Walmart
• Raejeanne Skillern, Vice President Data Center Group, Intel
• Mary Stenzel-Poore, Senior Associate Dean for Research, School of Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU)

The event’s panel of expert judges included:

• Becky Wanta, Executive Vice President & CIO at Pacific Compensation Insurance Company; Board of Directors, Calgary Scientific; former CTO for MGM Resorts and former CTO of Best Buy
• Julien Barber, Co-founder & CEO at Holberton School; former Senior Director of Growth for Docker
• Jean Atelsek, Analyst at 451 Research

Keynote speakers at the event included: Julie Hanna, Executive Chair of the Board, Kiva.org; Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec, Vice President of Amazon Web Services; and Lila Abrahams, CEO of Coursera. The event also featured a special report on women in cloud by Kantar TNS Research.

The Top Women in Cloud Innovation Awards are presented in partnership with Office of the Cloud and sponsored by Cloudability, GoDaddy, Cisco, Netflix, Intel and DataSite.

About CloudNOW

CloudNOW is a non-profit consortium of the leading women in cloud computing, providing a forum for networking, knowledge sharing, mentoring, and economic growth. CloudNOW offers members the opportunity to creatively approach the technological challenges of cloud today, working in partnership with the tech industry and cloud thought leaders. To learn more, visit us at cloud-now.org.