2016 StateScoop 50 Industry Leadership Award Winners
Maggie Hallbach
Vice President, Government and Education
Verizon Enterprise
Maggie Hallbach’sleadership and ability to create transformative solutions for state, localand education customershave enabled government organizations to bring their technology plans into realization. Hallbachand her customer-first-focused sales and operations team has helped states from New York to California modernize their IT and networks, proving that innovative and collaborative solutions can drive positive change, allowing government organizations to operate more efficiently and improve constituent experience.
Tim Merrigan
VP, State, Local and Education
VMware
TimMerrigan brings more than 22 years of experience to bear in refining VMwares customer-mission-oriented approach, and his leadership has been instrumental in improving digital education in the K-12 landscape by advocating for a mobile and secure 1-1 digital classroom experience for students. Through his efforts, VMware now has E-rate-eligible solutions for K-12 customers and is responsible for the go-to-market strategy, solutions and partnerships built around solving the unique problems that impede state and local education customers from delivering on their vital missions. Merrigan also engages Students with STEAM Explorations within his community in his personal time.
Bethann Pepoli
Director, State & Local Government and Education
Splunk
Bethann Pepoli has worked to effect change asa former state governmentdeputy CIO, industry CTO and now as abusiness leader at Splunk.Most recently, she has worked with state leaders to deploy next-generation cyber solutions to protect our most important asset:data. She’s alsocollaborated with leading integrators to secure and eliminate fraud with some of our largest health and human service programs and state agencies.
John Punzak
National Sales Director
Red Hat
John Punzak has worked at Red Hat for more than 10 years, helping state and local governments, as well as educators, understand, adoptand reduce costs with open source software. Punzak champions the idea that open source can accelerate innovation and increase efficiency in the public sector. He takes great interest in helping organizations effect change directly by challenging buying and evaluation processes, as well as the way code is developed and ideas are shared. He holds leadership positions in influential organizations, includingNASCIO, Code for America, CompTIA and Public Technology Institute, andfrequently speaks at conferences across the nation.
Bob Schaar
Segment Solutions Leader, SLED
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Bob Schaar is HPE’s segment solutions leader for state/local government and education. Schaar develops the HPE solutions that help governments, collegesand K-12 schools build a strong foundation for hybrid cloud, software-defined data center, mobility, cloud migrationand big data to accelerate their technology transformation. Over the past six months, Schaar has launchedsolutions in software-defined file and content storage, video surveillance and workload migration. These solutions help state and local governments provide critical citizen services, bring cost efficiency to technology platforms, and enable the flexible movement of workloads across hybrid technology platforms.
Bret Brasso
VP, State, Local and Education
FireEye
Bret Brasso is responsible for protecting the state, local government and education sectors from malicious attacks and leading a team of passionate security professionals who build trusted adviser relationships with clients. In his role, Brasso regularly speaks to state government officials aboutthe importance of cybersecurityand encourages them to protect themselves against the growing breadth of cyberthreats. In addition to regularly traveling across the country to meet with officials, Brasso also blogs regularly for FireEye, offering his advice to state information technology leaders.
Crystal Cooper
VP, Public Sector
Unisys
In her role at Unisys, Crystal Cooper focuses on bringing the companys technology solutions to health and human services and justice and public safety departments within state government. Cooper is responsible for developing new business opportunities and delivering improved client satisfaction in the market. In the justice space, Cooper regularly advocates for the companys Secure Image Management System, which helps public safety departments organize and use the vast amounts of data they collect.
