CloudFest—The Cloud Computing World’s Most Legendary Event

Wolfgang studied Engineering and Business and holds a PhD in Energy Economics. He started his career as a consultant with McKinsey & Company, before he took different leadership roles in the solar industry based in Europe and California. Since 2015, Wolfgang has been COO of Europe's biggest search engine: Ecosia, the search engine that plants trees.

Sonja Pierer is leading the Business Consumption Team of Intel Germany since October 2021 and is responsible for all Sales and Marketing related topics throughout all verticals. Sonja started her career with Cisco, where she held various Enterprise Sales positions covering customers from different segments (manufacturing, retail, logistics, finance and telecommunication). After 7 years with Cisco, she moved on to become the Regional Director for DACH at VCE and afterwards the Sales Director for EMEA with NCR, complementing her IT knowledge with solutions and services sales experience. Getting the chance to become the Managing Director at Experis, Sonja decided to use this opportunity to gain new expertise outside of the IT world and additionally to own full responsibility of the P&L of Experis Germany and dive deeper into all responsibilities a Managing Director has. With her latest role within Amazon B2B Marketplace, Sonja deepened her project and process knowledge. Sonja completed her Diploma of Computer Science and Economics at the University of Passau, is ITIL certified and is also a Project Manager PMP certified by PMI. Sonja Pierer lives with her partner and 2 dogs in Unterhaching, near Munich.

Prof. Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and the bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and Sapiens: A Graphic History. His books have sold over 35 Million copies in 65 languages, and he is considered one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals today. Born in Israel in 1976, Harari received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2002, and is currently a lecturer at the Department of History in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2019, following the international success of his books, Yuval Noah Harari co-founded Sapienship with his husband and original agent, Itzik Yahav. Sapienship is a social impact company with projects in the fields of entertainment and education, whose main goal is to focus the public conversation on the most important global challenges facing the world today. Yuval Noah Harari gave keynote speeches on the future of humanity in Davos 2020 and 2018, on the World Economic Forum’s main Congress Hall stage. He regularly discusses global issues with heads of state, and has had public conversations with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Harari has also met with French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Argentine President Mauricio Macri, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and Shanghai’s Mayor Ying Yong. In 2019, Harari sat down for a filmed discussion on technology and the future of society with Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and in 2018 he presented the first ever TED talk delivered by a digital avatar. Harari originally specialized in world history, medieval history and military history. His current research focuses on macro-historical questions such as: What is the relationship between history and biology? What is the essential difference between Homo sapiens and other animals? Is there justice in history? Does history have a direction? Did people become happier as history unfolded? What ethical questions do science and technology raise in the 21st century? Published in 2014, Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has become an international hit, with over 21 Million copies sold. It is a New York Times top 10 bestseller, which has stayed on the paper’s bestseller list for over half the time it has been available in the US, over a six year period. The book held positions #1-#3 on the Sunday Times’ bestseller list for 96 consecutive weeks. Sapiens was recommended by Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Natalie Portman, Janelle Mon e, Chris Evans and many others. The Guardian has credited Sapiens with revolutionizing the non-fiction market and popularizing ‘brainy books’. In 2016 Prof. Harari returned with Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, a critically acclaimed book that examines the big future projects facing humanity in the 21st century. Since its publication, over 9 Million copies of the book have been sold worldwide. After venturing deep into the past and then the future, Yuval Noah Harari published 21 Lessons for the 21st Century in 2018. Here he stopped to take the pulse of our current global climate, focusing on the biggest questions of the present moment: What is really happening right now? What are today’s greatest challenges and choices? What should we pay attention to? Over 5 Million copies of 21 Lessons have been sold worldwide. In 2020 Harari (as creator and co-writer) joined forces with renowned comics artists David Vandermeulen (as co-writer) and Daniel Casanave (as illustrator). Together, they created Sapiens: A Graphic History – a radical adaptation of the original Sapiens into a graphic novel series that is bursting with wit, humour and colour. These illustrated books cast Yuval Noah Harari in the role of guide, who takes the reader through the entire history of the human species, accompanied by a range of fictional characters and traveling through time, space and popular culture references. The series will be published in five volumes, with the first two books already available. Prof. Harari’s writings have received several accolades. In 2021 he was presented with a US Association of Foreign Press Correspondents Honorary Award. In 2020, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from VUB (the Free University of Brussels), and received the CITIC Author of the Year prize in China, for Sapiens: A Graphic History. In 2019, 21 Lessons was honoured as ‘Knowledge Book of the Year’ by the German magazine Bild der Wissenschaft, Homo Deus was recognized as the ’Wise Book of the Year’ by Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, and Sapiens won the ‘Academic Book of the Year’ prize at the UK’s Academic Book Trade Awards. In 2017 Homo Deus received Handelsblatt’s German Economic Book Award for “the most thoughtful and influential economic book of the year”, and in 2015 Sapiens won China’s Wenjin Book Award. Yuval Noah Harari lectures around the world on the topics explored in his books, and offers his knowledge and time to various audiences on a voluntary basis. He writes articles for publications such as The Guardian, The Financial Times, The New York Times, TIME and The Economist, andin 2020 wrote and interviewed extensively on the global COVID-19 crisis – discussing the pandemic’s implications on major news channels, including CNN and the BBC. Harari was featured in a profile piece on CBS’ 60 Minutes programme in 2021.

As a project manager for Airbus Defense and Space GmbH, Till Eisenberg has built a career from pushing the limits of human endeavor. He specializes in aerospace, rocket and jet propulsion systems, and aerospace medicine. Most recently, Till and his team brought AI into space for the first time with CIMON. In early two decades of work, he has also worked in the fields of biology and blood analysis in the pursuit of space flight innovation.

Elisabeth Kurek is an American cloud leader and diversity advocate living in Germany, with 15+ years of experience in the cloud industry. Elisabeth is currently the VP of Cloud Marketing at IONOS, leading campaign marketing, technical marketing, and the website management teams for all IONOS cloud products, worldwide. Prior to IONOS, Elisabeth led partner marketing for the DACH region at AWS, driving her region to the #1 partner marketing pipeline in EMEA. Elisabeth has served as the Vice President of Partner Growth at uberall, and held various marketing roles at Parallels (now Corel Corporation), NTT, and 1&1. Elisabeth holds a master’s degree from an ivy league school, graduating with an M.S. Ed. in Educational Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. Elisabeth is a champion for diversity in the tech industry. Among other things, she launched the first Diversity & Inclusion Working Group at i2Coalition and the first diversity event of the ecoVerband. Elisabeth was a core member of the Women@Amazon affinity group, and a member of the core team to bring the AWS GetIT program to the DACH region.

Maria is Innovation Manager in the Business Development Team of Cloud&Heat since 2020. Among other tasks, she coordinates the area of collaborative funded R&D projects to improve the efficiency and performance of cloud technologies. Previously she was a research associate and lecturer at the TU Dresden, where she completed her award-winning PhD thesis on stakeholder-driven technological innovation. She has a background in industrial engineering and has also worked in other industrial sectors like food & beverage and logistics.

Dr. Merritt Moore is a quantum physicist and professional ballet dancer. She graduated from Harvard in Physics, and Oxford with a PhD in Quantum Optics. She danced professionally with the Zurich Ballet, Boston Ballet, English National, and Norwegian National Ballet. She was one of the 12 selected candidates to undergo astronaut selection on BBC "Astronauts: Do you have what it takes?". Merritt was awarded Forbes 30 under 30 and now dances with robots, featured by TIME, BBC, FT, and Vogue.

Josepha is the Executive Director of the WordPress project, helping to coordinate and guide volunteer efforts across the ecosystem. Since 2015 Josepha has worked behind the scenes as the lead of the open source division at Automattic. Her work includes financial planning, sponsorship relations, volunteer training programs, and several diversity initiatives on a global scale. She is well-versed in conflict mediation tactics and has a knack for explaining complex topics clearly and respectfully.

Dr. Burt Kaliski Jr., senior vice president and chief technology officer (CTO), leads Verisign’s long-term research program. Through the program’s innovation initiatives, the CTO organization, explores emerging technologies, assesses their impact on the company’s business, prototypes and evaluates new concepts, and recommends new strategies and solutions. Burt is also responsible for the company’s industry standards engagements, university collaborations and technical community programs. Prior to joining Verisign in 2011, Burt served as the founding director of the EMC Innovation Network. He joined EMC from RSA Security, where he was vice president of research and chief scientist. Burt started his career at RSA in 1989, where, as the founding scientist of RSA Laboratories, his contributions included the development of the Public-Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS), now widely deployed in internet security. Burt has held appointments as a guest professor at Wuhan University’s College of Computer Science and as a guest professor and member of the international advisory board of Peking University's School of Software and Microelectronics. He has also taught at Stanford University and Rochester Institute of Technology. Burt was program co-chair of Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES) 2002, chair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) P1363 working group, program chair of CRYPTO ’97, and general chair of CRYPTO ’91. He currently serves on the scientific advisory board of QEDIT, a privacy-enhancing technology provider. Burt is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, a senior member of the IEEE Computer Society, and a member of Tau Beta Pi. Burt received a PhD, Master and Bachelor of Science degrees in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where his research focused on cryptography.

Tim Callan is responsible for ensuring the company’s CA practices conform to industry and regulatory requirements and the company’s published Certificate Practices. Tim has more than twenty years’ experience as a strategy and product leader for successful B2B software and SaaS companies, with fifteen years’ experience in the SSL and PKI technology spaces.

 

Dr. Klaus Kolitz is leading the global Sixt IT comprising of more than 700 colleagues in Pullach, Bangalore and Kiev. He joined Sixt in 2019 as CTO and has since been responsible for driving the digitization and technical modernization across all areas. This includes rebuilding the majority of Sixt’s system landscape which has grown tremendously since Erich Sixt started programming the first lines of codes in the 1980s, and of course, Sixt’s own journey to the cloud. Prior to entering the “Orange World”, Klaus worked at “trivago” which he joined in 2011 in the early days of the startup. Due to the significant growth of trivago he was given the opportunity to build up the entire engineering organization and shape the backend search technology as well as the customer frontend. Notable milestones include scaling the platform from 10 to 150 Million monthly visitors, bringing AI into the search and rebuilding the entire backend with new technologies into the cloud. Klaus studied at KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) in Karlsruhe, Germany where he received his Diploma in Industrial Engineering (Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen). He then completed his PhD in information systems with a strong focus on electronic markets.