Fresh on the heels of our trip to the West Coast and DEMO, I once again joined with our Entrepreneur in Residence Ingrid Vandervelt to meet with some of the top entrepreneurs in America. This time we were on the East Coast for the Inc 500|5000 Conference and Awards Ceremony.
This was Dell’s 5th year to proudly sponsor the annual three-day event that brings the nation’s most successful business minds together to celebrate the achievements of the companies that appear on Inc. magazine’s prestigious ranking of America’s fastest-growing privately held companies.
Prior to the official kickoff of the conference, we invited a select group of attendees to a special AdvanceTech session that blended the topics of international security, as told through the tales of former Central Intelligence Agency Chiefs of Disguise Tony and Jonna Mendez, with the real data security issues small and medium businesses (SMBs) face every day.
With the recent increase in security attacks and related court cases, the importance of data security for SMBs is still being overlooked due to their size and the bottom line is that the implications of a security breach can be a matter of life or death for a growing business. This was the topic of discussion in a fireside chat with Dell’s vice president and general manager of Small & Medium Business, Americas, Eric Dithmer; Barry Hensley, Director for the Counter Threat Unit at Dell SecureWorks; and Billy Cox, Cloud Strategy Software & Services Group Intel.
Solutions for those security issues are just one of the many things people often don’t realize Dell does. Our enterprise technologists hear it every day, so while at the Inc 500 conference, Ingrid took a few minutes to ask one about it and we captured it in this video:
Laura Pevehouse was profiled as one of five “social media mavens” in the March 2009 issue of Austin Woman Magazine and named an AdWeek’s TweetFreak Five to Follow. She has been part of the Dell organization for more than 15 years in various corporate communications, employee communications, public relations, community affairs, marketing, branding, social media and online communication roles.
From 2014-2018, Laura was Chief Blogger/Editor-in-Chief for Direct2DellEMC and Direct2Dell, Dell’s official corporate blog that she help launch in 2007. She is now a member of the Dell Technologies Chairman Communications team. Earlier in her Dell career she focused on Global Commercial Channels and US Small and Medium Business public relations as part of the Global Communications team. Prior to that, she was responsible for global strategy in social media and community management, as well as marcom landing pages, as a member of Dell’s Global SMB Marketing, Brand and Creative team. When she was part of Dell’s Global Online group, Laura provided internal consulting that integrated online and social media opportunities with a focus on Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. She managed the home page of Dell.com, one of the top 500 global web sites in Alexa traffic rank, and first brought web feeds and podcasts to the ecommerce site. In her spare time she led Dell into the metaverse with the creation of Dell Island in the virtual world Second Life.
Laura has earned the designation of Accredited Business Communicator from the International Association of Business Communicators, and received her Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Louisiana State University. Before joining Dell Financial Services in 2000, she worked at the Texas Workforce Commission and PepsiCo Food Systems Worldwide.