Greg Duff
Principal and Chair
Foster Garvey PC

Speaker: The New Paradigm – Vaccines, Health Passports and other COVID-Related Operational and Contracting Challenges

Greg Duff is a Principal in the Seattle office of Foster Garvey. He serves as Chair of the firm’s national Hospitality, Travel & Tourism practice. Throughout Greg’s 25+ year career working exclusively in the hospitality industry, he has dedicated himself to helping clients solve the range of “back of house” legal issues associated with owning and operating a modern hospitality operation – from advising on the myriad of issues associated with distribution and online travel to navigating the complex relationships among owners, operators, regulators and vendors/suppliers. More recently, he has been helping clients stay up-to-date with operating in the COVID-19 pandemic environment, including advising on best practices for guest communications, COVID-19 testing and related guest services and risk mitigation.
 
Prior to his career in private practice, Greg served in-house legal and business roles with the Westin Hotel Company/Starwood Hotels and Resorts, Homegrocer.com/Webvan Group and Columbia Hospitality.

Bram Gallagher
Senior Economist
CBRE Hotel Research

Speaker: CBRE Hotel Outlook

Bram Gallagher is a Sr. Economist for CBRE Hotels Research, the Americas research arm of the world's largest commercial real estate firm. He maintains performance forecasting models for 65 major U.S. hotel markets, performs consulting work for destination marketing organizations, creates tools for hotel developers, and examines the effects natural disasters have on hotel occupancy. His background in statistical modeling and understanding of how markets operate have allowed him to reveal powerful, new insight into the future of the lodging industry.

Caleb Hurd
Director of Site Reliability Engineering
Citrix

Speaker: Why procrastination is the winning strategy in technology

Caleb Hurd has worked in tech for the last 15 years. He has started up tech practices such as creating Chick-fil-A's first DevOps/SRE practice, as well as forming Citrix's first SRE group. Caleb has worked as an engineer, as a manager and as an executive... dealing with the full cycle of technology challenges from doing the work to leading, to setting the strategic vision for medium to large organizations. In 2019, Caleb lead overhauling Chick-fil-A's onsite compute system which culminated in the deployment of Kubernetes to all Chick-fil-A restaurants in order to run IoT and robotic workloads within the kitchen. Because of this, he has developed a deep appreciation for the challenges of running onsite workloads, like those found in the hospitality industry.

Matt Muta
VP of Innovations
Delta Air Lines

Speaker: Innovations at Delta Airlines

Matt has over 30 years of experience with roles in Leadership, Emerging Technologies, Envisioning, and Innovation.  He oversees an organization within Delta that drives innovation through exploration, rapid prototyping, envisioning, and the development or investment in new technology.
 
Previous to Delta, Matt had responsibility as the Global Managing Director for Hospitality & Travel for Microsoft Corporation. In his role Matt was responsible for developing Microsoft’s comprehensive solutions framework that enables the next generation of Hospitality & Travel innovation. Matt worked closely with customers, partners, industry groups and Microsoft product groups to shape Microsoft’s Hospitality & Travel solution offerings by leveraging best practices gained from leaders in the industry.  Building on his experience in the field as a strategic customer advisor and technical evangelist, Matt also worked in Microsoft R&D with the Envisioning Team to drive their technical strategy efforts.  In that role he was the liaison with multiple business owners, product teams, and customers to help ensure the teams efforts shared a unified vision, as well as drive a process for how the Envisioning Team could integrate results and learning to affect long-term product roadmaps. 
 
Prior to Microsoft Matt was with Albertson's Food & Drug Inc., where he was the Corporate Vice President of Web Technologies and E-Business responsible for consumer direct channels Albertsons.com & Savon.com as well as Intranet, and extranet operations.  
 
Matt is a graduate of Boise State University, and presently serves on the Board of Sarcos Robotics, as an Advisor to COVR Technologies, and is member of the Innovation Outreach Program. Matt’s time away from work is spent with his family and enjoys diving, hiking, restoring cars and building motorcycles.

Shamla Naidoo
Global CISO | Digital Transformation | CIO | Board Member | Risk Leader | Attorney

Speaker: How businesses should think about their cybersecurity investments

Shamla Naidoo brings a rare mix of global business experience, technical knowledge and legal expertise to her numerous roles.  She is currently the head of Cloud Strategy and Innovation at Netskope.  She is also an independent director at multiple public and private companies.  She was recently a Managing Partner at IBM where she advised CEOs, board directors, and executives on how to ensure digital transformation, innovation and strategic risk management co-exist while creating business value. Prior to that Shamla was IBM’s Global Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), where she was accountable for the protection of the worlds largest Intellectual Property portfolio and IBMs global technology estate.

After 25 years as an engineer and technologist, Shamla acquired a Jurisdoctor degree and is licensed to practice law.  She teaches multiple courses in Information Technology, Security and Privacy law at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Law and she coaches a number of Security and Technology executives.

 

Rachel Ratcliff
Senior Managing Director
Stroz Friedberg, an Aon Company

Speaker: War Stories, Practical Advice and How We Change the Narrative on Security

Rachel Ratcliff is Senior Managing Director and serves as leader of the Engagement Management Group and the head of Aon Cyber Solutions Dallas team where she manages digital forensic investigations, leads teams responding to data breach incidents, and oversees security risk assessments, as well as data collection, processing, and hosting in electronic discovery matters. Ms. Ratcliff maintains a full docket of
cases involving cybercrime, theft of intellectual property, deletion of digital data, and proactive incident preparedness. Additionally, Ms. Ratcliff routinely advises boards and C-suite executives on a multitude of cybersecurity issues. Her clients include Fortune 500 companies, private equity firms, non-profit organizations, major law firms, and private individuals.
 
Before joining Stroz Friedberg, Ms. Ratcliff practiced law at the Dallas law firm Carrington, Coleman, Sloman & Blumenthal, LLP. At Carrington Coleman, she focused on business litigation and employment law, assisting clients in administrative, arbitration, federal, and state court proceedings.
 
Ms. Ratcliff also serves as an adjunct professor at Texas Tech University School of Law, where she teaches courses on electronic discovery. She is a frequent speaker and guest lecturer on cybersecurity matters.