Americas Volunteer

Kate Fontanella
Senior Technical Instructor
HP Vertica
Big Data Champion

Kate Fontanella is a Senior Technical Instructor at HP Vertica.   She has a passion for training and facilitating adults to gain the skills they need to grow professionally.  In her new role at Vertica, Kate is excited to welcome long standing database professionals to the world of big data, allowing them to process data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications.

Throughout Kate’s career she has worked with many database technologies including Cognos, SAP and Oracle.  She most recently worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology building online courses for staff on SAP and Cognos.  Kate spent over 10 years in the legal industry as a Marketing Technology Manager managing a SQL based CRM system and its team.  During that time she also managed a peer group for the International Legal Technology association focused on the CRM system and eventually all marketing technology tools.

She holds an MBA with a concentration in Marketing and Human Resources from Clark University.

Kate is also an avid biker and sailor and in the summer you will find her on the Charles River most nights after work.

 

EMEA Volunteer

Andreas Birk
Founder & Principal Consultant
Software.Process.Management
Testing, Quality, and ALM SIG Leader

Dr. Andreas Birk is Founder and Principal Consultant of Software.Process.Management in Stuttgart, Germany. He serves the HP Software community as a leader for the worldwide TQA (Testing, Quality, and Application Lifecycle Management) Special Interest Group of Vivit. He also has served as a member of several Vivit and HP Software committees. His special interests include tool-based requirements management and requirements management in agile development using tools like HP Quality Center / ALM and HP Agile Manager.