SPEAKER PROFILES

Praveen Sengar
Sr. Manager, Software & Services and Industry Verticals Research
IDC (India) Limited 

Praveen Sengar heads the Software and Services Research practice at IDC India. He is responsible for driving all market analysis and research assignments for the India domestic Software and Services market and identifying new research and consulting opportunities. Praveen personally supervises the India Packaged Software market tracker for IDC. He has also conceptualised and spearheads research into new, emerging technology markets such as Security Solutions, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Information Management for the India domestic market.

Praveen also heads the industry verticals research practice for India and has conceptualised and led important customised assignments to study emerging new IT markets in the Retail, Pharmaceuticals, Government and BPO/IT-enabled Services sectors.

Praveen is a regular speaker at IDC’s annual IT industry briefing session Directions and at major IDC and industry conferences.

Praveen has worked with organisations like Lowe Lintas in brand management and Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals in marketing.

Praveen graduated from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi with a Master’s degree in International Business (specialising in International Marketing).

Andrew Knott,
Vice President, Marketing – Asia Pacific, Salesforce.com

As Vice President, Marketing, Andrew Knott is responsible for leading the marketing efforts for Salesforce.com across Asia Pacific. As the world’s fastest growing enterprise technology company over the past five years (source: Forbes Magazine), Salesforce.com has been expanding rapidly in Asia with Marketing at the forefront of efforts to drive category leadership, market penetration and growth.

Prior to joining Salesforce.com, Andrew held a variety of senior management roles in Singapore, Korea, China as well as regional Asia-Pacific when working at Ogilvy & Mather. Andrew lead the development of the CRM & digital agency group, OgilvyOne in North Asia working with some of the most innovative and market leading organisations spanning the fields of technology, finance, automotive & logistics, through to personal technology and consumer goods.

With close to twenty years of experience in brand management and CRM (customer relationship management), Andrew believes in the value of managing your existing customer base to maximum effect. In times like this it is important to be absolutely focused on your customers to drive revenue, deliver better service and ultimately get more value out of your customer relationships. Something that Salesforce.com is similarly focused on with each and every one of their 51,800 customers around the globe and is reflected by the simple fact that 94% of Salesforce.com’s customers said they would recommend Salesforce to other potential customers and some 77% actually have.

Frank Feldmann
Senior Product Manager, Red Hat Asia Pacific 

Frank Feldmann is the Senior Product Manager for Asia Pacific, with over 13 years of experience in the field of open standards and open source. Frank is responsible for the Red Hat Infrastructure solutions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. He is the live-link into Red Hat's global product managers community. 

Prior to Red Hat, Frank worked at Novell Asia Pacific in the role of Technical Alliance Manager. He was responsible for technical relationships with IBM, Hewlett Packard and Dell. Prior to relocating to Asia, Frank co-owned and managed a Java services company in the Netherlands specializing in Open Source JBoss Middleware technology. 

Before that, Frank worked as a Product Manager for SilverStream Software EMEA, an innovative J2EE middleware software vendor that was acquired by Novell Inc. mid 2002.

Frank has a business degree in computer science and economics and has been instrumental in many product and technology shaping activities throughout his career.

Nimrod Gindi
Director - Corporate Strategy, Mellanox Technologies

Nimrod Gindi is Director of Corporate Strategy at Mellanox Technologies, which specializes in Ethernet and InfiniBand adapters and system products. Mr. Gindi has been in charge of business development mainly in the USA financial market. Between 2000 and 2005, he was Team Leader for Network Adapter Architecture and Design validation projects and Team Leader for PCI Bridge design projects. Between 2003 and 2005, Mr. Gindi was the company's official representative in standard Architecture working group at the InfiniBand Trade Association, and Workgroup Leader in Compliance and Interoperability Working group (CIWG).

Mr. Gindi holds a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from Israel Technion Institute of Technology.

Abhinav Karnwal
Technical Marketing Manager, APAC, Trend Micro

Abhinav Karnwal is responsible for Technical Marketing for the Enterprise segment at Trend Micro. He works closely with the Sales, Marketing, Technical Services and Product Management teams to develop programs and works with customers to understand their security requirements, develop long-term strategies and implement solutions to achieve their business goals.

Previous to this, Abhinav worked as a Technical Consultant at Trend Micro, providing technical services to Enterprise & Government customers for Trend Micro’s Internet Content Security Solutions. Prior to Trend Micro he was part of the Secure Converged Networking division at Ramco Systems Ltd.

Abhinav holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronics and a Post Graduate Diploma in Information Technology.