Have you been wondering how to benefit the most from IT Arena 2020? We suggest you get acquainted with the event’s lineup beforehand so you can prioritize your time efficiently throughout the conference days. To make your life easier, we’ve prepared key highlights about some of this year’s speakers. Join us for 3 days of content covering business, tech, startup, and product tracks and learn the latest trends and best practices from leadership and innovation perspectives.

Business

IT Arena Business track speakers will share their most important lessons learned on growing successful companies. Among the 2020 lineup is Godard Abel, co-founder and CEO of G2, a peer-to-peer review site previously known as G2 Labs, Inc and G2 Crowd. The platform collects user reviews for business software, with over 5 million businesses making use of over 1 million trusted customer reviews to make purchasing decisions each month. In April, G2 revenue hit $50m with $450m valuation. The company’s success owes to its founders expertise and vast managerial experience. Abel’s previous tech venture was BigMachines, where he spent 13 years growing it into a successful enterprise and eventually selling it to Oracle for $400 million. He also invested millions of his own capital into Steelbrick, which was later acquired by Salesforce. 2020 has been marked not only with COVID-19 crisis – we have been facing ubiquitous SaaS customer scepticism and crisis of trust, argues the expert. At IT Arena, Godard Abel will outline his vision on how to win back customer trust.

Mikita Mikado, Co-Founder & CEO of PandaDoc, a US-headquartered startup with Belarusian roots will deliver a talk at this year’s event. Mikita will share tips on opening the US market for sales, talent, and funding. In light of the current political situation in Belarus, and the recent arrest of PandaDoc employees, we are very curious to hear a perspective from the person coming from the last totalitarian country in Europe. 

Last but not least, Mada Seghete, Co-founder at Branch will join IT Arena’s Business track. Branch is the mobile growth platform of choice for over 50,000 apps and 2 billion monthly users around the world, and one of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing unicorns. Mada co-founded Branch in 2014, masterminding the community-driven marketing strategy behind the company’s early, explosive success. Today, she leads marketing for Branch – her talk at IT Arena 2020 will revolve around the mobile marketing landscape and its key trends.

Tech

IT Arena 2020 Tech track will be represented by experts from the world’s most recognizable brands, among which Formula1, BMW Group, Tesla, NVIDIA, and more. In particular, in his talk, Tesla’s senior data scientist Parsa Hosseini will cover multiple deep learning architectures and elaborate on their underlying mathematical concepts and three main categories of neural networks: Convolutional Neural Networks, Pretrained Unsupervised Networks, and Recurrent/Recursive Neural Networks. Applications of each of these architectures in selected areas such as autonomous driving, information technology, and medical diagnosis will also be discussed. 

Matthias Schindler, who leads Artificial Intelligence in BMW’s production system in 15 countries all over the world, will deliver a presentation on AI as self-service in manufacturing. At BWM, AI plays an important role in improving quality of inspection across the production process, with automated inspections implemented to check the configuration of cars replacing tedious manual inspection tasks that led to an increased error rate, allowing employees to spend more time on creative work, logistics processes, and conveyor belt operations. AI-based image recognition in assembly does not require employees to write code. Instead, a neural network evaluates the images taken by employees and determines if the product meets the criteria. Learn more about AI at BWM during the expert’s presentation in October.

Tech track will also feature breakthrough startups, including Ukrainian startup RefaceAI, which has recently left behind TikTok, Netflix, and Hulu on the App Store in the US, reaching 33M downloads, and Europe’s biggest fintech unicorn Swedish Klarna that reportedly raised $650 million in an equity funding round, valuing the company at $10.6 billion. 

Startup

At the IT Arena Startup track, emerging tech entrepreneurs share their wins, losses, and tips on how to propel a business to the next level. In October, you will hear Alexandr Galkin, CEO and Co-Founder of Competera, dwell on the lessons learned from Competera’s journey and share fundamental tips about Customer Development. Competera is a SaaS product that provides online business with recommendations on pricing and helps manufacturers analyze their position across different markets. Founded in 2014, the company has long relied on its own resources and without venture investments managed to grow exponentially attracting international clients. According to Crunchbase, only last year, Competera raised a total of $1.5M in funding over 2 rounds from SMRK VC Fund.

The Startup Competition 2018 winner success story, Ukrainian e-commerce platform for medicine delivery Liki24, will be presented by its CEO Anton Avrinsky. Having gained traction locally, the startup has embarked on European expansion with a recent $5 million investment from Horizon Capital, and the total funding raised by the company to date accounts for $6 million. 

Product

Those who seek expertise on how to launch winning products won’t be disappointed with the IT Arena speakers lineup, among which Ken Sandy, who has over 20 years of experience in leading product management teams, including online education platforms MasterClass and Lynda.com, acquired by LinkedIn for $1.5 billion. Ken teaches product management at UC Berkeley and is a Silicon valley thought leader. As a Product Consultant and Executive Coach Sandy has helped to shape and grow numerous successful enterprises. At IT Arena, Ken will introduce ten techniques from his recently released “The Influential Product Manager – How to Lead and Launch Successful Technology Products” that can be applied to align product teams with market needs and organizational goals. 

In his talk, the author of the Software Product Management – Finding the Right Balance for Your Product Inc Timo Wagenblatt will elaborate on holistic software product management’s vitality. Timo Wagenblatt, SAP’s Head of Quote-to-Cash and Service Products, developed PYPR (ˈpaɪpɚ, which stands for The Product Yield Potential Radar) – a holistic software product management approach that determines and assesses product’s weak and strong areas, guiding product leaders oh how to reach peak performance for products and teams, as well as on how to find the right balance for customer success and product longevity.

See IT Arena 2020 speaker lineup here. The lineup is still being updated, so stay tuned for more exciting tech folks!