Koen Aers is a senior software developer at JBoss. He is currently driving the Eclipse support for the JBoss jBPM project. He has been part of the jBPM team since April 2004 and became a JBoss employee when the jBPM project joined JBoss. Koen graduated as a civil engineer from the Belgian Royal Military Academy and obtained a Master's degree in information technology at the Brussels Free University. Before joining JBoss, he worked respectively in the IT department of the Belgian Army and as a software consultant, first for Unisys and as an independent afterwards.

Al Aghili is the CTO and Founder of Managed Methods. Al is a veteran of the performance monitoring industry. Prior to founding Managed Methods, he was Vice President of Engineering at Newmerix. He has also been Director of Technology for Mercury Interactive responsible for all aspects of design, architecture, and release of the performance monitoring software product Mercury obtained through its acquisition of Freshwater Software, where Al was a Senior Software Engineer. He has also held senior software engineering positions at OneRealm Software, Parexel Corp and Rogue Wave Software.

As director of APC-MGE’s northeast enterprise segment, Domenic helps large corporations improve their enterprise IT infrastructure availability. Previously a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy, Domenic was certified to serve as chief engineer of any U.S. nuclear-powered submarine. He holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Rochester.

Tom Bishop is the Chief Technology Officer of BMC Software, a leading provider of enterprise management solutions that empower companies to manage IT from a business perspective. Bishop joined BMC in 2005 from VIEO. For more than 20 years, he has served in senior technology and strategy roles at leading organizations including UNIX International, Tandem Computers and CompuCare Management Systems. Previously, Tom was Chief Technology Officer and General Manager for IBM Tivoli’s Embedded Solutions business unit. Tom received Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees, both in computer science, from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

Etay Bogner is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Neocleus. He is responsible for executing against the company’s product vision and for setting the technology vision. Neocleus is Etay's second entrepreneurial venture. The first, Sofaware Technologies Ltd., was ultimately acquired by Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP). Etay has presented at several technical and industry conferences in Israel and the United States including the annual conference for The 451 Group and Xen Summit. In January 2008, he will be presenting at the WTSA quarterly meeting.

Prior to Sonoa, Gregory led the architecture of BEA’s microServiceArchitecture and WebLogic JMS projects. Over the past 15 years in the IT industry, he has worked as a developer, architect, consultant and SE for Citibank, Transarc, IBM and TransactPlus. Greg has presented at EclipseCon, JavaOne, BEA World, the High Performance Transaction Systems workshop and elsewhere.

Michael J. Carey is a Senior Engineering Director on the AquaLogic side of BEA Systems. Dr. Carey is currently the chief architect for BEA's AquaLogic Data Services Platform product. Prior to joining BEA in 2001, Dr. Carey spent a dozen years on the University of Wisconsin-Madison computer science faculty, five years as an IBM Almaden database researcher and research manager and a year and a half leading the data team at an e-commerce infrastructure software startup, Propel Software. Dr. Carey is an ACM Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a past recipient of the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award and the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award. He has co-authored over one hundred conference and journal articles on topics related to database management systems and middleware and has extensive experience speaking at technical conferences.

Ariel Cohen is the CTO of Xsigo Systems. Previously, he was at Topspin Communications (acquired by Cisco). His areas of expertise are networking and I/O. He holds a PhD from UCSD, he authored papers and patents in the areas of storage systems, I/O virtualization, Web switching, and RDMA protocols.

Simon Crosby was founder and CTO of XenSource prior to the acquisition of XenSource by Citrix. Previously, Simon was a principal engineer at Intel where he led strategic research in distributed autonomic computing, platform security and trust. He was the founder of CPlane Inc., a network optimization software vendor, where he held a variety of executive roles. Prior to CPlane, Simon was a tenured faculty member at the University of Cambridge, UK, where he led research on network performance and control, and multimedia operating systems. He is author of over 35 research papers and patents on a number of datacenter and networking topics including security, network and server virtualization, resource optimization and performance. In 2007, Simon was awarded a coveted spot as one of InfoWorld's Top 25 CTOs.

Glen has over 20 years of industry experience, writing code, leading teams and building standards. He has been deeply involved with Web Services since 2000, and spearheaded Apache's Axis project. He serves as WSO2's Director of Java Platforms and VP, Web Services at the Apache Software Foundation.

Mark M. Davydov is an internationally recognized expert on software architecture, and software evolution and reuse. Dr. Davydov is the author of over 100 highly acclaimed articles in industry leading publications and vendor technical forums such as IBM developerWorks and Oracle Technical Network. His 2001 book "Corporate Portals and e-Business Integration - A Manager's Guide", introduced many ideas that influenced the progression of Service-Oriented Architecture and the Web Services model. He is a frequent presenter and panel participant at international conferences on software architecture and service-oriented computing, e.g., ICSOC04, WICSA 2004, FinanceCom05, ECIS 2005, WEBIST 2006, etc.

Dr. Davydov is Director of Systems Development at CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield and technology advisor to several industry consortiums such as Connected Health and HL7. Dr. Davydov did his graduate work in applied informatics at the State Academy of Chemical Engineering, and received post-doctoral training in computer science at the Karpov Scientific and Research Institute of Physical Chemistry, both in Moscow, Russia.

Doc D’Errico is responsible for the Infrastructure Software Group which develops products that integrate directly into the IO stack, including RecoverPoint, EMC PowerPath and EMC Invista. The products under Doc’s direction enable secure, simple, seamless and ubiquitous access to information throughout its lifecycle and are crucial foundation enablers for EMC.

Sean Derrington is director of storage management and CDP/R in Symantec Corporation’s Data Center Management Group and is responsible for product marketing, product strategy, and outbound marketing for Veritas Storage Foundation and Storage Management products.

Sean joined Symantec through the company’s merger with Veritas software. Prior to joining Veritas, Sean was senior program director of META Group's Server Infrastructure Strategies. He earned a bachelor’s degree in material science and engineering and a bachelor’s degree in engineering and public policy from Carnegie Mellon University.

Kevin Epstein is the VP of Products for Scalent Systems with a degree in high-energy nuclear physics and a Stanford MBA, several technology patents in his name, founding experience at three successful ventures, and more than 15 subsequent years of experience in guerrilla marketing tactics at such software industry high-flyers as Netscape, RealNetworks, Inktomi and VMware.

Yakov Fain is a managing principal of Farata Systems, a consulting, training and product company. He's authored several Java books and dozens of technical articles. The latest book he co-authored is "Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters." Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group.

Pierre Fricke is director of product line management for Red Hat's JBoss Portal and SOA products. Starting with JBoss Portal and jBPM in 2005, he led the product strategy and management expansion into the integration and SOA market with JBoss Rules, Messaging and Enterprise Service Bus. Today, these products are the unit volume market leader or emerging strong challengers to long-time incumbents. He started working on UNIX at IBM in 1983 as one of the first AIX developers, building experience in data management, operating systems, communication programs, development processes and customer support. After holding several software development management positions and completing his MBA at the University of Texas in Austin, he became one of the leading strategists and marketing leaders in IBM focusing on interoperability, integration, WebSphere, Windows NT, UNIX, as well as Linux and open source. He led the creation of IBM's "Compete, Leverage, and Interoperate" Windows NT strategy after OS/2 was discontinued and was one of the eight original leaders on the team that lead IBM into Linux and open source in 1998 and 1999. In 2000, Pierre joined D. H. Brown Associates, a research analyst firm, as VP of application and integration infrastructure.

Shai architected the ScaleMP technology. Before ScaleMP, he was CTO of BRM Capital, a first-tier Israeli VC firm. He served in the Israeli Defense Force central intelligence unit, where he led a large IT organization. He holds a bachelor of technology and applied science from the Jerusalem College of Technology.

Kyle Gabhart is a subject matter expert specializing in service-oriented technologies and currently serves as the SOA Solutions Director for Web Age Solutions, a premier provider of technology education and mentoring. Since 2001 he has contributed extensively to the SOA community as an author, speaker, consultant and open source contributor.

Jeremy Geelan is Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events. He is Conference Chair of the AJAXWorld Conference & Expo series, SOA World Conference & Expo and Virtualization Conference & Expo. He is also the founder of Web 2.0 Journal. From 2000-6, as first editorial director and then group publisher of SYS-CON Media, he was responsible for the development of all new titles and i-Technology portals for the firm, and regularly represents SYS-CON at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of "Power Panels with Jeremy Geelan" on SYS-CON.TV.

Matt George is senior software engineer with Fidelity Investments. In his 10 years with the company, he has had experience with supporting and engineering enterprise wide products and solutions. In 2007, Matt helped design an infrastructure that utilizes Network Attached Storage (NAS) and file virtualization technology. Through this infrastructure, Fidelity was able to seamlessly migrate Terabytes of data onto a more stable system with zero impact to their customers. Prior to this, Matt worked on the Active Directory infrastructure team where he designed and implemented tools utilized by Systems Administrators throughout the company. In March, 2007, Matt partnered with Microsoft and Quest Software at the Microsoft SMS Conference for a presentation regarding Windows Powershell and how it can be utilized for Active Directory automation.

John Goodson is the executive leader of DataDirect Technologies. He is responsible for daily operations, business development, product direction and long-term corporate strategy.

John brings significant technical and business leadership to the company. Joining DataDirect in 1992 as an engineer, he has since held positions of increasing responsibility in research and development, technical support and marketing. John is a well known and respected industry luminary and data connectivity expert. For more than 10 years, he has worked closely with Sun and Microsoft on the development and evolution of database connectivity standards including J2EE, JDBC, .NET, ODBC and ADO. John has been involved with the ANSI H2 Committee, which is responsible for building the SQL standard and the SQL Access Group, which has been responsible for building call level interfaces into relational databases. He is now actively involved in Java standards committees, including the JDBC Expert Group and Java Rowsets. This active leadership has helped his team develop the most technically advanced data connectivity technologies.

John holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Virginia Tech.

Michael M. Gorman is the founder of Whitemarsh Information Systems Corporation. Mike has been Secretary of the ANSI Database Committee for 30 years and he co-authored all the SQL standards. He has delivered data management consulting and training to a number of Fortune 100 companies, as well as State and local governments. Mike has authored numerous books, contributed to The Data Administration Newsletter, and taught at a number of universities, at Data Management Association (DMA) chapters, and at International DMA conferences.

Ravi Gururaj is currently the founder and CTO of VMLogix. Ravi has over seventeen years of product development, management and marketing experience, having held position at companies including Trilogy, UberWorks and Dialogic, and having founded two software start-ups. Ravi received his MBA from Harvard, and his BSE in CS & Engineering and B.Sc. in Finance from Penn.

Mark Hapner is a Sun Distinguished Engineer and is currently SOA Strategist for Sun Software. He helps formulate Sun's SOA and composite application strategy spanning Java Standards, Web Service Standards and Sun products. He is also Sun's WS-I Board Member.

Mark was previously lead architect for Java EE and was responsible for guiding the overall architecture of J2EE 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4. Earlier he was co spec lead of the Enterprise JavaBeans specification and spec lead of the Java Message Service specification.

Stephen Herrod is responsible for VMware's new technologies and technology collaborations with customers, partners and standards groups. He has led the VMware ESX group through numerous successful releases. Prior to joining VMware, Stephen was Senior Director of Software at Transmeta Corporation co-leading development of their "Code Morphing" technology. Stephen holds a Ph.D. and a Masters degree in computer science from Stanford University where he worked with VMware's founders on the SimOS machine simulation project.

Gordon's technical expertise spans embedded systems, distributed real-time systems, robotics and controls. He is recognized as RTI's Open Architecture expert and principal consultant for distributed system architectures. He routinely provides advanced designs and training to RTI customers and is an active member in the standards communities. Gordon joined RTI in 1999.

He is a Commander select in the U.S. Naval Reserves and is a qualified Engineering Duty Officer. His Navy involvement has included working for both NAVSEA and SPAWAR commands in a wide variety of robotic hardware and software integration efforts. Currently, Gordon is working with ONR/NRL supporting the ex-USS SHADWELL, a decommissioned United States Navy Landing Ship Dock that serves as the Navy's full-scale damage control research, development, test and evaluation platform.

Gordon holds an MS from Stanford University and a BS from Purdue University in aerospace engineering. He can be reached at Gordon.Hunt@rti. com

As senior XML program manager at DataDirect, Dr. Carlo Innocenti (Minollo) is responsible for the overall strategy and direction of the XML products group including DataDirect XQuery, DataDirect XML Converters and Stylus Studio.

Prior to joining DataDirect Technologies, Minollo served as principal software architect of Stylus Studio at Progress Software and eXcelon Corporation. While at eXcelon Corporation, Minollo managed an engineering group responsible for the overall tools strategy of the XML database division, overseeing product design and development. Prior to that, he served as development manager for tools at Object Design, Inc., an object database company. Minollo began his software development career at ViVi Software, an Italian company he co-founded.

As CTO, David Kleidermacher is responsible for the company’s product planning, development, deployment, and technical support. He has contributed major innovations and product successes, was awarded, jointly with CEO Dan O'Dowd, a US Patent for his work on the MULTI Profiler, and has other patents pending in the areas of operating systems and software development tool technology.

Jacek Kruszelnicki is the founder and President of Numatica Corporation. Jacek's holistic approach stresses planned software ecosystem design, risk minimization, usability and interoperability to provide outstanding value to clients. His approach and interest in the business and IT alignment correspond well with the service oriented architecture (SOA) high-level objectives.

Jacek co-authored several patent-pending solutions and published numerous technical and business papers and articles ("ISource Business", "JavaWorld"). His work in the area of high-end transactional environments was acknowledged in the book "Transaction Processing" by J. Gray, A. Reuter. Jacek enjoys mentoring and public speaking (MIT, ACM WebTech Chapter, numerous client seminars). Jacek earned his Master’s Degree in computer science from Northeastern University in Boston, MA and is an Adjunct Professor at Northeastern. Jacek is member of the MIT Enterprise Forum, Association for Computing Machinery and the founder and past president of the New England BEA WebLogic User Group.

Rich Lechner is vice president of IBM's IT Optimization business unit in 2007. Rich oversees an extensive portfolio of solutions that combine hardware, software and IBM services to help customers simplify, better manage and do more with their existing infrastructures. He is responsible for IBM's virtualization, grid and platform management offerings.

Paul Lipton is a senior architect in the CA Intellectual Property and Standards Group where he specializes in SOA, Web services, standards, open source initiatives and emerging technologies. He has participated in many standards organizations such as OASIS and the W3C, is a founding member of the CA Council for Technical Excellence, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional and a Sun Java Champion. Paul has also been an architect and developer of enterprise systems for over 20 years. He is a highly sought-after author and speaker, and has shared his knowledge with appreciative audiences around the world covering such topics as Enterprise Architecture, SOA, Web services, management/security, governance, Java, .NET, EAI and emerging technologies.

Victoria Livschitz is a founder and CEO of Grid Dynamics, a premiere engineering and consulting firm specializing in the "extreme" applications and network system. Victoria has an impressive track record as a technical innovator, visionary and leader. She is a renowned expert in the fields of grid computing and programming languages. Prior to founding Grid Dynamics, Victoria spend 10 years at Sun Microsystems in a variety of senior technical roles, including Principal Architect in Sun Grid division and chief architect for financial services industry.

In the Java community, Victoria is well-known for her candid writings and interviews on the escalating complexity of software engineering and her original research into next-generation programming languages and paradigms, including her new programming language, Metaphors.

Bob Lozano is a technology industry veteran, serial entrepreneur, and co-founder and chief strategist of Appistry, a software company pioneering the convergence of grid computing, virtualization and service-oriented architecture. Bob founded and led successful companies PaylinX and Tapestry Computing. He holds a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Missouri and an MS in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Greg Lyon is an IT professional with over 25 years experience in Software Development, Project Management, Sales Engineering, and Business Development. For the last three years Greg has worked at Egenera where he has held positions as a Senior Sales Engineer, Sales Engineer Manager, and most recently as the National Technology Director for the Egenera/Dell OEM partnership. Prior to Egenera Greg worked for several startups in a technical sales capacity.

Peter J. Manca is currently the chief technology officer and executive vice president of engineering at Egenera. Peter formerly served as Egenera's senior vice president of engineering, having spent the past five years guiding all aspects of product development, product management and program management. He has more than 20 years' experience in enterprise computing.

Andi comes to EMA with over 20 years experience, across 4 continents, with large-scale Enterprise systems software on mainframe, midrange, server and desktop systems. He has worked within the IT departments of various global corporations, and with several enterprise software vendors, leading diverse technical, sales and marketing teams. Andi has extensive industry and presentation experience. Over more than 10 years, he has presented to many technical and executive audiences, including enterprise and vendor audiences.

Brian Martin is a senior technical staff member and lead architect of the WebSphere Extended Deployment Operations Optimizer Product. Prior to his role in WebSphere XD, Brian was an architect with the WebSphere Technology Institute and lead several performance optimization projects primarily focused on Web caching. As one of the original engineers on the WebSphere Application Server, Brian lead the development of classloaders, caching, and other runtime services. Brian holds a dozen US patents and has another 20 patents pending with the patent office. Brian received a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from Virginia Tech in 1991.

Miko Matsumura is vice president and deputy CTO, SOA products at Software AG webMethods. Miko is chair of the OASIS SOA Adoption Blueprints Technical Committee. He is well recognized for his work at The Middleware Company, Systinet, and as Chief Java Evangelist for Sun Microsystems. He has an MBA from San Francisco State University and a Masters in neuroscience from Yale University.

Joe McKendrick is a nationally published known author and consultant with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in the technology industry. He is a contributing editor to a number of national and international publications and Websites including Database Trends & Applications, Webservices.Org, ENT Online and Enterprise Systems. He also serves as analyst for Evans Data Corp., for which he coauthors Evans' Web services survey reports, and is lead analyst for Evans' enterprise development management issues and database development surveys.