Team & Partners

Former Amazon Executive Responsible for the launching and scaling the merchant integration team and played a key role in launching and scaling the Amazon marketplace business, which is now over 50% of all units sold at Amazon.com. Also responsible for the enterprise services business with responsibilities for Toys R Us, Target.com, NBA.com and other great brands.

Media Analyst Sought after expert commentary regarding Amazon as interviewed by New York Times, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg, BBC, Geekwire and many others.

Author Author of Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader. Author of The Amazon Way on IoT: 10 Principles for Every Leader from the World’s Leading Internet of Things Strategies. This is a must-read for business people wanting to understand how connected devices could impact their business and industry and who need to build a strategy and culture for IoT. Author of The Amazon Way: Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles. In The Amazon Way, John introduces readers to the unique corporate culture of the world’s largest Internet retailer, with a focus on the fourteen leadership principles that have guided and shaped its decisions and its distinctive leadership culture — as only an insider could do.

Assignments - Interim chief technology officer for the Gates Foundation - Innovation advisor to T-mobile - Interim CIO for a national retailer

Speaker Keynote speaker on innovation, leadership and digital transformation. John leads workshops on a wide variety of innovation, internet of things, digital strategy, and creating a culture of agility, trial and error, scaling and accountability. His goal is to give audiences tools they can immediately use to operate differently.

Advisor Rossman Partners helps it’s clients compete and win in the digital era. I work with my clients to both define strategy and create change for the organization. Bringing a broad range of expertise and trusted partners to the table, I first listen and understand, and then help create a customized approach for your situation.

- Recognized as one of the "Top 9 Most Exciting Entrepreneurs" in 2021 by USA Today - Recognized as one of the "Top 50 Technology Leaders in the World" by Intercon, the Internet Tech conference - Member Newsweek Expert Forum, a community for pioneering thinkers and industry leaders

Created nine cutting-edge cloud products and seven eCommerce website solutions generating over $2 billion in revenue for Microsoft, Amazon, Rackspace, and VerizonConnect (formerly Telogis). Plus, 4 technology company acquisitions ranging from $10 million to $1.2 billion. I bring over 30 years of experience creating innovative, high-growth products that sustainably and reliably accelerate time to market and extend product portfolios to meet rapid growth.

Advising B2B technology leaders • Translate technology goals into strategic plans, architecture, and execution plans that work to enable high growth • Benefit from massive market changes in Digital Transformation, including transforming software to SAAS delivery models, adopt Cloud Computing technologies effectively, machine learning, and Internet of Things • Beat aggressive scale and delivery growth goals • Reduce the time to translate their technology vision into actionable architecture and plans by 25%

Vice President Service Architecture, Telogis, A Verizon Company Vice President Software Engineering, Rackspace General Manager, SimpleDB, Amazon AWS

The CTO of Ramani engaged Matt as a trusted technical advisor based on its experience in rapidly creating large-scale SAAS and Cloud Computing products to aid him in formulating his technology and organizational strategy and tactics. To reach a sound approach, Matt worked with the CTO over two months to perform a current state and desired end state assessment, including technical and engineering approach analysis involving: Reviews of existing architecture and desired technical investment decisions for the future. Assessment of engineering objectives, structure, and team size. Evaluation of production metric development. Review and assessment of how to choose technology for use in Ramani’s software. This concluded that Ramani needed to make changes in technology planning, organizational design and structure, and operational efficiencies to achieve its 12-18 month goals. advisory role working directly with the CTO to help him implement changes. Within weeks, advised the CTO on a range of technology choices like HTTPS/REST over GRPC for inter-service communication to begin decomposing its platform into additional microservices to enable scale and build other monitoring capabilities to understand production performance.

Manny Bernabe helps companies compete in a data-driven world. He is an expert in AI, machine learning, analytics, and data management technologies. Manny assists clients with AI strategy formation, use case identification, AI pilot management, and employee training.

Most recently, Manny was the Head of AI Product and Lead Data Scientist at Uptake, an AI industrial IoT startup that was listed as #3 on Forbes Most Promising AI Companies in America in 2019.

Prior to Uptake, Manny held the role of Investment Strategist for FlexShares. line of Northern Trust Asset Management. At FlexShares, Manny designed and launched quantitative financial products totaling +$13 billion in assets under management.

Manny earned his B.S. in Finance (Honors) from DePaul University, a Data Science. Specialization from Johns Hopkins University, and has passed all three levels of the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam series.

Former Amazon Executive Vice President of Merchant Services and Sales with Amazon where he was in charge of the commercialization of Amazon’s overall enterprise services business and responsible for driving enterprise direct sales, channels, alliances, and partnerships.

Background Mr. Arens was a Managing Director at managing consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal. Prior to that he was Vice President of Merchant Services and Sales with Amazon where he was in charge of the commercialization of Amazon’s overall enterprise services business and responsible for driving enterprise direct sales, channels, alliances, and partnerships. Mr. Arens was a senior executive at Syncra Systems, a supply chain management company providing B2B internet-based collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment solutions. Mr. Arens started his career at IBM and served in various senior level sales management roles during IBM’s historic transformation from a hardware company to a services company. When he left he was responsible for IBM’s overall global B2B market place initiatives.

Consultant to CEOs Mr. Arens’ specialty is creating pragmatic digital strategies based on Amazon’s principles of leadership and customer innovation. Wes collaborates closely with CEO’s to refine their own vision for digital, define their unique market point of view for superior customer value, and build a roadmap to improve business outcomes. He knows the hard questions necessary to challenge and transform the business and can objectively assess internal capabilities and gaps and illuminate blind spots including talent acquisition. In the end Mr. Arens helps organizations build a plan to accelerate the speed and quality of day to day decision making. His approach has helped dozens of companies unlock their own brand of innovation and prioritize the bets necessary to transform and improve results.

Speaker Frequent keynote speaker and leads workshops on a wide variety of innovation, internet of things, digital strategy and creating a culture of agility, trail and error, scaling and accountability. My goal is to give people tools they can immediately use to operate differently (like we would at Amazon). Please contact me to discuss your event ([email protected])