Dan has been with UPMC for over 20 years, with different roles of increasing responsibilities in network engineering, network architecture and enterprise architecture. He is responsible for evaluating and driving emerging trends and technologies in order to deliver greater flexibility as well as optimize UPMC’s IP network, enabling IT to better support the company’s goals. Dan also specializes in large campus networks, IoT, mobility, network automation, SDN and wireless. Dan has attained several leading industry certifications including Cisco’s CCIE and Nokia’s SRA. He is also a co-founder of a startup company that specializes in end-user experience monitoring.

Benjamin Gamble is the Technical Director of Networking and Security at Iron Bow Technologies and a CCIE-certified network engineer with experience spanning routing, switching, wireless, unified communications, security, and data center networking. His career has included roles with MSPs, VARs, OEMs, and service providers. He has designed and supported networks serving education, healthcare, federal government, and state emergency services, with experience centered on Cisco and Juniper technologies.

Joe Hlasnik is a Principal Architect at Expedient, designing large-scale cloud infrastructure platforms spanning networking, virtualization, automation, and cloud technologies. Previously, Joe spent nearly a decade leading network architecture for an MSP/CSP, designing enterprise-grade solutions delivered at scale while mentoring engineers. He is passionate about modernizing network engineering through automation and sharing practical lessons learned from operating complex environments.

Daniel Hertzberg is a Network, Observability, and Automation Engineer with 15+ years of experience across enterprise, service provider, and cloud provider environments, specializing in network automation and observability. He focuses on bringing software engineering practices to modern infrastructure, bridging the gap between traditional network engineering and software development.