Wayne Shearer is Managing Director of MagicOrange APAC, bringing more than 25 years of experience in executive finance leadership roles. Prior to joining MagicOrange, Wayne served as Head of Finance and Advice Shared Services for a Brisbane based insurance and banking organisation, where he gained firsthand experience with the challenges of demonstrating the value of shared services to business consumers.

Wayne’s areas of expertise include IT and shared services financial management, cost optimisation, program management, and strategic financial analysis.

Nikhil Batra is an Senior Research Director for the regional telecommunications team in IDC Asia/Pacific. Based in Australia, Nikhil focuses on Telecom Service Provider and tech vendor strategies, along with enterprise services across the A/P region. In his role, Nikhil works with the regional telecom teams to produce intelligence reports, market insights, and contributes to various consulting projects for leading regional telcos and tech vendors.

With about 12 years of experience in the telecom and technology Industry, Nikhil has worked with some of the industry giants like Verizon, IBM and most recently YTL Communications. Prior to IDC, Nikhil has worked in various roles including business analyst and solution consultant, creating strategy roadmaps, conceptualizing solutions for new products/initiatives, as well as defining different elements of go-to-market strategy.

Nikhil is a qualified Telecommunication Engineer with an MBA in Information Technology from SP Jain Global School of Management, Sydney.

David Head is the CTO for Asia Pacific & Japan at Omnissa, bringing over 25 years of experience leading global technical, product, and delivery teams. He focuses on driving innovation across the end user computing space for both customers and partners.

Gautam leads Solutions Engineering for Couchbase across APAC, working closely with enterprise customers to think through and implement their AI and data strategies end to end, from cloud to edge. His focus is on solving real business problems helping teams figure out where AI can genuinely move the needle and building the pragmatic technical solution to get there. Before this, he spent over a decade in MLOps, and DevOps transformation.

His view: getting AI right starts with the business problem, not the technology  and answering it properly means designing across cloud to edge, not just wherever it’s easiest to build. That’s the part of the job he focuses on most.

Simon Lewry is the Director of Solution Architect for the Asia-Pacific region, where he leads a high-performing team responsible for designing and delivering innovative technical architecture solutions across global data centers, private, public, and hybrid hosting environments, and complex networking landscapes. With over 25 years of experience in technology, advisory, and services, Simon is a seasoned leader known for his consultative approach to problem-solving. He combines deep industry expertise with a proven track record of delivering impactful outcomes across global markets, including extensive experience in the Asia region. Throughout his career, Simon has partnered with enterprise customers to strategically align technology with business objectives, drive customer-focused innovation, and lead transformation initiatives that enhance business performance. His ability to foster collaboration, guide technology strategy, and navigate complex transitions has positioned him as a trusted advisor in the digital transformation space.

Colin Teubner is Field CTO at Camunda, helping enterprises rethink how they design, run, and improve their most critical business processes. He brings more than 20 years of experience in process automation, spanning enterprise software, consulting, and industry analysis. Colin began his career as an analyst at Forrester Research, advising Fortune 500 companies on business process management and automation strategy, then moved into software, building and taking to market automation technologies that power some of the world’s largest enterprises. Today, he works with Camunda’s largest customers to apply that experience to process re-engineering, agentic orchestration, and AI adoption.

Co-Founder and CTO of Kiandra, a Svitla Systems company, and a technology leader with more than 30 years of experience. He helped grow Kiandra from a two-person start-up into an award-winning Australian software company delivering hundreds of complex engagements across government and enterprise. Under his technical leadership, Kiandra expanded across Australia and Canada, accumulated more than 1 million development hours, received over 18 awards, and gained recognition from ARN, CRN and Deloitte. Martin remains closely involved in technology strategy, with expertise spanning custom software, application modernisation, enterprise low-code and AI-accelerated development.

Ram Tallavajhala is a Principal AI Field Engineer at Boomi, working across Global Field Engineering with a focus on the Asia-Pacific enterprise market. He partners with customers across education, resources, finance, and government to translate emerging AI and integration capability into field-tested demos, technical proof points, and talk tracks for analyst briefings and customer engagements.

Ram brings 25 years of enterprise integration experience to the role, 8 of them at Boomi, the majority spent building out generative and agentic AI capability since its inception. His work spans agent governance and orchestration, API and data management, event-driven architecture, and grounding AI systems in trusted enterprise data — with hands-on experience across major cloud AI platforms and enterprise application ecosystems.

He’s known internally for building field-executable positioning that holds up under scrutiny from sophisticated buyers and analysts — consistently pushing for honest, capability-versus-roadmap clarity rather than overstatement in customer- and analyst-facing material.

John Feng’s current research focus is software research in the Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) market, with tracker focus on system infrastructure software, including network and system management, security, and storage. John also brings research experience from other technology areas, including telecommunication and business peripherals, markets he closely tracked and into which he delivered key strategic insights, before moving onto software.

Prior to joining IDC, John worked as a data analyst in FMCG market research. John is also an experienced researcher building from solid academic background.

John holds a Bachelor of Psychology (Honors) degree from the University of Sydney and a Graduate Certificate in Applied Finance from Kaplan Professional. He is a keen reader who would be a bit cautious before picking up a bestseller.

Ian Hulme is Lead AI Consultant at HCLTech, helping executive teams translate AI ambition into measurable business outcomes through strategy, governance and enterprise operating models. He advises organisations across Australia and New Zealand on where AI creates the greatest value, how to invest with confidence, and how to scale adoption responsibly. Ian is responsible for AI Wayfinder, HCLTech’s enterprise AI maturity platform that helps CIOs assess capabilities, prioritise investment and accelerate AI adoption with evidence-based decisions. At the IDC CIO Summit, Ian will share practical insights into closing the AI value gap and preparing organisations for the Autonomous Enterprise.

Cassandra Ashworth is an IT executive with 30 years of experience driving growth, transformation and partnerships. She leads HCLTech’s frontier AI go to market across Australia and New Zealand, leveraging her experience across enterprise applications, cloud, data centres, infrastructure, digital workplace, data and AI to help organisations reimagine business processes. Cassandra connects customers, partners and teams to translate emerging technology into business outcomes. Beyond her executive responsibilities, she chairs HCLTech’s CSR initiatives and actively supports women in technology, championing inclusion, community impact and future female leaders. She is also an experienced event moderator, having facilitated discussions over the past decade. 

Noha Salib is Executive Director of Strategic Change, AI and Transformation at HCLTech, specialising in the critical last mile of AI transformation: turning AI investment into sustained adoption, changed ways of working and measurable business value. Her expertise sits at the intersection of AI, human behaviour and enterprise transformation, designing adoption strategies that build trust, capability and confidence while accelerating value realisation. A Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Prosci-certified change leader, Noha has led complex transformations across Australia, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Europe. She focuses on making AI adoption scalable, measurable and human-centred moving organisations decisively from experimentation to enterprise impact.