Team
Experienced. Hands on.
Shahin Khan
Partner
Shahin Khan has over 30 years of experience as a technology executive and an industry analyst focused on Digital Transformation, tracking High Performance Computing (HPC), AI, Quantum technologies, IoT, and Cryptocurrencies.
He is a member of the board and acting chief marketing officer at SourceCode (intelligent infrastructure) and serves on the board of directors of Wizmo (SaaS) and Massively Parallel (code modernization).
Shahin’s past roles have included serving government, academic, and enterprise markets as VP/GM for the HPC and Graphics unit at Sun Microsystems with revenues of $2B and VP of marketing and corporate development at Silicon Graphics with revenues of $500M. He has been CMO at Afero (IoT), Avni (multi-cloud), DriveScale (composable infrastructure), 3Leaf Systems (memory fabric), ScaleArc (database infrastructure), EFI (print technologies), and Azul (Java systems). His executive positions at Sun Microsystems also include VP and Chief Competitive Officer and corporate spokesperson, and VP of Product Marketing & Planning. Shahin lived in the UK to lead European Marketing for FPS Computing before its acquisition by Cray Research and was at Cray Business Systems Division through its acquisition by Sun Microsystems. He started his career as a “post-doc” and software engineer at Enrico Clementi’s quantum chemistry lab at IBM/National Foundation for Cancer Research. He founded StartupHPC, a grass roots community for STEM-inspired entrepreneurs that was active from 2014 until 2019.
Shahin is co-host of the @HPCpodcat in association with InsideHPC, covering technologies, markets, and policies that shape HPC and featuring some of the most celebrated thinkers and practitioners of supercomputing, Mktg_Podcast focused on the transformation of marketing as a discipline, the OrionX Download, aiming to simplify big ideas in tech, and the monthly Quantum Analyst Roundtable videocasts together with 4 other analysts, discussing the latest advances in this critically important area.
He is a frequent speaker at industry events and is consistently ranked as a top presenter. Speaking engagements include: panelist on ACGSV’s Web 3.0, AI and the Corporate Metaverse, and keynotes at RISC-V Global Forum on Information Revolution, Chips, and Openness, and HPC + AI Wall Street on Crypto Innovation and the Future of Money. You can see some of this thinking in Shahin’s presentations on SlideShare and in the reports/webinars on OrionX.net. He has been quoted or featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Wired, CNet, Silicon Angle, and has written for The Register and Enterprise AI.
Shahin is a graduate of The Hun School of Princeton and Cornell University with Bachelor of Science and Master’s degrees in chemical engineering with heavy concentration in computer science. He is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Cindee Mock
Partner
Cindee Mock combines business aptitude with a passion for writing and is a published author in several media outlets, including Harvard Business Review. She is an energetic and resourceful thinker with exceptional positioning/messaging, communications and executive communications skills.
Cindee specializes in transforming complex topics into customer-focused “stories” that help shorten the sales cycle. Realizing that customers have choice, she also stresses the importance of fully understanding the competitive landscape in order to best position, market and sell vis à vis the competition.
Cindee is a self-starter who enjoys fast pace and favors a hands-on, practical approach. Previously, Cindee held several senior director-level positions at Sun Microsystems, including Message & Evidence Marketing, as well as Worldwide Launch Marketing, Competitive Intelligence, and Sun Laboratories Marketing. Prior to Sun, Cindee worked at two high technology PR agencies and had the opportunity to work with a diverse set of companies ranging from technology start-ups to Fortune-500 enterprises.
Cindee holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies from the University of California at Berkeley.
Laura Drago
Partner
Laura Drago is an experienced marketing consultant who has a fascination with the intersection of creativity and technology. She has experience with creating PR & social media campaigns, web design & implementation, content creation, and event management. She also has a background in film production, crowdfunding, blogging and podcast creation.
Prior to working with OrionX, Laura worked as an independent consultant for many years, and was a Social Media Manager at CA Technologies and Healthline Networks. She has written for Backstage, Ideaing, and is the Assistant Editor-in-Chief of Ms. in the Biz. She is an alumna of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Stephen Perrenod
Partner
Stephen Perrenod is a recognized public speaker, energetic blogger on IT and science issues, and a published author of two well-received books on cosmology and extragalactic astronomy.
He possesses expert knowledge in key market sectors for enterprise computing including Cloud Computing, Big Data, IoT, Deep Learning, and HPC. At OrionX he has worked with Fortune 500 companies, SMEs and startups to develop and enhance their business strategies and extend their market initiatives in each of these areas, and in enterprise computing generally.
He has held a variety of senior sales and marketing positions at Cray, SGI, and Sun Microsystems, as well as for two startup companies. In these roles he has been responsible for business segments in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. At Sun Microsystems he doubled the HPC business for the Asia-Pacific region within a 3 year period.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from MIT and a masters and Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University.
Adrian Cockcroft
Partner
Adrian Cockcroft is a technologist and strategist with broad experience from the bits to the boardroom, in both enterprise and consumer-oriented businesses, from startups to some of the largest companies in the world, equally at home with hardware and software, development and operations.
He’s best known as the cloud architect for Netflix during their trailblazing migration to AWS and was a very early practitioner and advocate of DevOps, microservices, and chaos engineering, helping bring these concepts to the wider audience they have today. Adrian spent the last few years as a VP at Amazon deeply immersed in the dual challenges of helping Amazon itself – one of the largest companies in the world – become more sustainable, and via AWS – one of the largest technology suppliers in the world – helping its enterprise and public sector customers become more sustainable.
There is an industry wide fascination with the success of both Netflix and Amazon, their culture and ideas, and Adrian has been distilling these learnings and sharing them with executives for many years. The Cloud for CEOs booklet – Measure Innovation with One Metric – 2019 is a short summary of his thoughts.
Adrian worked at Sun Microsystems for many years and wrote the Sun Performance and Tuning book that can still be found on many technologist’s bookshelves. He was a distinguished engineer in the performance engineering team and chief architect of the High Performance Technical Computing team led by Shahin Khan. Re-joining Shahin at OrionX continues a friendship and working relationship that has been in place for decades.
Adrian led the process of joining and represented Amazon on the board of both the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and the Open Source Climate foundation (OS-Climate). He was previously an independent board member for European consulting firm Trifork, and while at Sun, helped form the Enterprise Grid Alliance. He’s been a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) since 2016.
Adrian has a BSc in Applied Physics and Electronics from The City University, London, UK. He’s a frequent speaker and has keynoted many events for AWS including many of the AWS Global Summit series, and has presented at many events such as the Monitorama, GOTO, YOW, QCon and DevOps Days conferences. He’s held past advisory positions at the following companies (acquired by): DeepDyve, Liquid Robotics (Boeing), Apcera (Ericsson), Ayla Networks, NGINX (F5), Docker, Instana (IBM), and Gremlin.
Chris Kruell
Partner
Chris Kruell is a partner and practice leader in marketing and communications at OrionX, with over 25 years of marketing leadership in a wide range of companies: from early-stage technology companies to established technology hardware manufacturing to the Fortune 200. For the past 18 years, he has served as the CMO for both software and hardware companies that have targeted the enterprise, SMB, and federal government sectors. He has also served in board and leadership positions in the non-profit sector.
His strategic marketing and branding experience is grounded in technical aptitude and pragmatism when setting strategies and tactics to meet business objectives. His expertise includes marketing and communications strategy and execution, product marketing, partner marketing, and website development. Beyond marketing and corporate communications, his writing includes published articles.
Chris is active in the outdoor recreation industry, having served as a rock and mountain climbing instructor and climb leader for the Portland-based Mazamas non-profit climbing and outdoor education organization.
Holding a BS degree from Cornell University and an MA degree from Hamline University, he is based in Portland, Oregon.