Leader of the Year Award Winner

Mark Herbert was nominated by members of the Vivit Arizona Chapter who value his vital leadership role in their local community. Mark has led the Arizona Chapter for three years; before this, he led the Pittsburgh Chapter which he founded in 2006 as a Mercury user group. Mark organizes quarterly events with special emphasis on customer presentations focusing on both applications and operations technologies. In addition, Mark engages members in the event process by operating a forum on the Vivit Arizona web site so they can request topics of interest for upcoming events.

Nationally, Mark is bringing his expertise to the HP Discover conference as a roundtable leader.

Mark is an HP Accredited Systems Engineer (ASE) with HP Quality Center and HP QuickTest Professional. He has been working in software Quality Assurance and using HP testing tools since 1999. Mark is also an HP Certified Instructor in these tool sets.

Champion of the Year Award Winner

Paul Peissner has championed both the advancement of IT professionals (helping them take advantage of the quickly changing IT industry) and gathered a variety of industry experts and leaders to work with the Vivit global community. He has established and grown member-participation and recruited leaders for local Chapters and global Special Interest Groups. He has helped Vivit establish strategic partnerships and recruit community sponsors. Paul has regular conversations with Vivit team members on how to improve member services, become more visible to IT professionals, and bring more members to the Vivit community 

His strategy to combine the efforts of HP Software Applications and Operations teams to help optimize IT organizations and advance the careers of Vivit’s IT professionals has resulted in the launch of the Vivit DevOps Special Interest Group, which he leads. Paul is also a Northern California Leader for the Silicon Valley and San Jose Chapter, connecting users and thought leaders in the region. Additionally, he has served as an advisor to the Vivit Board of Directors and offers his insights and expertise to the wider community, speaking at local Chapter meetings in the US and Europe and co-presenting on live web events.

As a Business Development specialist for many technology companies, Paul has become a strong advocate for partner-based "eco-system innovation”, encouraging IT’s adoption of Cloud and the creation of self-service education and training programs to assist in industry adoption and global standardization efforts. He understands the limits of an R&D platform team, the growing needs of their customers, and the wealth of resources the right partnerships can provide to both.

Paul has been a part of

- numerous partner-based Enterprise solution launches

- many partnerships which resulted in acquisitions

- the co-authoring of an IT Ops Automation patent (submitted in 2010)

- the recent Enterprise Cloud Development launch with CollabNet

- many industry and local networks and communities…including Vivit.