Brian W. Horton, CEO, IT Strategy, Inc

Hackers have found another way to extort the medical community and their patients. There’s a disturbing trend of cyber-thieves targeting medical devices in doctors’ offices and hospitals. The very medical devices that provide life saving treatment are now being targeted by hackers – for profit.Just recently, researchers discovered a new version of MEDJACK, which is leaving medical devices, like x-ray machines and MRI scanners, vulnerable for cyber-criminals. Initially discovered in 2015, the MEDJACK malware was developed as an intentional and organized initiative targeting hospital networks. The latest version to be discovered allows the threat actor to steal patient data, exfiltrating it from the network.The issue starts with how these devices were made. The purpose behind these types of devices are their unique functions: heart monitoring, insulin pumps, dispensing of medication, medical imaging, etc. Cybersecurity was rarely, if ever, considered during the design and development of these devices. As medical organizations continue to push the boundaries of interconnecting devices, software, patient records, etc., these devices must now be placed on computer networks. This useful interconnection can also make breach possible.Compounding the situation is federal regulation which now mandates such interoperability – think MACRA. The breach of medical devices is highly lucrative for hackers. In addition to locking down and encrypting computer data for ransom, medical devices could now be rendered useless until monetary demands are met. Imagine telling your staff the MRI scanner cannot be used because it was breached. Or perhaps explain to a patient their sensitive test results were stolen directly from the device. Worse yet, a machine is compromised and disabled while a patient is using it. Hackers are keenly aware of the sensitivity this issue presents, and will exploit it every way possible.Needless to say, all of this is a major issue for healthcare organizations. There are best practices institutions can adopt to help protect themselves and their patients.One of the more critical steps is network isolation and segmentation. For example: making sure medical devices cannot directly communicate with staff computers would reduce the risk of breach.

As we, as a society, continue to commit to the progressive marriage of technology and medicine, healthcare related cyber crime will continue to compound. This is unavoidable. Trying to tackle these issues in a singular fashion, with one-off incident response processes and security projects, will never address the larger issue. Healthcare organizations must begin adopting a culture of security. From senior management, to the janitor, cyber security must drive executive dialog and corporate decision points.

The exponential growth in cloud consumption and revenue of the big three cloud providers confirms the urgency and speed with which enterprises are moving their IT stack to the cloud. But, they are stymied in moving the enterprise crown jewels—data and the associated data warehouse—by two factors: one, long-term infrastructure investments, and two, significant expense, time and business risks of conventional replatforming initiatives. Datometry solves the challenge of switching costs and offers a radical departure from the status quo by making existing applications and modern databases interoperable in realtime with its virtualization technology. This means enterprise data management replatforming initiatives costing in the tens of millions of dollars, taking years to complete, and posing significant risk to the business can now be completed in just weeks.

Mike Waas, one of the world’s database domain experts, founded Datometry in 2013 with a vision to redefine enterprise data management by virtualizing the data warehouse, a technical challenge that has been unsolvable until now. Prior to Datometry, Waas was the founder and architect of Greenplum’s ORCA query optimizer initiative; he also held senior engineering positions at Microsoft, Amazon, Greenplum, EMC and Pivotal. He has authored or co-authored 36 publications on the science of databases and has 24 patents to his credit.

The company’s flagship product, Datometry Hyper-Q, translates existing queries, scripts and workloads between the existing applications and the target modern cloud database in real time, allowing the applications to work natively with the new system. It also emulates features from the legacy database that are not found on the new target database. The company offers two products besides Hyper-Q: Datometry qInsight and Datometry qShift. Datometry qInsight automatically generates a detailed catalog of existing database queries and workloads in a holistic view for the business user. This saves months of specialized manual effort required to map out the existing data warehouse.

The second product, Datometry qShift also automatically generates database schema (tables, views, functions and types) for the target cloud data warehouse, thereby saving enterprises months of specialized manual effort and significant expense in a conventional replatforming project.

“We believe that five years from now, no company will connect any application directly to a data warehouse or database anymore. Datometry technology will become the ubiquitous data management fabric in the enterprise, managing all communications between data warehouses and applications.”

In one instance, a Fortune 100 retailer was looking to move their sizable custom business intelligence application with close to 40 million application queries executed per week to cloud-native Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse. Their own testing and POCs had found that rewriting the entire application stack for the new cloud data warehouse would be a multi-year project with costs running in the tens-of-millions of dollars. Datometry was able to demonstrate that using its flagship product Datometry Hyper-Q, the customer could migrate to the new data warehouse in 12 weeks and at 85 percent less cost than previously estimated.

Today, Datometry is working with Fortune 500 companies across all major verticals in North America with first implementations in Asia and Europe under way. Datometry and its vision are being viewed by enterprise IT leaders and industry experts as pivotal to the adoption of modern cloud data management technology. It is clear that Datometry is emerging as a standard for interoperability in the enterprise data management space.

Recently labeled by CNBC as one of the “10 start-ups that reached $1 billion in record time,” Apttus is the category-defining leader of the Quote-to-Cash (QTC) market – the bridge between Customer Relationship Management (CRM)and Enterprise Resourse Planning (ERP), or “middle office.” Founded in Silicon Valley in 2006, Apttus is powered by the Apttus Intelligent Cloud, a hybrid-cloud platform utilizing the most advanced technologies from Salesforce, Microsoft and IBM. The company offers the world’s most comprehensive QTC footprint, spanning solutions for: Configure Price Quote(CPQ), Contract Lifecycle Management(CLM) Revenue Management, E-Commerce and Analytics, empowering enterprises to automate and optimize their most Critical Revenue and Commercial Relationship management process.

Over the last 12 months, Apttus pioneering vision and dedication have truly solidified its leadership position in the Quote-to-Cash(QTC) category. In addition to recent recognition by analysts as the global gold standard for Contract Lifecycle Management(CLM) and Quote-to-Cash(QTC) solutions, Apttus intelligent middle office platform has also earned notable acknowledgments, including Microsoft’s 2017 US Dynamics ISV Partner of the Year, landing on the Forbes Cloud 100 and Deloitte Technology Fast 500 lists – each for several consecutive years, and one of Business Insider’s 50 Companies to Bet Career Your On. Apttus innovations include Max – the world’s first and only Quote-to-Cash Artificial Intelligence – that enables enterprises to achieve superior business outcomes. The company partners with a world-class ecosystem, and with with over 1 million users globally, Apttus customers include hundreds of the world’s mid-sized organizations and the who’s who of the Global 1000.

In 2015, Forbes published an article entitled “Apttus: Unicorn Without The Utter Nonsense,” and for good reason. One of Apttus most unique achievements was its decision to initially bootstrap the company and not accept any outside capital. It wasn’t until late 2013, after 7 years of mainlining its own profitability, that the time was right to finally scale the business and Apttus raised a $37 Million Series A Round. Hundreds of new salespeople, support teams and engineers were hired to take over the market opportunity, and just 714 days after closing its first round, Apttus earned its “Unicorn” valuation. To date, the company has raised $329 Million in funding and with more than 1,200 employees across 9 employees across 9 global locations, 25+ certified consulting partners and 1000+ professional resources, Apttus is the largest, most experienced and fastest-growing provider of Quote-to-Cash solutions.

” Apttus: Unicorn Without The Utter Nonsense “

Fostering a world-class mentality internally and externally plays a huge part in Apttus booming success, and its strong impactful leadership begins at the highest level – with its CEO. Born in South Africa and having lived in the UK, Germany and France, Kirk Krappe is a huge believer in giving employees from all walks of life a fair opportunity in the workplace and he is 100% dedicated to creating a diverse work environment with employees of various backgrounds. To be a leader, breaking stereotypes is no exception, and the lack of women in tech is a long-standing stereotype that unfortunately has substance to it. When founding the company, Kirk and his co-founders set out to change this. As a result, due to the company’s ongoing support of female empowerment, several employees have created Philanthropic and Women’s leadership organizations that are sponsored by Apttus – a true testament to the company’s forward-thinking approach for equality in the Silicon Valley workplace.

Another significant impact that Apttus has had on the local community is the consistent investing in young working talent. In 2014, the company created the Apttus Academy – the largest, most cohesive training program in Silicon Valley. The eight-week enablement program for recent college graduates and junior employees looking for new career opportunities, delivers intensive product training and industry knowledge. The program spans all fields and provides strong foundations by pairing newcomers with established employees to create good habits. Often times, Academy participants even compete with each other to do the most good for local causes and all new hire trainings (not just the Academy) participate in local community outreach, food drives, and more. Consequently, hundreds of the best employees have come out of the Apttus Academy, and today the program serves as one of the company’s most shining accomplishments.

Simply put, Apttus Co-Founders have built the only company to offer a fully automated, efficient suite of tools that runs through the entire revenue operation. While there are standalone CPQ tools, CLM tools and revenue management tools, Apttus uniquely provides its customers an unbroken funnel that encompasses the complete Quote-to-Cash cycle. The explosive growth of the Quote-to-cash market underscores the business need for automating the back/front office and Apttus is unmatched in its ability to deliver successful business outcomes, especially to the world’s largest enterprises with the most complex sales operations.

Apttus

Management

Kirk Krappe
Co-Founder, Chairman, CEO

Description

Apttus provides Quote-to-Cash solutions, including Configure-Price-Quote(CPQ), Contract Management, E-Commerce, and Revenue Management.

Today, Leslie Wiernik, CEO, NASP, is termed an industry expert due to her technical knowledge about the industry, her willingness to take risks, and her strong communication and listening skills. All these qualities are armed with her ability to pivot quickly, building and leading teams with the willingness to nurture them towards productivity. But to reach the position she had to cross numerous roadblocks. “Mine had historically been a male-dominated industry. Not only were there limited corporate objectives to encourage promoting women to leadership roles, but women were cautioned about being too aggressive and striving for those roles.”

She overcame them by participating in every leadership skills course that she could find, taking the lead on projects, and exceeding corporate and personal goals for years. “Yet when I was promoted to a leadership position, I found myself being scrutinized– everything from my qualifications to whether I could still be a good mother to my children. I never wavered. It just made me more determined. ,” she says. “In one instance, as I was leading a large insurance claims investigation a public official asked, “who’s the guy in charge of this investigation?” I stepped forward and replied “me.” Witnessing some eye rolls and snickering, it became apparent to me at that point that my qualifications and leadership skills may have gotten me here, however, I needed to go an extra step that perhaps my male partners did not, which is to work even harder to earn the same respect.”

Leslie has been told that she leads like a man but with the heart of a woman. Some women may object to that statement, but she takes it as a compliment. The best of both worlds. Leslie has been a pioneer at implementing numerous mentoring programs for her (primarily female) staff and board members. She developed a tuition reimbursement program for staff members and helps define their strengths, interests, and goals. She strongly encourages young women to strive for leadership roles through various platforms and has developed Women in Subrogation programming for the industry.

Speaking about her role model, Leslie says that strong women in her family, educators, and colleagues have influenced her immensely over the years. She first-hand witnessed how difficult it was at times for them to have a voice and says that each has inspired her through their struggles and achievements. Armed with these exceptional qualities, Leslie has been leading the company to great heights.

NASP was born in 1998 to provide subrogation education and networking to the insurance industry. NASP helps the industry aggregate claims data to identify trends and then provide training to assist with recovery. That aggregated claims data is shared with the groups such as the Consumer Product Safety Commission, National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, etc., to effect product safety. NASP was strong and financially healthy pre-pandemic and has continued to grow and expand offerings over the last two years.

Other associations and companies within the network that did not have long-term strategic goals before the pandemic has become irrelevant. Technology has played a large part in NASP’s success.

The company pivoted yet again to develop hybrid educational programming and networking in the post-pandemic climate.

As a result of pivoting quickly when the pandemic began in early 2020, NASP has been able to continue offering valuable subrogation education and networking opportunities to the industry without a hiccup. For the days to come, NASP is ready to provide in-person educational events that will pivot to a hybrid model in 2022 to allow the nearly 35,000 folks from around the world to continue honing their subrogation skills and obtaining necessary accreditation for licensing in a way that best suits their needs and comfort level.

NASP is also moving towards a digital transformation of benchmarking studies to capture and compile data more efficiently. In 2022, NASP will roll out a digital Digest of NASP’s award-winning Subrogator magazine. The magazine has been available to members in digital format for several years, but in 2022, a digest version will afford readers more timely information in an easy-to-navigate format. IEWL.

“To help others get to the top of their tree so that they can enjoy their view.” This purpose has guided Selina Millstam’s career as a leader at some of the world’s most successful companies, including Nike, consulting firm Oliver Wyman, and, today, as Global Head of Talent Management at Ericsson.

Selina’s passion for enabling others to realize their potential plays well with her qualities, and this starts with her non-hierarchical approach. According to Selina, “teams are at their best when each person can speak up, challenge, and share their ideas, unconstrained by where they happen to be in the org chart. This is particularly important in today’s world of work where change is rapid, and innovation is key.”

“Selina is also keen to accelerate the pace of change in increasing the representation of women and other underrepresented groups who have faced specific, structural barriers to progression.”

Next is transparency. Selina believes that if you want people to get to the top of their tree, you need to empower them with information and insight. “Old leadership models emphasized guarding and often withholding information as a source of power. That doesn’t work today when we need people at all levels of our organizations to be making fact-based and courageous decisions,” says Selina. She practices continuously with her team, being candid, particularly during times of change. But what about when it’s simply not possible to share some information with the team, such as commercially sensitive or privileged data? Selina’s approach is “share what you can and be upfront about what you can’t. People in businesses understand these constraints. What creates problems is any feeling that information is hidden without explanation.”

Finally, inclusion. Selina drives inclusion and belonging in the way she runs her teams and as part of the cultural transformation she is leading across Ericsson’s 100,000-person workforce in 180+ countries. “If you want people to bring their best ideas, deliver great work and enjoy the process of doing so, then you need to make sure they are not distracted by feeling they need to ‘cover’ parts of their identity or ‘code switch’ from who they are to who they feel they need to be,” according to Selina. For her, this means embedding a culture of empathy and humanness where people understand, accept, and embrace their differences and appreciate how these differences make them more potent as a team.

Selina spent almost a decade in consulting, motivated by enhancing individual and company performance through developing leaders. One challenge, however, was that at this time, there were few women leaders in the organization whom she could look up to as role models. Selina reflects that this made it even more critical for the senior men to practice inclusivity and mentorship. She was grateful that some of the senior men in her team became her mentors, “they saw in me progression capacity that I didn’t yet see in myself, and that was incredibly powerful. I valued their expertise, and having their support made me more resilient and better able to learn and grow.”

Selina has been developing global leaders for more than 20 years. This is the thread that has woven together Selina’s roles as a social worker in Detroit, Michigan, supporting underserved communities; as a Board member of Giving Wings, a Sweden based foundation supporting girls and women in gaining independence through education and healthcare; and as an external and internal consultant in the talent space with Oliver Wyman, Nike, and Ericsson.

Throughout this wide-ranging career, Selina has experienced the many and varied challenges people face in realizing their potential and the importance of flexibility and understanding. For Selina, this has informed her work on culture transformation and diversity and inclusion at Ericsson. “We need a culture in which people can speak up when they need support or a different way of working, and this has been particularly important during the challenges around COVID-19,” she reflects.

Selina is also keen to accelerate the pace of change in increasing the representation of women and other underrepresented groups who have faced specific, structural barriers to progression. One of her achievements in this space is ALTitude, Ericsson’s new global career accelerator program designed to help advance talented women in the organization. Selina is keen to highlight that programs like this are not about giving advantage to one group over another; instead, “it’s about removing the systematic and structural barriers that unfairly hold some groups back.” IEWL

Suzanne R. Fuller, Vice President and Chief Solutions Officer, Companion Data Services, is responsible for strategic partnerships and solutions for all CDS markets. Her background spans 30 years of leading business development, strategy, marketing, population health management, product development, and P&L operations within health plans, third-party administrators, health information technology solution organizations, and consulting firms.

She has held executive and senior leadership positions in global for-profits and technology start-ups, bringing a keen ability to rapidly identify the right strategy and solution to meet market and customer business needs. Suzanne is a licensed mental health counselor with national certifications in counseling, disability management, and rehabilitation counseling. Her clinical and technology background has led to innovative solutions and organic growth in population health and clinical technology solutions from both the provider and the payer side, lending a unique perspective to health plans, hospital systems, clinical solution providers, and federal health agencies and their customers and partners.

Suzanne has always mentored potential female leaders throughout her career, both through informal and formal mentor/coaching relationships, as well as through networks, continuing education, and organizational leadership. While most of her support to emerging and current leaders has been within formalized corporate and for-profit organizations, she has had the opportunity to support women interested in developing their entrepreneurial capabilities, up to and including business plan development, marketing planning, and feasibility in the not-for-profit and start-up settings. “In most instances, mentoring is more like a collaboration, where support of a business leader/owner doesn’t necessarily lead to radical changes. Oftentimes, the most important thing that one can do to support an emerging business idea is to simply validate an existing thought process or approach,” says Suzanne.

As a leader, she pays attention to the finer details as well as the big picture, asking relevant and focused questions of her team members to encourage them to develop and present fully realized proposals. She also encourages the team to think strategically in developing long-term initiatives. Suzanne enjoys one-on-one and group settings for coaching, idea generation, and problem resolution.

Companion Data Services has been highly successful with existing and prospective customers across their verticals, including commercial health and federal health agencies, higher education, and state and local government. With a Federal health agency, the CDS team worked closely with a visionary leader to enact a new model for transitioning applications from a physical data center to a co-located cloud environment, seamlessly without disruptions to any service levels. With a large Commercial customer, CDS supported development of a proprietary platform to support their transactional processing of claims unique to their needs. “These innovations have largely been achieved through our “meet you where you are” strategy and approach. Unlike many IT product-centric companies, CDS understands IT deeply. We are healthcare experts with deep roots in an 80-year-old, highly regarded, successful health services company,” says Suzanne. “Our approach is consultative. We seek first to understand the complexity of our customer’s business needs and then we design an effective solution tailored to their desired service models and outcomes.”

As a continuous learner, Suzanne is always curious about the evolution the core business (healthcare solutions) is experiencing. To that end, she must stay current on operational and clinical models and legislative and market impacts. “Some of this learning comes organically as part of ongoing continuing education units (CEUs) for my various clinical professional licenses and certifications,” Suzanne adds. “I’m constantly reviewing articles and blogs on best practices, innovation, and trends. This year I’m focusing on bringing a new and transformation approach to managing insurance market risk with a trusted partner.”

With a seasoned and growing team, Suzanne focuses on strategy, particularly strategic growth opportunities in existing and emerging markets. Some of this involves making surgically precise “tweaks” to an existing strategy. In other aspects, her team investigates growth in new and emerging markets where their proven capabilities and past performance support the prospective customer’s needs. “We are looking towards enhancing our solutions and providing the best services to our clients for years to come,” says Suzanne. WL