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Last updated on March 1st, 2023 at 2:13pm
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FULTON, Md.—(BUSINESS WIRE)— Kion, the leading cloud enablement solution provider, today announced that Randy Shore, VP of Delivery and Support at Kion, will speak at EDUCAUSE 2022. The EDUCAUSE Annual Conference is the premier higher ed IT event and will be held on October 25-28, 2022 in Denver. Shore will be joined by Tim Champ, Assistant Director of Research and Enterprise Computing, from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and Andrew Marcontell, Executive Director of Solutions Engineering, from Texas A&M University.
The session, “Your cloud: a well-managed ranch or the wild, wild west?”, taking place on Thursday, October 27 from 4 -4:45 p.m. MDT in meeting room 601/603, will provide different perspectives on how the cloud plays a role in higher education. The session will explore the following topics:
- Effectively migrating research and instructional workloads to public cloud infrastructure
- Architecting, managing, and scaling secure, cost-efficient access to cloud infrastructure
- Successful delivery of cloud services to students, faculty, and researchers as demonstrated by UMBC and Texas A&M
“Information technology teams in the higher education space are often faced with unique challenges when it comes to adopting new technologies. Resource constraints, competing priorities, and budgetary confinements can hinder technology adoption. However, by not embracing these technologies, there is a missed opportunity for these institutions to better meet the needs of those across the campus,” said Shore. “UMBC and Texas A&M are two universities that are successfully migrating to the cloud and delivering cloud services to their institutions. I look forward to speaking alongside Tim and Andrew to share examples that hopefully help other higher education institutions navigate their cloud adoption journey.”
Shore, who previously served as Director of IT at The George Washington University, is a seasoned IT leader with extensive experience in multi-cloud solution architecture and design, enabling him to support higher education organizations with their cloud usage. At Kion, Shore is responsible for ensuring customers achieve success with the Kion platform to realize the full benefits of cloud governance and management. For higher education, Kion helps streamline processes across the three technology-based focus areas—research, academics, and administration—while providing speed, cost-savings, and access to leading services and technologies.
"At UMBC, we have been working to transition services to the cloud for over 5 years. We've had many stops and starts, often learning through trial and error and with help from colleagues throughout higher ed. Our efforts have now enabled us to migrate, relatively smoothly, some of our largest and most complex systems to a cloud native architecture. I'm very excited to talk through our journey in the hope that it may help others, the way we often benefited from some of the schools that started this journey before us,” said Champ.
“When I first joined Texas A&M our cloud footprint was incredibly small, yet we’ve been able to scale adoption to achieve 30 times growth. I am honored to collaborate with Randy and Tim to not only share our wins but the setbacks we faced along the way and how we were able to overcome them,” said Marcontell.
Tim Champ, Assistant Director of Research and Enterprise Computing, has worked in higher education IT for over 20 years. In his current role, Tim oversees the campus high performance computing, research storage enterprise infrastructure for UMBC, both on premise and within the university’s cloud infrastructure. Tim is an active member of the Maryland High Performance Computing community and is involved with the Internet 2 and EDUCAUSE Cloud communities.
Andrew Marcontell, Executive Director of Solutions Engineering at Texas A&M University (TAMU), brings over 25 years of experience from the military, higher education, and corporate consulting. Andrew accelerated TAMU’s cloud footprint with its Aggie Innovation Platform Cloud-adoption framework, coupled with a dramatic increase of CI/CD pipeline automation using Infrastructure-as-Code to address large scale organizational change.
Kion also recently announced its addition to the Internet2 community through the successful completion of the NET+ program service evaluation. Kion was vetted by over 10 higher education institutions that found the company to be well positioned to satisfy the cloud services needs of the research and education community.
