Sukant Acharya

Director, SVP, Global Business Head IoT/IIoT/I4.0, IoT WoRKSTM HCL Technologies

Sukant leads the IoT business for HCL and is responsible for the BU P&L across all industry verticals globally. As part of HCL’s Mode 2 business model, IoT WoRKSTM designs, develops, and delivers industry leading products and solutions to the Global 2000 organizations.

Sukant is responsible for overall business growth that includes the charter of driving the BU strategy, driving HCL’s thought leadership in IoT-led digital transformation, creating, and nurturing the market space, establishing, and strengthening the alliance and partner ecosystems, conceptualizing, and launching IoT led products and solutions.

With 25 years of experience in management consulting, outsourcing, and several core industry verticals, Sukant brings a 360-degree perspective to help global organizations navigate and lead the digital wave and the connected industry imperatives.

Sukant’s career has revolved around sponsoring and nurturing emergent technology led business transformation areas like Digital, Analytics, Cloud, Edge, IoT, IIoT, 5G, Smart Products, Smart Operations, Smart facilities, and Industry 4.0. His experience extends across fostering global businesses and co-creating value with clients, partners, and supplier ecosystem. He has extensively worked in sponsoring, advising, developing, and delivering digitally enabled business transformation, innovation, and operational improvement programs.

Bob Pike

General Manager, Smart Edge Group Network & Edge Platforms Division, Intel Corporation

Robert (Bob) Pike is General Manager of the Smart Edge Division, in the Network & Edge Platforms Division, leading the team responsible for driving the intelligent edge platform that will fuel a joint roadmap aligning with Intel’s Smart Edge Open and Smart Edge’s commercial offering. Smart Edge is built to run on Intel technologies such as high-performing Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors today and, going forward, Optane™ memory, Intel FPGAs and other accelerators. Smart Edge’s software is also highly complementary Intel’s OpenVINO and Open Visual Cloud.

Bob joined Intel in October 2019 as part of the acquisition of the Smart Edge™ intelligent-edge platform business from Pivot Technology Solutions, Inc. Previously, as one of the founders and original developers of the Smart Edge™ platform. Earlier in his career, Mr. Pike served as: CTO for Network & Mobile Broadband solutions at ACS (US), a Pivot subsidiary specializing in enterprise infrastructure; President and COO of MDSI, a provider of RAN and network integration services; and, at AT&T where he won high-performance recognition in bringing digital data services to Enterprise clients. Bob also was one of the principles in a successful startup that was sold to Wang Systems.

Bob is a graduate of Auburn University. He is a strong advocate for youth and serves as a teacher/mentor for church youth, targeting working with young men just going into or coming out of college to assist in finding their passion. He is also involved in a Bereaved Parent Support – Specifically supporting Fathers who have lost children.

Ray Le Maistre

Editorial Director, TelecomTV