As a Research Director at IDC, Rob is a private and hybrid cloud infrastructure strategist. He's held executive leadership roles at Ericsson, Hitachi, and Microsoft and is a globally recognized leader in IoT and Digital Twin technologies.As Vice President and Head of IoT Strategy at Ericsson, he drove 5G connection management with the IoT Accelerator and participated in global M&A activities. As Chief Technology Officer at Hitachi, he received the Presidential “Product of the Year” award for designing the Lumada Industrial IoT platform which landed in Gartner’s “Leaders” Magic Quadrant. Spending most of his career at Microsoft, Rob was Director and Global Technology Lead for the Azure IoT cloud platform which also made it to Gartner’s “Leaders Quadrant.” Prior to Microsoft, he co-founded NetPerceptor developing one of the industry’s earliest Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) platforms for smartphones.As a bestselling author and keynote speaker, Rob is a frequently sought-after source of insights globally. He’s been featured in Wired, Forbes, CIO, Fierce Wireless, Inc. Magazine, Dataconomy, Thinkers360, Onalytica, Mobile World Live, Techonomy, and SXSW.Rob is a U.S. Navy Submarine veteran.