John Abel

CIO
Extreme Networks

John Abel has 25 years of experience in the IT industry working in global Fortune 500 companies managing teams of over 300 people and budgets of over $200M. Currently, John is SVP and Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Veritas. In this role, he is responsible for leading and transforming the Information Technology function for Veritas, including its infrastructure, systems, processes, and security.

Throughout his career, Abel has led a number of transformations of the IT business function, with an excellent record of achieving business results by developing strong business relationships, building high quality teams, and providing best-in-class services. Prior to Veritas, Abel served as SVP and CIO for Ellie Mae. In this role, Abel carried out a transformation of the IT function, with a focus on strong business partnership and a strategy around Automate, Scale, and Secure the enterprise, backed by cloud first strategy to keep pace with the hyper growth of the business. Before joining Ellie Mae, Abel was Sr. Vice President of IT at Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) where he developed a strategic vision for the transformation of IT and executed multiple global initiatives to enable growth in revenues while improving IT through effective governance processes.

Abel also served as Vice President, Information Technology at Symantec Corporation where he led the integration and consolidation of applications following the merger with Veritas Software in 2005. Prior to Symantec Abel also worked at JDS Uniphase and started his career at KPMG Consulting.

John is a citizen of both the US and European Union, and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Information Systems from Staffordshire University in the United Kingdom, and has spoken at several conferences on global IT best practices.