Featured Speakers

Apu Pavithran
Founder and CEO
Hexnode

Rachana Vijayan
CMO & Director of Sales, Marketing and Channel Partnership
Hexnode

Michael Ashford
Director of Marketing
The Receptionist

Joel Benge
Principal
MessageSpecs LLC

Valerie Morris
Director of Marketing Strategy
Tintero Creative

Dale Bertrand
President
Fire&Spark

John Smibert
CEO
Sales Leader Forums

Rachael Taplin
CEO
Media Matchmaker

Trevor Lee
Chief Entrepreneur
Trevor Lee Media

James Urie
Senior Partnership Manager
Close

Namrata Kulkarni
Enterprise Security Architect
Dell Technologies

Heather K. Margolis
Senior Vice President of Marketing
360insights

Apu Pavithran
Founder and CEO
Hexnode
Apu is the Founder and CEO of Mitsogo Inc., which is popular for Hexnode, the Unified Endpoint Management solution leveraged globally to manage and secure endpoints. Apu is the driving force behind visualizing, formulating and implementing Hexnode’s vision to be at the forefront of technology. With an eye for talent and a genuinely curious mind, Apu embraces the idea of thinking outside the box and encourages ingenuity and innovation in the community.
An entrepreneur to the core, Apu is a thought-leader and a strong advocate of governance and information security. Helming an organization that makes device management easier for businesses, Apu strongly addresses the necessity for enterprises to ensure cyber safety. He takes time out of his busy schedule to contribute in popular publications on topics that feels strongly about.

Rachana Vijayan
CMO & Director of Sales, Marketing and Channel Partnership
Hexnode
Rachana is the Chief Marketing Officer, Director of Sales, Marketing and Channel Partnerships at Hexnode. As the CMO, Rachana is responsible for leading the company’s global marketing operations. She believes in pushing the horizons of creativity and engaging in fruitful collaborations that lead to exciting work.
Before joining Hexnode, she has held technical and leadership roles in Zoho and FCA. With an engineering background and a master’s in business administration, Rachana’s analytical skills and decisiveness translate well into her role in Marketing. She is also deeply passionate about cutting-edge technology, gender equity and inclusion, and often encourages young girls to break the glass ceiling.

Michael Ashford
Director of Marketing
The Receptionist
Michael is currently the Director of Marketing at The Receptionist in Denver, Colo., and has spent the past decade building and leading marketing teams at companies large and small. Prior to his career in marketing, Michael was an award-winning journalist after graduating from Kansas State University. Michael’s approach to marketing focuses on scaling companies through the power of storytelling and humanizing brands.

Joel Benge
Principal
MessageSpecs LLC
Joel Benge is the principal at MessageSpecs LLC. He supports technical organizations in creating technically-accurate and textually-beautiful stories and messages. He works closely with clients to connect their business objectives to the human emotions and motivations of their target audiences — creating content that gets attention, gets remembered, and gets results. With over 25 years in IT, cybersecurity, and marketing, Joel has worked for companies from NASA to Nickelodeon, along with several other organizations that start with different letters than N.

Valerie Morris
Director of Marketing Strategy
Tintero Creative
Valerie Morris is a digital marketing strategist who believes that you can be successful in marketing AND have balance in life. She understands social media growth tactics and how they fit in with other digital marketing disciplines. Valerie founded Tintero Creative, a digital content agency based in Colorado. Valerie is active in the digital community in Denver and a speaker and trainer. She is also the author of the book We're All Ears: How to increase your impact, influence, and success online in a noisy world.

Dale Bertrand
President
Fire&Spark
Dale Bertrand has been an SEO specialist to Fortune 500 companies and venture-backed startups around the world for two decades. His clients include global brands such as Citizen Watch, Nestle, Raymond Weil, Exxon Mobil and Bulova. He applies his graduate school work in artificial intelligence to search engine marketing. Dale speaks at industry conferences, leads corporate training events and serves as Entrepreneur in Residence at the Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs Organization. He has trained marketing professionals from TripAdvisor, Microsoft, HubSpot, Digitas, Exxon Mobile and Proctor & Gamble. Dale has BS and MS degrees in Computer Engineering from Brown University.

John Smibert
CEO
Sales Leader Forums
John is a renowned B2B sales influencer and an award winning author. He has had a long and successful sales and management career selling technology and software based solutions. In recent years he founded Sales Leader Forums and Sales Masterminds APAC, both focused on assisting B2B selling organisations to transform the way they sell. John recently co-authored a best selling sales novel titled The Wentworth Prospect, an insightful story of how a small cybersecurity software provider sold to a large bank.

Rachael Taplin
CEO
Media Matchmaker
Rachael Taplin a well-known businesswoman and entrepreneur; previously recognised as one of the top 50 UK Inspirational Women in the UK. She now dedicates her time as The Media Match Maker, training and helping entrepreneurs and business owners to be inspired to use PR and secure publicity for themselves whilst also connecting them direct to the UK media and journalists.
Rachael has launched an Online PR & Media Training platform and the UK’s first media database dedicated to Business Owners and Entrepreneurs.
Rachael has achieved her own personal media exposure within local, regional and national press, on radio and TV, she has also appeared within most of the national glossy magazines and has worked with lots of well know celebrities, so it’s safe to say she knows what’s she’s talking about.
Rachael will cover everything you need to know on how to become a media expert and secure thousands of pounds worth of publicity for next to nothing. Rachael will share with you how from one press release she appeared on over 70 radio stations in one day and was also featured in one the UK’s largest daily newspapers. The principles you can apply and use yourself so that you will soon be gaining media exposure for your business.

Trevor Lee
Chief Entrepreneur
Trevor Lee Media
Trevor Lee helps business leaders and their teams deliver better, more confident and more successful presentations, sales pitches and day-to-day client interactions.
Trevor spent 29 years in the semi-corporate sector with 26 of those at senior manager / commercial director and managing director level prior to setting his own presentation and sales consultancy business in 2012 - trevorjlee.com
Trevor is the host of the ‘Better Presentations More Sales’ podcast which started in Feb 2018 and comes out every Monday featuring an array of global guests. He is a business speaker and aspiring ultra runner having completed his first ultra a 44 mile coastal path run in 2021 to celebrate a landmark birthday. The run raised over £7000 for the local children’s hospice music therapy programme and resulted in his first business book - ’12 Business Lessons from Running an Ultra Marathon’. Trevor’s second book ‘7 Steps to Successful Presentations’ is due out in May 2023. His second podcast ‘Running 44@60’ has broadcast well over 100 episodes.

James Urie
Senior Partnership Manager
Close
James Urie is a sales pro turned partnerships manager that heads partnerships at Close.com. James believes that the best partnerships are built through identified synergy and trust. He lives in the mountains of Colorado and finds joy being outside, in the mountains, with his family.

Namrata Kulkarni
Enterprise Security Architect
Dell Technologies
Namrata Kulkarni helps business teams to assess their security posture with emerging technologies such as Telco, 5G, IoT etc. She comes from the mindset that security fabric should get interwoven into the business fabric to build quality products.
Wearing multiple hats throughout her career including development, application and product security, cloud security, and overall enterprise security, she provides security guidance for end-to-end business solutions. Despite being a working mother and Yoga instructor, she tries to make a perfect balance in professional and family life. Loves to travel and explore different cultures.

Heather K. Margolis
Senior Vice President of Marketing
360insights
Heather K. Margolis is Senior Vice President of Marketing at 360insights. Formerly, Heather was the Founder and CEO of Spark Your Channel, creators of a through-channel marketing automation platform, and Founder and Chairperson of Channel Maven Consulting, a strategic channel marketing agency. Both companies were acquired by 360insights in November 2021. Heather is a recognized channel marketing expert and a sought-after keynote speaker to a variety of audiences about entrepreneurship, building a service-based business and B2B strategy, B2B marketing and channel marketing.
A self-proclaimed "recovering channel professional," Heather is passionate about enabling vendors to drive sales through their channel partners. She spent several years in channel programs and marketing for big-brand tech companies like EMC, EqualLogic, and Dell before forming Channel Maven Consulting in March of 2009 to provide strategic channel marketing “to” and partner demand generation “with” IT and telecom channel organizations of all sizes. Heather has a master’s degree in business administration from Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Boulder, Colo., where she can usually be found hiking, working out, or hanging with her two girls!