About Our 2024 Keynote Speakers
Cisco Keynote
Javed Khan
SVP/GM Collaboration
Javed Khan is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Collaboration. This multi-billion-dollar business boasts the award-winning Webex product portfolio, including Cisco Collaboration Devices, the Webex Suite, Webex Contact Center, Webex Connect, and Webex Events.
Javed is passionate about delivering unrivaled collaboration experiences that fuel the future of work. He took on this leadership role in the midst of a global pandemic, leading and innovating through exponential growth as remote work unfolded. Now the team has delivered thousands of innovations and transformed the portfolio to help customers prepare for the next normal.
In his tenure with Cisco, Javed has held several leadership roles in Collaboration, including VP/GM for the Calling and Meetings business units, where his team delivered several transformative initiatives, including a single meetings platform architecture and modernization of the Webex experience. Prior to joining Cisco, he served as Vice President of Enterprise and Consumer Security products at Symantec, securing the most important user and enterprise environments at scale. He started his career as an engineer at Novell Networks, moving into escalating leadership roles there and at Symantec.
With over 20 years of enterprise and consumer product leadership, Javed is an accomplished speaker on the future of work, business transformation, sustainability, product development, and technology architectures.
He holds an MS in Computer Science from Loyola University and an MBA from the Anderson School of Management at UCLA.
Microsoft Keynote
Nicole Herskowitz
Vice President, Microsoft Teams & Platform
Nicole has been an active leader in the technology sector for over 25 years. Nicole currently leads Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Mesh, and Microsoft 365 Platform product marketing. She previously held leadership roles on the Microsoft Azure, Visual Studio, SharePoint, and Project businesses. During her tenure at Microsoft, Nicole’s responsibilities have included product management, product marketing, and sales in both worldwide and European offices.
Prior to joining Microsoft, Nicole worked at a startup focused on customer relationship management SaaS. Nicole started her career as a strategy and technology consultant at Arthur Andersen. Nicole earned her MBA at the University of Michigan and undergraduate degree at University of Texas at Austin.
Outside of work Nicole spends her time with her husband and two daughters, travelling and long-distance running.
RingCentral Keynote
Kira Makagon
Chief Innovation Officer
An 11 year veteran of RingCentral, Kira Makagon serves as Chief Innovation Officer where she leads global product, user experience, engineering, cloud operations, security, and IT. She has been a critical driver in defining RingCentral’s product strategy and global reach that has put RingCentral at the forefront of the communications and collaboration market, leading to rapid year-over-year growth from pre-IPO to over $2 billion in annual recurring revenue.
From 2012 on, Makagon led a number of market-first product innovations at global scale, such as RingCentral's mobile-first cloud PBX with integrated video meetings capabilities. She launched RingCentral's open platform, allowing for customizable workflows through open APIs.
In 2015, Makagon led the acquisition of Glip, a team messaging solution, making RingCentral the first cloud communications provider to have a truly unified solution across messaging, video, and phone. Under her leadership, RingCentral brought omnichannel capabilities into its collaborative contact center solution with the acquisitions of ConnectFirst and Dimelo, enhancing the customer experience for businesses worldwide.
In 2020, Makagon spearheaded the launch of RingCentral Video®, the company's proprietary video meetings solution.
In 2021, she focused on launching RingCentral Ventures™, RingCentral's corporate ventures arm, which partners with exceptional founding teams and leading venture capitalists to reimagine the future of work through communications and collaboration. With RingCentral Ventures well on its way, Makagon expanded her responsibilities and resumed her leadership of the innovation organization.
Zoom Keynote
Smita Hashim
Chief Product Officer
As Zoom’s Chief Product Officer, Smita is responsible for leading Zoom’s product management. She is an industry veteran with 20+ years of product management experience across Google and Microsoft. Her product experience spans leading delivery of television over IP networks at Microsoft, leading and scaling Google Meet, and more recently managing real-time communications platform and products at Microsoft Teams. Beyond video, Smita has led Google Voice (Phone), Google Calendar and Tasks, Google Adwords product suite for local advertisers, and Google Chromebooks device portfolio and ecosystems. Smita grew up in India where she received her B.Tech in Electrical Engineering at IIT Kanpur. She received her masters from Princeton University in EECS and a Ph.D. from UC Santa Barbara focused on image and video compression. Smita is a recipient of IIT Kanpur distinguished alumni award and founder of IIT Kanpur women alumni network WIN.
