ESW #316 – Theresa Lanowitz, Vinay Anand, Christopher Kruegel, Geoff Bibby, Randy Watkins, Nick Biasini

Vinay Anand is a seasoned technology leader with expertise in leading product strategy, engineering, business development and product marketing for security, software and networking products. Vinay has spent a major portion of the last 20 years focused on developing security solutions for enterprise markets.

Most recently Vinay was the VP of Products for Prisma Cloud – Palo Alto Networks’ public cloud security platform. Prior to this, Vinay was responsible for Anthos Trusted Services covering security, compliance and service management for hybrid clouds at Google. Vinay came to Google from IBM where he was the Vice President of Global Product Management and Strategy for IBM Security, driving strategy and product innovation for the $2B IBM security portfolio. Before that, Vinay was the VP & GM for the ClearPass Security business at Aruba, an HPE company. Prior to Aruba, Vinay held leadership roles in McAfee, Symantec & Cisco Systems.

Christopher Kruegel is VP Security Services at the Network and Security Business Unit (NSBU) at VMware. Before that, Christopher was a co-founder at Lastline, where he served in various positions (CEO, Chief Product Officer, and Chief Scientist) until the acquisition by VMware. In addition, Christopher is a Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara (currently on leave). Christopher’s research interests are computer and communications security, with an emphasis on malware analysis and detection, web security, and intrusion detection. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in top computer security conferences. He is also the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an MIT Technology Review TR35 Award for young innovators, an IBM Faculty Award, and several best paper awards.

Theresa Lanowitz is the Chief Cybersecurity Evangelist at LevelBlue, a strategic alliance between AT&T and WillJam Ventures, that simplifies cybersecurity for the businesses fueling our global economy.

With a distinguished career in the technology industry, she has held influential roles at companies including Gartner, Borland, Taligent, and Sun Microsystems, significantly impacting application security and emerging technologies.

Theresa is a globally respected leader known for her deep and diverse experience in cybersecurity. Theresa frequently speaks at major industry conferences, sharing her insights on high tech trends, AI integration, and the evolving threat landscape.

Theresa holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA.

Geoff Bibby is Senior Vice President of Cybersecurity Marketing and Strategy at OpenText Cybersecurity.

In his role, Geoff leads a dedicated team of marketing professionals who wake up every day wanting to catapult OpenText further up the list of global cybersecurity leaders. Geoff and his team manage over 15 security brands, supporting millions of users across nearly every aspect of the cybersecurity space including adversarial threat analysis, application security, secure data discovery and cyber resilience.

Before assuming this role, Geoff was on the Executive Leadership Team for Zix/AppRiver where he served as Chief Marking Officer. During that time, he played an integral role in helping the company grow into a cloud-based security leader before being acquired by OpenText in 2021.

Geoff is an avid cyclist and endurance athlete. He and his wife Kathleen have three grown sons. While a Canadian native, Geoff now calls Dallas, TX his home.

Nick Biasini’s interest in computers and technology started at a young age when he tore apart his parents’ brand new 486SX PC. Ever since he has been tinkering with computers in one way or another. In his current role, Nick serves as the Head of Outreach for Cisco Talos leading the team responsible for the majority of the published research. Before that Nick was responsible for exposing new details to major threats, with a focus on crimeware. This includes identifying techniques like Domain Shadowing, helping to stop large scale malware campaigns, and revealing clever spam campaigns. Nick has a master’s degree in digital forensics from the University of Central Florida and has worked in both public and private sector positions in the security industry for more than fifteen years.

Randy Watkins is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Critical Start and an emerging thought-leader in the security industry. As CTO, Randy is responsible for designing and executing the company’s strategic technology initiatives, which includes defining the strategy and direction of Critical Start’s Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services delivered by the Zero-Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP).

Previously, Randy served as Critical Start’s Director of Security Architecture, where he set the strategy for emerging vendor technologies, created the Defendable Network reference architecture, and set product direction for the company’s internally-developed Security Orchestration Automation and Response platform. Watkins was employee number five when he joined Critical Start in 2012.

Randy is a respected author and speaker on security trends and is well-versed in applying security technologies, in practical and meaningful ways, to improve risk management and security infrastructure for enterprise customers. He holds numerous security certifications in data analysis, data science, computer science, and leadership. Randy earned a bachelor’s degree in Information Systems Security and an associate degree in Computer Networking Systems, both from ITT Technical Institute.

In his free time, Randy continues to contribute to the security community through his consultancy to security product manufacturers to help them drive value to the customer through their solutions.