John DesJardins is Field CTO at Akka, responsible for advising customers on solution architecture and best practices. He was formerly CTO at Hazelcast, setting technology strategy for the real-time data platform. His expertise in large scale computing spans Big Data, IoT, ML and cloud. John brings 25+ years of experience in architecting and implementing global scale always-on computing solutions with Global 2000 while at Hazelcast, Cloudera, Software AG and webMethods. He is an active writer and speaker, and holds a BS in Economics from George Mason University, where he first built predictive models, long before that was considered cool.