Kannan Mani

Kannan Mani (@kantwit) is currently a Staff Architect - Oracle Solutions for VMware. Kannan has been with VMware for more than 4 years, involved in developing and architecting business critical Oracle solutions on VMware platforms, and helping customers and partners successfully virtualize Oracle on VMware vSphere platform globally. Kannan was previously Reference Architecture Specialist at NetApp, where he architected and developed Oracle solutions on NetApp Storage. Prior to NetApp, Kannan was an Architecture Specialist at Unisys, where he led Oracle Center of Excellence. Kannan is the domain expert in Oracle technologies on various platforms (Storage and Virtualization) and published numerous customer-facing technical documents on Oracle and Database technologies. Kannan has over 17 years in the IT industry experience, and his expertise includes Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), Automatic Storage Management (ASM), clustering, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), business intelligence, performance and scalable enterprise architectures, benchmark and performance, technical solutions marketing and management, virtualization, and Cloud solutions. Kannan is a regular speaker at IOUG, VMworld, VMware Partner Exchange, Oracle Open World, EMC World, NetApp Insight, SNIA, and he is also an evangelist of Oracle technologies. Kannan has been recognized by Oracle as an Oracle ACE, and by VMware as CTO Ambassador and vExpert. Kannan holds a Master’s degree in Computer Applications and a Master’s degree in Business Administration focused on technology.

Don Sullivan, an Oracle Certified Master, a vExpert, and a VMware CTO Ambassador joined VMware in June of 2010 as a Systems Engineer Database Specialist and Oracle Solution Architect for the entirety of the Americas. In that capacity, he has worked with numerous customers and partners focused on the proposition of running Oracle, SQL, and other high-workload systems on vSphere. Presently, the Product Line Marketing Manager for Business Critical Applications at VMware, Don is a frequent speaker at conferences focused on databases and virtualization. After finishing his Master’s thesis at Arizona State University in 1996, Don focused on logical database design with Sybase TxSql, and he moved to Denver to work as a contract DBA. Don subsequently worked for AT&T as a contract DBA with both Sybase and Oracle. In 1998, he joined Oracle and Oracle University and became a Senior Principal Instructor for Oracle University, focusing on server products. He taught all server-based classes for 6 years, which included all New Features classes, OPS/RAC, Backup & Recovery, Performance Tuning, SQL Tuning, Data Guard, and the Data Server Internals (DSI) classes from 7.3 through 10g. He is a co-author of the Oracle Certified Master Practicum, and he is an original Oracle Certified Master. He also co-authored a performance-tuning class text for MySQL. In 2004, he became a consultant with Oracle’s Advanced Technology Services (ATS) and spent the next 18 months involved in a number of proofs of concept (POCs) and other post-sales engagements. In 2005, Don joined Polyserve Corporation as the primary customer-facing Oracle Solution Architect. Although his role was primarily pre-sales, he was involved with all Polyserve customers who had Oracle implementations at every step of their implementation, both pre- and post-sales. In 2007, Polyserve was acquired by HP, and he stayed with HP. In that capacity, Don spent the majority of 2009 through 2013 delivering seminars and workshops to large customer groups focused on Oracle over Network File System (NFS). In 2010, Don joined VMware as a customer-facing Systems Engineer Database Specialist with both Sales and later PSO. In addition, Don is also a project manager for many projects to include cross-corporate functional stress tests. Finally, Don manages the virtualizing applications sub-track at VMworld and VMware’s series of select database workshops.