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.

Andy Astor is founder and chief executive officer of EnterpriseDB, the world's leading enterprise open source database company. Andy has championed the support of independent open source communities and hybrid open source business models since the company’s inception in 2004. This year, Andy was named one of the “Top Leaders in Open Source Business” by LinuxWorld Magazine.

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.

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.

Donato Buccella brings more than 20 years of software industry experience having successfully brought to market several commercial products in multiple verticals including security, infrastructure management and electronic data capture. Prior to coming to Certeon, Donato was a founder and Chief Architect at Verdasys. He has also lead product teams at Symantec Corporation and Phase Forward in addition to consulting to several Fortune 500 companies. He holds a number of patents and received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Boston University.

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.

Andrew Conte, Jr. is a Territory Accounts Manager for APC. As a Territory Accounts Manager, Andrew is responsible for assisting mid-market corporations within the New York City area improve their enterprise IT infrastructure availability. Prior to his role as Territory Accounts Manager, Andrew held multiple positions with APC including Channel Manager, Preferred Accounts Manager, Preferred Accounts Sales Team Manager - West Coat, and District Manager (NY Metro). Andrew holds a B.A. in Psychology and English from Providence College.

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.

Stefanos “Stef” Damianakis, president and CEO of Netrics, is a visionary in intelligent data matching technologies with more than 20 years of experience in scientific research and business management. An entrepreneur since his undergraduate days at McGill University in Montreal, Stef has leveraged his unique managerial experience and strong academic base to found and grow Netrics through the burst of the Dot-Com Bubble, inarguably the modern technology industry’s most volatile and tremulous period.

Mr. Daniel currently leads product marketing, web properties, and corporate communications for Parallels, a leading virtualization and automation software provider for consumers, businesses and service providers. Prior to joining the company in 2004, he spent several years at Microsoft, leading a product management and business strategy team for SQL Server. Daniel helped grow the business past $1 billion and helped launch SQL Server 2000, Reporting Services, SQL Mobile, and Notification Services. Daniel began his career as an Operations Analyst at Capital One. He holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Virginia and an M.B.A from Harvard University.

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.

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.

Brian Duckering was responsible for product management and marketing of the award-winning AppStream application delivery and management platform until the recent acquisition of AppStream by Symantec. With AppStream, plus virtualization software from Altiris on board, Symantec has created a new Endpoint Virtualization product group, and Duckering is its primary evangelist, advocating the use of the various virtualization technologies available today to promote higher productivity for end-users and better system manageability and cost reduction for IT.

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.

Paul Fremantle is CTO for WSO2, the open source SOA company, where he leads the technical vision and strategy for the company which is creating the most innovative software in enterprise middleware today. As well as his work as CTO of WSO2, Paul also chairs the Apache Synapse project, and is a committer and Member of the Apache Foundation. Previously Paul was a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM where he created the IBM Web Services Gateway, and led the team that developed and shipped it as part of the WebSphere Application Server.

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.

Rick German, Co-founder, CEO and Chief Technology Officer - Rick is a co-founder of Stoneware, Inc. and has been the company's President and CEO since inception. Rick is one of the key architects of Stoneware’s webOS and is heavily involved in the company's efforts to move Web Desktop Virtualization into the “cloud” computing space. Prior to founding Stoneware in 2000, Rick was the Vice President of System Engineering for Cornerstone Systems. He has a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems from University of Iowa.

Dror Gill, Chief Strategy Officer at Ceedo, is an industry executive with more 20 years of experience in communications, multimedia and consumer devices. Prior to joining Ceedo, Mr. Gill was an independent consultant on mobile multimedia technologies advising leading firms such as NEC, Samsung, Comverse, Radvision and Zoran. Mr. Gill also served as Entrepreneur in Residence at Giza Venture Capital in the fields of digital home and fixed-mobile convergence. Previously, Mr. Gill was Chief Technology Officer of Emblaze Semiconductor (now Zoran), and a project manager at IBM Research in Israel, where he pioneered the fields of Voice over IP and Internet video streaming. Mr. Gill holds a Bachelor of Science with honors in Electrical Engineering from the Technion Institute of Technology.

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.

Maneesh Jain is a Storage Architect at 3PAR where he focuses primarily on developing server virtualization technologies. Maneesh came to 3PAR in 2007 from NetApp, where he was a Technical Marketing Engineer. Prior to NetApp, Maneesh also held Engineering and Systems Administrator roles at Terraspring and Bay Networks. He holds a BS in Computer Science from the Calfornia State University of the East Bay.

David Kleidermacher is Chief Technology Officer at Green Hills Software where he has been designing operating systems, virtualization, and security solutions for the past seventeen years. David is responsible for the company’s product planning, development, deployment, and technical support. David holds a bachelor of science in computer science from Cornell University and is a frequent writer and speaker on technology subjects.

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.