Featured Speakers:
Bill Pessin, Vice President, Salesforce
Bill Pessin has served the U.S. Public Sector, Aerospace, and high-technology market for the past 25 years. He leads a team of sales and engineering support professionals representing Salesforce’s complete portfolio to the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and the Defense Industrial Base. Before Salesforce, Bill was with Oracle, focused on complex enterprise application initiatives and infrastructure solutions in the DoD, and SAP, focused on large system integration programs across the Federal Government. Bill is also a U.S Army Veteran serving in the Army and Army Reserve as a Transportation Officer.
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Dave Wennergren, Senior Vice President, Technology, PSC
David M. Wennergren is Senior Vice President, Technology at the Professional Services Council, the principal national trade association of the government technology and professional services industry. He has extensive leadership experience in information technology and change management and has served in a number of senior positions, most recently in the private sector as a Vice President at CACI International Inc., and prior to that, across the Department of Defense (DoD) and federal government, including DoD Assistant Deputy Chief Management Officer, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Information Management, Integration and Technology/Deputy Chief Information Officer, Department of the Navy Chief Information Officer and Vice Chair of the U.S. Government’s Federal CIO Council.
Patience Samson, Director, Corporate Business Development at Leidos
Patience was hired as a junior national security analyst in March of her senior year at Pepperdine University and started with SAIC in June 2004. Patience worked on a contract supporting the Defense Threat Reduction Agency for seven years, moving up from junior analyst to senior project and program manager. During this time, she gained subject matter expertise in programmatic and technical support to Department of Defense and other Federal, State and local agencies in the areas of policy, strategic and operational planning, and training and exercises across the WMD spectrum (nonproliferation, counterproliferation, and consequence management). The highlight of these years was participating in several Cabinet-level exercises at the White House during the Bush Administration.
In May 2011, Patience graduated with her Executive Master of Business Administration from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, through the SAIC-sponsored nomination program. Upon graduation, she was offered a position in business development for the Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Group and was responsible for all business development (BD)-related systems at the Group level in support of business operations. During the Leidos-SAIC split in 2013, Patience added BD metrics, analysis, forecasting, and reporting to her capabilities and was promoted to Director, Strategy/BD Plans and Analysis at Leidos. Patience then became head of all BD operations for one of Leidos’ two Sectors (the National Security Sector) and in November of last year was asked to move to the Corporate staff as Director, Corporate Business Development. In this role, Patience has managed the planning, design, implementation, training, and company-wide adoption of Salesforce at Leidos. She currently still manages the Salesforce program and its continual growth at Leidos. She is also a BD member of the management team charged with the planning and execution of the transaction combining Lockheed Martin’s Information Systems and Global Services business with Leidos to create the largest IT provider in the federal market space, forming a $10B company.
Patience works to live for two amazing, energetic children, Alena (6) and August (3), her wonderful husband of 10 years, Jon, and two adorable Staffordshire Bull Terriers, Duke and Delilah. The Samson family enjoys traveling and road trips, especially to the great state of Montana to see their families, visiting wineries and breweries, working out and participating in races or mud runs, volunteering, and enjoying as many sports and stage entertainment activities as possible.
