Mackenzie is the Global Startup Evangelist at AWS. His days are spent traveling the globe to meet startups, share their stories, and connect engineering teams together. Every day there are a large number of startups launching on AWS across every imaginable industry. It’s Mackenzie’s mission to find stories of startups that are helping to improve the world and share these stories with a wide audience.
Prior to joining AWS, Mackenzie was the Head of Technical Operations at Betterment, the world’s largest independent robo-advisor based in NYC which manages over $8B in assets. Mackenzie was a founding engineer and Head of Technical Operations at Oscar Health, an insurance startup also based in NYC, helping to grow the company to over 400+ employees.
Many U.S. state and local government institutions rely on mainframes (non-x86) – high performance computers with large amounts of memory and processors that compute billions of simple calculations and transactions in real time. For many entities, the mainframe is cited as a central point of gravity that stalls or lengthens a large cloud migration. The technology landscape of today requires more flexibility and agility at a lower cost than mainframes can provide.
Learn how institutions across all market segments are modernizing their mainframes with AWS to reduce costs, increase agility, retire technical debt, and accelerate innovation.
Michael “Dee” Hester is the AWS Worldwide Public Sector subject matter expert for Mainframe Modernization.
Dee has spent more than 30 years migrating and modernizing enterprise applications and working to build world-class application development teams and partner ecosystems with Electronic Data Systems (EDS), Micro Focus, Microsoft and AWS. Dee’s focus has been on technology, processes and teams related to migrating and modernizing IBM mainframe applications with/to Windows/Linux/cloud. Dee has domain experience in healthcare data systems and manufacturing execution systems. Dee is dedicated to systems engineering frameworks and lean, agile methodologies. Dee believes that success can always be found when energy, innovation, and customer obsession are combined. Connect with Dee on LinkedIn.
Kevin Grace is the leader of the Public Sector Mainframe Modernization Practice inside AWS Professional Services. He is a former state agency chief information officer and chief data officer with over 15 years of public sector experience across many domains including, but not limited to, health care/human services, workforce, licensure, finance, tax, transportation, legislative, IT, and others. He is a multi-platform systems and applications architect/engineer and cloud builder with extensive experience in systems development and implementation across public sector, healthcare, telecommunications, retail, logistics, and technology organizations.
