Brian Wilson is the Chief Executive Officer of Kion, a cloud governance and management software company based in Columbia, Maryland. He was appointed CEO in October 2025 after more than two decades leading SaaS, observability, and customer experience companies, including roles as CEO of Monetate, COO of Kibo Commerce, and Chief Customer Officer at Zenoss. At Kion he is driving a 'FinOps+' strategy that combines cloud cost management, governance, and policy automation for multicloud and AI-driven workloads. He is based in Austin, Texas, and is a member of the Forbes Technology Council.
Kion is a Columbia, Maryland software company that builds a self-hosted FinOps+ platform for managing cloud operations across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud. Founded in 2018 as cloudtamer.io and rebranded as Kion in 2021, the company combines cloud financial management, policy-based governance, and continuous compliance into a single platform that runs inside a customer's own cloud environment. Its software is used by commercial, higher-education, and government organizations - including NASA, the CDC, Verizon, and Indeed - to control cloud spend, enforce guardrails, and automate account provisioning through retirement.
MontyCloud is a Redmond, Washington-based software company behind DAY2, a no-code autonomous CloudOps platform that helps IT teams, enterprises, and AWS managed service providers govern, secure, and cut the cost of running cloud infrastructure without writing code or hiring large cloud engineering teams. Founded in 2018 by Venkat Krishnamachari and Kannan Parthasarathy and led by CEO Walter Rogers, the company pairs deep AWS integration with generative and agentic AI to automate routine cloud operations, enforce best practices, and give teams a single dashboard for visibility across multiple accounts and tenants.
Walter Rogers is the CEO of MontyCloud, a Redmond-based cloud operations platform that uses agentic AI to let IT teams manage AWS without writing scripts. Born in Rome, raised in Houston, and now based in Austin, he studied Italian and Economics at UT Austin before building and selling three software companies, two of them to VMware. He remains Chairman of Baker Communications, the sales-training firm he has run since 2003, and joined MontyCloud as CEO in April 2022.
Raw Engineering is a San Francisco software products-and-services firm founded in 2007 that builds custom mobile apps, websites, SaaS products and cloud infrastructure for Fortune 500 enterprises, sports teams and startups. Best known as the lab that incubated and spun out the headless CMS pioneer Contentstack and the enterprise mobile platform Built.io (acquired by Software AG in 2018), the company today runs five centers of excellence and powers personalized Digital Fan Experience platforms for clients including the Sacramento Kings, Miami Heat and the NBA.
Zelar (ZelarSoft) is a cloud-native engineering and consulting firm that helps banks, telcos, oil & gas, and government teams adopt Kubernetes, DevOps, and AI without the usual pain. Founded in 2018 and led by CEO Vasu Maganti, the company pairs hands-on services - cloud migration, SRE, security, and data engineering - with its own platforms: Klusternetes for self-service Kubernetes multi-tenancy, OpenOps for production-ready GKE stacks, and Cokpit for agentic AI DevOps. A Google Cloud Premier Partner with offices across the US, Canada, India, and the UAE, Zelar bets that most teams want cloud-native outcomes, not cloud-native homework.
Vasu Maganti is the founder and CEO of Zelar (formerly Zelarsoft), a Google Cloud Premier Partner and cloud-native consulting firm headquartered in San Francisco. Since founding the company in 2018, he has built it into an ~180-person, $26.6M-revenue enterprise serving Fortune 500 companies, major banks, telcos, and federal governments across North America and APAC. Zelar was named Google Cloud Activation Partner of the Year - JAPAC 2025 and Google Cloud Partner All-Star in Artificial Intelligence 2024 under his leadership. Maganti co-organizes Silicon Valley's cloud-native meetup community and is a vocal advocate for Kubernetes multi-tenancy, GitOps, zero-trust security, and FinOps practices.