Biography

Daniel Aracena has over 25 years of professional IT experience in the private and public sectors. Daniel started his IT career coming out of a customer service background, extending that philosophy into a successful career. He is currently the Chief Information Officer at Teachers College, Columbia University. Daniel has spent the last 10+ years working at the college to improve the overall service desk, data center and networking services, helping to introduce a strong ITIL service oriented process. He has worked to implement a green-field networking environment, migrating from a Cisco platform to a complete Aruba/HP/Palo Alto environment. He has moved the Campus to a highly secure and redundant environment, introducing Aruba ClearPass and Software Defined Networking technologies at the college. Prior to Teachers College, Daniel spent 13 years managing IT at the Buying Offices at Ross Stores, Inc., a clothing and apparel retailer. He worked on supporting the expanding organization, providing a secure, redundant and robust IT services environments for both the Los Angeles and New York buying office. Prior to Ross, Daniel spent 10 years with Tropicana Product Sales, Inc. initially starting out as a Customer Services manager, and expanding his role to manage the IT services throughout the North East Sales offices.