Michael Gardner is a managing director and Head of Center at the BNY Mellon Innovation Center, Silicon Valley. Mike is responsible for ensuring access to the best and latest Silicon Valley expertise and technology, to supplement the company’s other innovation centers and technologists around the world. Mike leads a team of actively engaged software architects and data scientists delivering software into the BNY Mellon private cloud, and manages relationships with universities, startups, and the investment community to ensure access to best of breed emerging technology. A Silicon Valley veteran, Mike has nearly 30 years of experience in software engineering entrepreneurship and executive leadership. Before opening the BNY Mellon Innovation Center, as the VP of Technology at Apigee Mike designed, built and operated the Apigee cloud, a very secure API management PaaS running on up to 3000 instance nodes running in Amazon AWS.