Congratulations to the 2025 South Florida ORBIE winners!
Leadership
Jeff Smith
Super Global
Eric Firer
Global
Venkat Gopalan
Large Enterprise
Tom Gillette
Enterprise
Sameer Istafa
Large Corporate
Sharon Milz
Corporate
Wendi Iglesias
Super Global Finalists
Shawna
Cartwright
Michael
Delgado
Eric
Firer
Murtaza
Habib
Global Finalists
Rodrigo
Gonzalez Hermosillo
Venkat
Gopalan
Jenifer
Jones-Barbato
Luis
Suarez
Damon
Venger
Large Enterprise Finalists
Tom
Gillette
Kevin
Olson
Michael
Paseltiner
Frank
Quintana
Archie
Satchell
Enterprise Finalists
Sheila
Hanlon Ravindran
Sameer
Istafa
Kevin
Larson
Ganapathy
Subramaniyan
Denise
Walker
Large Corporate Finalists
Joe
Hernandez
Clayton
Jenkins
Sharon
Milz
Sasha
Seco-Alvarez
James
Twigger
Corporate Finalists
Ariel
Carrion
Ricardo
Castillo
Mario
Diez
Ryan
Fernandes
Wendi
Iglesias
Edson
Romero
2025 Keynote
Jeff Smith , EVP & COO, World Fuel Services
Leadership Award Recipient
Jeff Smith, World Fuel Services
Jeff Smith retired as World Fuel Service’s Chief Operating Officer at the end of 2023. Jeff’s focus as COO was delivering innovation at the pace of the best tech companies by operationalizing culture – making it something you can learn, practice and improve. Jeff believes that talent and culture are the differentiating factors of great companies. His organization strategy centers around building, nurturing and coaching small, self-directed teams that are loosely coupled and tightly aligned to Agile practices. His leadership beliefs focus on providing clarity of purpose for his teams and inspiring diversity of thought and collective wisdom to solve problems in unconventional ways. As COO, Jeff led efforts to move all infrastructure to Cloud – this included migrating applications and closing 21 of 23 data centers, implementing a global SDWAN and transitioning all telephony and 82 PBX systems to Zoom phone. Prior to joining WFS, Jeff was Chief Information Officer at IBM. He was globally responsible for 20k IBMers across the company’s IT solutions and infrastructure. In addition, he also led the Agile transformation across the company. Before leading IBM’s IT organization, Jeff was CEO of Suncorp Business Services. He was responsible for Suncorp Group’s shared services across all companies. This included IT, Shared Financial Services, Procurement, Real Estate and Risk Management. Jeff has over 35 years of corporate experience and has held senior executive roles in several companies including Telstra, Honeywell and Toyota. Jeff has also been an Advisor to leading tech companies including Zoom, Box and Tech Mahindra. In addition, Jeff currently sits on the Board of Directors of ANZ Bank, PEXA and Sonrai Security while continuing as an Advisor to World Fuel Services. A native of Ohio, Jeff earned a bachelor’s degree in Applied Science from Miami University and an MBA from San Jose State University. In addition, he also served on the Australian Fulbright Commission awarding Australian post-graduate scholarships to US universities.