April 2012: Named by CRN Buzz among top 50 Influencers in the Virtualization Industry. http://bit.ly/Ih4nxg

Steve Kaplan is VP of Virtualization and Cloud at Presidio, a leading nation-wide professional services firm that received the 2010 VMware Global Desktop Partner of the Year Award. Steve formerly co-founded and ran AccessFlow. AccessFlow was named VMware Rising Star of the Americas during its 2nd year in business and won the VMware Rainmaker Award the following year - just prior to its acquisition by INX. Kaplan previously co-founded and ran RYNO Technology which was named the Citrix Partner of the Year for the United States before its acquisition by MTM Technologies in 2001.

Kaplan has co-authored 3 books on VMware (USENIX) and two books (8 editions) on Citrix/Terminal Server—all "Official Guides" published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill. He has also written scores of published IT articles and white papers on subjects such as security, disaster recovery and the effect of regulatory compliance on IT. He is author of the "VirtualMan" comic book series. Kaplan is a frequent speaker across the globe including delivering the keynote addresses at the Comstor LEAP launch in 2010, the Academic Summit 2009 in Hawaii and at ThinPower 2006 in Norway. He has presented at both Citrix Synergy in Australia and at Citrix Summit as well as at 7 VMworlds and at the last 3 VMware Partner Exchanges.

Kaplan was the first person to approach a utility (PG&E) about creating a program to provide virtualization energy rebates. He helped pioneer and develop Citrix' ACE Cost Analyzer and assisted Gartner in developing an ROI tool for Citrix. Kaplan has held positions on the advisory boards of several industry manufactures including Microsoft, was a Microsoft MVP for Terminal Server for four years and was named a charter VMware vExpert. He holds a BS in business administration from U.C. Berkeley and an MBA from Northwestern's J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

Specialties

Kaplan organically built and sold two different consulting firms to publicly traded companies after winning top awards in their respective IT industry segments. His development of INX's virtualization practice was instrumental in its Cisco award as Global Technology Excellence Partner of the Year. Kaplan uses ROI analysis to facilitate rational IT decision-making, and to help clarify architectural design.