Speakers

Adam is the Director of Developer Relations at SpringSource and has extensive experience in enterprise Java community management. Prior to joining SpringSource, Adam ran BEA's dev2dev community and was a product evangelist, technology educator and public speaker for BEA's WebLogic products.

Adrian Colyer is the CTO of SpringSource and has more than a dozen years of experience leading teams in Java and enterprise middleware.

Adrian Colyer is the leader of the AspectJ open source project and a well-known industry expert on the topic of aspect-oriented programming (AOP). He is a co-author of the book "Eclipse AspectJ : Aspect-Oriented Programming in Eclipse with AspectJ and AJDT," and has also published numerous book chapters, articles and published papers. His short essay, "AOP without the buzzwords" has been described as "the best explanation of AOP, ever."

In 2004, Adrian was recognized as one of the top 100 young innovators in the world by MIT Technology Review for his contributions to the development and adoption of aspect-oriented programming in industry.

Adrian founded the AspectJ Development Tools project (AJDT) on Eclipse.org in 2003, a project that continues to lead the world in providing IDE support for AOP. As leader of the AspectJ project, Adrian has overseen several releases of the compiler and designed and implemented many of the AspectJ 5 language extensions to support Java 5 features.
Prior to joining SpringSource, Adrian gained over a decade of experience in building enterprise middleware at IBM. Whilst there he oversaw the introduction of aspect-oriented programming to many IBM development teams.

Adrian holds a BSc, Computer Science from University of Southampton.

Al Hilwa serves as Program Director for IDC's Application Development Software research. In this role, Mr. Hilwa provides thought leadership, expert opinion, analysis, research and competitive intelligence on all issues related to Application Development technologies, processes and audiences. Mr. Hilwa also offers technology and vendor advice to, investment and technology firms as well as Global 2000 end-user companies that subscribe to IDC's services.

In addition to market sizing and forecasting, the Application Development Software Program provides comprehensive coverage of the vendors and technologies in the space, including the various technologies being utilized today in developing applications, trends in the classic 3GL and 4GL areas, the ensuing battles in the Unified Development Environments, relevant developments in Open Source and AD offered as a Service, and the broadening of the space into web-design bolstered by trends in Web 2.0 and social networking.

Mr. Hilwa comes to IDC with over 20 years of work experience in both the supply and demand sides of the market. In 2000, Mr. Hilwa joined Microsoft as a Senior Product Manager on the SQL Server database team. In his seven years at Microsoft, Mr. Hilwa covered almost all aspects of product management, including running the SQL Server Customer Advisory Network and the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for SQL Server 2005. Mr. Hilwa spent his last two years at Microsoft as a Senior Strategist in the Application Platform marketing team where he drove internal projects to enhance Microsoft's enterprise selling capabilities. Mr. Hilwa started his analyst career in 1995 at Gartner where he was a Research Director on core database technology. In his tenure at Gartner, Mr. Hilwa published over one hundred research units, gave tens of conference presentations, was often quoted by the press and handled over 2000 client inquiries. Prior to Gartner Mr. Hilwa worked on the IT side in various industries including Education, Healthcare, Transportation, and Financial Services. Mr. Hilwa launched his career in the University where he did his graduate studies by running the academic computing labs for several years.

Mr. Hilwa holds a Master of Science Degree in Computer Science from Washington University and a BA in Mathematics and Computer Studies from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Alex joined Orbitz LLC in 2004 and is responsible for providing technical leadership and guidance in the development of foundational technologies, core libraries and APIs for the enterprise-wide use, as well as establishing and maintaining common design principles and standards used within the company and integration of new software development practices within the development community.

Previously Alex was a Senior Engineer on the same team responsible for web application frameworks and developing common practices and additional functionality on top of Spring MVC & Webflow.

Alex is a graduate of Loyola University of Chicago, with a B.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Computer Science specializing in Software Architecture. He currently resides in Evanston, IL and when not coding, Alex enjoys playing tennis, hiking, skiing, and traveling.

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.

At EMA Andi's focus is on the intelligent and automated management of IT, specifically surrounding systems and applications management, configuration management, provisioning and virtualization of systems and applications.

Andi began his career in 1984 in system operations supporting mixed mainframe and distributed computing environments. He spent several years in the UK and Australia with various financial, government, and manufacturing organizations delivering automation systems to improve efficiency of enterprise IT operations.

Andi then joined New Dimension Software as senior technical consultant and product specialist for the Asia Pacific region. In this role he focused on problem analysis, solution design and implementation across a wide range of industries, including outsourcing, government, financial, industrial, telecommunications and retail. Following the acquisition by BMC Software, Andi moved into a product marketing role for BMC, designing, developing and delivering enterprise management solutions.

Prior to joining EMA, Andi was Product Manager at Mobius Management Systems. In this role, he was responsible for researching and producing competitive market and gap analyses, defining product vision, leading development strategy and delivering products to market.

Andi's breadth and depth of experience provides EMA and its clients with a unique and extensive range of knowledge in Enterprise Management solutions.

Andres is a Java/Groovy developer with more than 10 years of experience in software design and development. He has been involved in web and desktop application developments since the early days of Java. He has also been teacher of computer science courses in the most prestigious education institute in Mexico. His current interests include Groovy, Scala and Swing. He is a true believer of open source and has participated in popular projects like Groovy, Griffon, JMatter and DbUnit, as well as starting his own projects (Json-lib, EZMorph, GraphicsBuilder, JideBuilder). Founding member of the Griffon framework.

He likes to spend time with his beloved wife, Ixchel, when not hacking around.

Andrew is the founder of the easyb BDD framework and the co-author of Addison Wesley's "Continuous Integration", Manning's "Groovy in Action" and "Java Testing Patterns". He is an author for multiple online publications including IBM's developerWorks and Oreilly's ONJava and ONLamp portals. He actively blogs about software at thediscoblog.com.

Andy Clement is a senior software engineer at SpringSource, based in the languages and tools lab in Vancouver. Andy has more than ten years experience in Java and Enterprise Application Development. He is a recognized expert on Aspect Oriented Programming and leads the Eclipse AspectJ project as well as being co-founder of the Eclipse AspectJ Development Tools project. Most recently he has been using his compiler knowledge to enable first class language support for Groovy in Eclipse.

Ari is a frequent speaker at technical conferences, such as SpringOne, QCon, Devoxx, and JavaOne, where this year he accepted the 2009 Java Everywhere Duke's Choice Award for Terracotta.

Before founding Terracotta in 2003, Ari was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Accel Partners. Before joining Accel, Ari was the Chief Architect at Walmart.com, where he led the innovation and development of the company's new engineering initiatives. At Walmart.com, he built and led a team of core engineers focused on performance management, and operations cost-saving measures.

Prior to Walmart.com, Ari worked as a consultant at Sapient and before that at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. During these years, he managed development and advised businesses on high technology strategy and deployment. His accomplishments at Sapient include the successful launch of Walmart.com, as well as successful engagements with Gap.com and Nike.com. At PriceWaterhouseCoopers, he worked with Harrod's of London, Siemens, Intel, Compaq, Barnes & Noble, and others.

Ari's career started as a software engineer for a subsidiary of Motorola, where he wrote groundbreaking wireless paging software. Since then, his software development accomplishments also include projects revolving around statistical analysis and data warehousing. In the mid 1990's, Ari invented a new object relational database that still exceeds the capabilities and performance of database technology today.

Ari holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering Computer Science as well as in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley.

Arjen Poutsma is a senior enterprise application architect with fifteen years' experience in commercial software environments. During this time he has worked with both J2EE and Microsoft .NET.

Two years ago, Arjen started to specialise in Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures. During this period he has conducted trainings and has researched SOAs in large organisations.

Arjen is the founder and the project lead for the Spring Web Services. This Spring project aims at facilitating development of document-driven web services. Recently, Arjen worked on the REST support in Spring 3.0. Arjen has also contributed to various other open source projects, including XFire, NEO and others.

Since early 2005, Arjen has been a consultant for SpringSource in The Netherlands.

Dr Ben Alex is a Principal Software Engineer with SpringSource, and has been working professionally in software since 1995. Ben founded the Spring Security project in 2003 and led its development into a popular, open-source security framework that is used in numerous government, banking and military installations. More recently Ben founded and serves as lead of the Spring Roo and Spring Shell projects, both of which deliver significant productivity and usability benefits to those using Spring technologies.

Ben's career history also includes other roles in software development and business. From 2005 until 2008, he led the establishment and exponential growth of SpringSource's operations in Asia-Pacific. Prior to SpringSource, Ben founded and grew a successful Australian software company, Acegi Technology Pty Limited. He has been a director and advisor to businesses in diverse industries including business services, intellectual property licensing and ecommerce.

In recent years, Ben has presented at technology conferences including JavaOne, The Server Side Java Symposium, JAOO, Oredev, SpringOne and The Spring Experience. He is a regular guest presenter at user groups across the world, with recent appearances in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, Singapore, Wellington, Auckland, Christchurch and Stockholm. He also authored the security chapter of the Wiley book, "Professional J2EE Development with Spring Framework," and maintains a blog at http://blog.springsource.com/main/author/bena/.

Ben Hale is a senior software engineer with Springsource and a core developer on the SpringSource dm Server project. Ben specializes in middleware development with using technologies such as OSGi and Aspect Oriented Programming as well as directing the build and release processes for all products in the Spring and SpringSource portfolios.

His interests include middle-tier architecture and effective build and release management strategies.

Prior to joining SpringSource, Ben spent several years leading teams in architecture and development of large-scale enterprise management applications for the telecommunications industry.

Burt Beckwith is a Java developer with over ten years of experience in a variety of industries including biotech, travel, e-learning, social networking, and financial services. For the past two years he's been working with Grails and Groovy full-time. Along the way he's released five Grails plugins and is the primary developer of the Spring Security plugin. He was the technical editor for Grails in Action.

Charles Lee was a co-founder of Hyperic, before Hyperic was acquired by SpringSource. Prior to co-founding Hyperic, Lee was a senior software engineer at Covalent. There, he built Covalent's configuration management product for Apache (CMP), and he spearheaded and architected the application management software (CAM), which later became Hyperic HQ.

Before Covalent, Lee developed a document management system for retail store build-outs based on open-source technology at WiseConnect. Lee also held senior engineering position at Hewlett-Packard, where he was instrumental in developing print drivers for network LaserJets for the Asian market, as well as developing the UI framework used for LaserJet drivers for all markets. Lee also developed the first GUI printer configuration framework for AutoCAD while a senior engineer at Autodesk. Lee was an early engineer at Backflip, where he created the document publishing system for the website based on mod_perl.

Chip is a Senior Product Manager for SpringSource, with primary responsibility for the HQ monitoring application. Prior to joining the SpringSource team in May 2009, he had worked on the HQ product team for three years as a Hyperic employee. Chip has been a practicing technology professional for over fifteen years, and has served in hands-on leadership roles ranging in responsibility from systems and network administration to systems engineering for Fortune Global 500, non-profit, and start-up organizations.

Chris is the technical lead for the Spring JavaConfig project and a Senior Consultant with SpringSource. He has trained hundreds of developers how to most effectively use Spring to create well-designed, testable enterprise applications. Before joining SpringSource in 2007, Chris worked as a software engineer in a variety of industries with a special focus on optimizing team productivity through test-driven development, continuous integration, and other agile techniques.

Chris Richardson is a developer, architect and mentor with over 20 years of experience and is the author of the recently published book "POJOs in Action". He runs a consulting company that helps development teams become more productive and successful by adopting POJOs and lightweight frameworks. Chris has been a technical leader at a variety of companies including Insignia Solutions and BEA Systems. Chris has a computer science degree from the University of Cambridge in England. He lives in Oakland, CA with his wife and three children.

Christian is a Principal Software Engineer for SpringSource and is the leader of the Tools Team responsible for SpringSource development tools including SpringSource Tool Suite. Since 2004 Christian has led the well known Spring IDE open source project that provides development tools for the Spring Portfolio based on Eclipse.

Christian has been developing Java enterprise applications since 1997. During this time, Christian designed complex software architectures with a focus on multi-tiered, web-based, client-server applications using enterprise Java technologies and the Spring Framework. Prior to joining SpringSource, Christian worked as consultant and project manager for one of the leading global technology consulting firms in the financial sector in central Europe.

Christian has presented on a variety of enterprise Java topics at conferences such as JAX, W-JAX, SpringOne and The Spring Experience.

Christophe Coenraets is a technical evangelist for Adobe where he focuses on rich Internet applications and enterprise integration. He has been working on Flex since the early days of the product in 2003. In his previous role at Macromedia, Christophe worked on JRun, the company's J2EE application server. Before joining Macromedia, Christophe was managing Java and Internet applications evangelism at Sybase. Christophe has been a regular speaker at conferences worldwide for the last 15 years. He blogs at http://coenraets.org.

Colin is Director of R&D at SpringSource. He is a co-founder of the company, and one of the original core committers on the Spring Framework project (gaining commit status in mid-2003). Since starting the company he has served in a number of roles, usually combining both technical as well as business and customer facing aspects. He is a hands-on architect with 20+ years of experience in developing commercial software, including all aspects of the software development lifecycle. Colin is co-author of 'Professional Java Development with Spring'.

Colin has had a long and varied career, including experience developing for and managing his own retail software company, other experience in the C++ shrinkwrap and enterprise software space, experience with Java since '97, and a complete focus on enterprise Java since '99.

Prior to SpringSource, Colin spent more than 4 years as architect then chief architect at a leading software incubator / VC. Colin's role was split between one part hands on architecture, design, and coding, another part mentoring and teaching best practices at the code and process level, and a final part performing technical due diligence and consulting for the VC arm. Throughout this period, Colin gained experience with and an appreciation for agile development practices as a vital part of software success.

Throughout his career, Colin's experience, wide ranging interests and general knowledge in the technology space have led him to be a resource that others have been able to draw on for advice. In general, Colin's background has left him with a deep knowledge of all it takes to successfully put out good software, at the code, process, and business level.

Along with client-facing work at SpringSource, Colin also spends significant time on Spring evangelism, having spoken on many occasion on Java EE and Spring Framework at conferences and JUGs.

Costin Leau is an SpringSource software engineer based in Romania. His interests include data access and aspect oriented programming. With significant development experience, Costin has worked on the Spring JPA integration, Pitchfork project and JavaConfig. Costin is currently the lead of the Spring Dynamic Modules (Spring OSGi) and the Spring-inspired, OSGi 4.2 Blueprint Service RI.

Craig Walls has been professionally developing software for over 15 years (and longer than that for the pure geekiness of it). He is a senior engineer with SpringSource and is the author of Modular Java (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf) and Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action (both published by Manning). He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring and OSGi on his blog. When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 4 birds and 2 dogs.

Danno Ferrin has been programming in Java since the Netscape 2.0 beta and started his career programming in NetDynamics. After surviving three different startups he is currently working as a government contracter at Intelligent Software Solutions. His day job involves writing Swing applications in Java, but on his own time he writes Swing applications in Groovy.

In the open source Java world he is an emeritus commiter at the Apache Tomcat and Ant projects and currently is a committer for the Groovy project and a Despot (Project lead) for the Griffon project.

Dave is a consultant helping organizations of all sizes to develop applications more quickly (and have more fun doing it) with Grails. Dave has been involved in enterprise software development for the past 15 years. He has worked as a developer, architect, project manager, mentor and trainer. Dave has presented at user groups and national conferences. He is also the founder of the Capital Java User Group in Madison, Wisconsin, the Gateway Groovy Users in St. Louis, MO, and the author of Grails: A Quick-Start Guide, published by the Pragmatic Programmers. . Dave's Groovy and Grails related thoughts can be found at http://dave-klein.blogspot.com

Dr David Syer is the technical lead on Spring Batch, the batch processing framework and toolkit from SpringSource. He is an experienced, delivery-focused architect and development manager. He has designed and built successful enterprise software solutions using Spring, and implemented them in major financial institutions worldwide. David is known for his clear and informative training style and has deep knowledge and experience with all aspects of real-life usage of the Spring framework. He enjoys creating business value from the application of simple principles to enterprise architecture. David joined SpringSource from a leading risk management software vendor where he worked closely with SpringSource on a number of projects. Recent publications have appeared in Balance Sheet, Operational Risk and Derivatives Technology.

Dennis leads The 451 Group's coverage of service-oriented architecture (SOA), including Web services development, governance, integration and management tools, application integration, middleware and business process management. His coverage area also includes a number of other IT management technologies, such as Internet performance management, desktop management, service-level monitoring and management, IT asset and service management, and project management. Dennis also contributes regularly to 451 Special Reports on topics including open source adoption and virtualization. He often speaks at industry events focused on SOA and is regularly quoted in the trade and business press in articles about companies in this space.

Before joining The 451 Group, Dennis was a senior writer at eWeek magazine for more than five years. At eWeek he covered a number of application and productivity software beats, including CRM, business intelligence and analytics, email, IM, collaboration, enterprise search, business-to-consumer e-commerce technologies and portals. He also led eWeek's coverage of Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance and the impact it has had on IT professionals, in addition to covering the software-as-a-service model and the IT market for small and medium-sized businesses.

Prior to joining eWeek, Dennis was Associate Editor at MC Magazine, where he covered the marketing of technology. He was also News Editor at Midrange Systems and Midrange Channels magazines, where he covered IBM AS/400 computing. In addition, Dennis has worked as a technical writer at SunGard Capital Markets, a global financial trading and risk management software firm, and as a sportswriter for a daily newspaper.

Filip is a Senior Software Engineer for SpringSource and a key participant in the company's Apache Tomcat initiatives. Filip brings 15 years of extensive experience in architecture, design and development of distributed application frameworks and containers and is recognized for his top-quality system development skills and continuous participation of Open Source development projects.

Filip is an Apache Software Foundation member and a committer to the Apache Tomcat project where he is a leading authority on Tomcat clustering and a key contributor to the core of the platform.

Filip has made contributions to software initiatives for Walmart.com, Sony Music, France Telecom and has held a variety of senior software engineering positions with technology companies in both the United States and Sweden.

He received his education at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden where he majored in Computer Science and Computer Engineering.

As Head of Grails Development for SpringSource, Graeme Rocher is the project lead and co-founder of the Grails web application framework. He's a member of the JSR-241 Expert Group which standardizes the Groovy language. Graeme authored the Definitive Guide to Grails for Apress and is a frequent speaker at JavaOne, JavaPolis, NoFluffJustStuff, JAOO, the Sun TechDays and more. Graeme joined SpringSource in late 2008 upon the acquisition of G2One Inc. Before founding G2One, Graeme was the CTO of SkillsMatter, a skills transfer company specializing in open source technology and agile software development, where Graeme was in charge of the company's courseware development strategy and general technical direction.

As Head of Groovy Development for SpringSource, Guillaume Laforge is the official Groovy Project Manager, and the spec lead of JSR-241, the Java Specification Request that standardizes the Groovy dynamic language. He is also a frequent conference speaker presenting Groovy and Grails at JavaOne, SpringOne, QCon, the Sun TechDays, and JavaPolis. Guillaume also co-authored Groovy in Action along with Dierk König. Before founding G2One, which was acquired by SpringSource in late 2008, and taking the role of VP Technology, Guillaume worked for OCTO Technology, a consultancy focusing on architecture and agile methodologies. While at OCTO, Guillaume developed new offerings around Groovy and Grails for its customers.

Hamlet D'Arcy has been writing software for over a decade, and has spent considerable time coding in C++, Java, and Groovy. He's passionate about learning new languages and different ways to think about problems, and recently he's been discovering the joys of both F# and Scheme. He's an active member of the Groovy Users of Minnesota and the Object Technology User Group, is a committer on the Groovy project, and is a contributor on a few open source projects (including JConch and the IDEA Groovy Plugin). He blogs regularly at http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com and can be found on Twitter as HamletDRC (http://twitter.com/hamletdrc).

Hans Dockter is the founder and project lead of the Gradle build system and the CEO of Gradle Inc, a company that provides training, support and consulting for Gradle and all forms of enterprise software project automation in general.

Hans has 13 years of experience as a software developer, team leader, architect, trainer, and technical mentor. Hans is a though leader in the field of project automation and has successfully been in charge of numerous large-scale enterprise builds. He is also an advocate of Domain Driven Design, having taught classes and delivered presentations on this topic together with Eric Evans. In the earlier days, Hans was also a committer for the JBoss project and founded the JBoss-IDE.

Imad is the Technical Marketing Director of M2Spring (Model to Code). He is MS graduated in Enterprise Architecture. He has over 10 years experience in software development Java EE and a deep expertise in Model Driven Architecture. Imad is a regular speaker at worldwide tradeshows, JavaOne, Eclipse world, IBM RSDC, EclipseCon, Code Generation, etc.

Isaac Christoffersen has over 15 years of experience in system integration and software solutions development for commercial and government clients. His expertise also encompasses relational database design and development, software and systems architecture and analysis, telecommunications management, and systems and software design.

Currently he is involved in the design, development, and implementation of Infrastructure and Platform as a service solutions for mission-critical systems using the latest SOA, JEE, Virtualization and open source standards and technologies.

Mr. Christoffersen is professional member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He is currently chairs the Historical and Membership committees of the Washington DC Chapter of the ACM (DC ACM). He is a frequent speaker on the use of open source and SOA technologies within the Federal Government.

Javier Soltero is Chief Technology Officer for Management Products for SpringSource.

Previously, Javier was the co-founder and CEO of Hyperic, the leader in multi-platform, open source IT management, which SpringSource acquired in May 2009. Prior to co-founding Hyperic, he was chief architect at Covalent Technologies, where he led the design and implementation of multiple enterprise products, including the configuration management product for Apache and the Covalent Application Manager (CAM)—now Hyperic's flagship product Hyperic HQ.

Prior to Covalent, Soltero was a senior software engineer at Backflip, where he met Hyperic co-founders Charles Lee and Doug MacEachern. At Backflip, he was actively involved in the design, implementation, and operational aspects of the site.

Soltero also held senior engineering positions at Netscape, where he participated in the design development of e-commerce and Internet infrastructure suites. Over the last 10 years, Soltero has been actively involved in various open source communities as both user and contributor to projects like JBoss and Apache Tomcat.

Soltero is originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico and received his BS in Information Systems and Industrial Management from Carnegie Mellon University.

Core member of the Grails development team, Jeff Brown, is a Senior Software Engineer with SpringSource. Jeff has been involved in designing and building object oriented systems for over 15 years. Jeff's areas of expertise include web development with Groovy & Grails, Java and agile development.

Jennifer Hickey is a senior software engineer for SpringSource, the company behind Spring. She holds a master's degree in software engineering from the Florida Institute of Technology. Jennifer specializes in enterprise application management, with a focus on application modeling methodologies and techniques for rapid development and deployment of management agents. Her interests include aspect oriented programming, asynchronous messaging, JMX, and OSGi.

Jennifer is also very interested in improving organizational productivity through testing. In a previous position, she won an excellence award for introducing automated unit, integration, and regression testing into the development process.

Prior to joining SpringSource, Jennifer was a principal architect of a large-scale network management system.

Jeremy Grelle is a senior software engineer with SpringSource and the technical lead of the Spring Faces project which provides first-class integration between Spring and Java Server Faces. He is a software artisan with extensive experience in combining server-side Java with the latest web browser technologies to deliver a rich and usable experience for the end user on the web. He has worked heavily with JSF since its initial release and is a member of the JSR-314 Expert Group for JSF 2.0.

Prior to joining SpringSource, Jeremy spent several years crafting large-scale enterprise web applications for the giants of the telecommunications industry. He was a leader in utilizing Spring, JSF, and the latest Ajax techniques to solve a wide variety of problems ranging from inventory management, to low-level network device monitoring, to providing more efficient integration with legacy mainframe systems. He began his career developing e-commerce systems at several web startups where he first became fascinated with bending web browsers to his will and hasn't turned back since.

Jim Jagielski is Chief Open Source Officer, Principal Software Engineer and Lead for tc Server at SpringSource. As Chief Open Source Officer, Jim brings his decade plus of experience in working with open source communities to ensure that SpringSource is successfully contributing, leveraging and remains committed to the communities that matter most to our customers.

Jim is best known for his deep, long-term involvement in open source and with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Within the ASF, which he co-founded, Jim is an active, key developer in numerous projects, including Apache Tomcat, Apache APR, and Apache HTTPd, in which he is the longest active committer within that project. He also serves on the board of directors of the ASF, a position he has held since its inception, and currently serves as Chairman.

Jim's team at SpringSource is focused on the Apache-based portfolio of products, used in association with the Spring Framework as well as independently. He and his team maintain continued deep development of these codebases, provide consulting and training around them, and serve as escalated technical support. As Chief Open Source Officer, Jim provides guidance and expertise over non-Spring related open source technologies, including Apache software, to compliment current offerings. He has a special affinity for scripting languages in addition to Java and C, and has the unique capability of handling technical problems from high-level architectural to low-level development point of view, and all aspects in between.

Over his career, Jim has served as CTO for Zend Technologies and Covalent Technologies. He founded jaguNET Access Services, a web solutions company and he also was a manager and engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He has spoken and presented at numerous conferences and seminars, and is a sought after resource by reporters and analysts regarding Apache and open source in general. He is also a noted author, having written numerous articles, including a monthly section in several magazines. Previously, he was also editor of the Apache section on Slashdot.

John Newton, CTO and Chairman, has had one of the longest and most influential careers in content management. In 1990, John co-founded, designed and led the development of Documentum®, the leader in content management recently acquired by EMC®.

For the next ten years, he invented many of the concepts widely used in the industry today. In addition, he built Documentum's marketing and professional services organizations in Europe. John has also been an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Benchmark Capital.

John was one of the founding engineers at Ingres® where he helped develop the world's first commercial relational database. John graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Joseph Faisal Nusairat, author of "Beginning JBoss Seam" and co-author "Beginning Groovy & Grails", is a Java developer who has been working full time in the Columbus Ohio area since 1998, primarily focused on Java development. His career has taken him into a variety of Fortune 500 industries including military applications, data centers, banking, internet security, pharmaceuticals, and insurance. Joseph is particularly fond of open source projects and tries to use as much open source software as possible when working with clients. Joseph is a graduate of Ohio University with dual degrees in Computer Science and Microbiology with a minor in Chemistry. Currently, Joseph works as a Senior Partner at Integrallis Software (www.integrallis.com).

Keith Donald is a principal and founding partner at SpringSource, the company behind Spring and a division of VMware. At SpringSource, Keith is a full-time member of the Spring development team focusing on web application development productivity. He is also the architect behind SpringSource's state-of-the-art training curriculum, which has provided practical Spring training to over 10,000 students worldwide.

Over his career, Keith, an experienced enterprise software developer and mentor, has built business applications for customers spanning a diverse set of industries including banking, network management, information assurance, education, retail, and healthcare. He is particularly skilled at translating business requirements into technical solutions.

Ken Sipe is a Technology Director with Perficient, Inc. (PRFT), IBM's largest service partner, where he leads multiple teams in the development of solutions in the SOA, Web 2.0 and portal domains, on both the Java and .Net platforms.

Ken was the founder of CodeMentor, where he was the Chief Architect and Mentor, leading clients in the execution of RUP and Agile methodologies in the delivery of software solutions.
Ken has a deep need to be highly diversified. Ken often works with IT executives on high-level strategic roadmaps, currently geared around service oriented architectures (SOA). Ken also likes to keep his hands "dirty" in the code, which has him on a regular basis, pairing or otherwise producing code. Ken is regularly requested by clients that know him to "rescue" projects, either through the streamlining of processes or the rapid production of code.

Kent spent 20 years in software development and consulting, mostly on middle-tier and integration technologies. He has published numerous technical articles, spoken at numerous technical conferences, including TechEd, VSLive!, and developer user groups. Kent joined Microsoft in 2008 and is the Technical Product Manager for Windows Communication Foundation and oversees several cross-vendor web service interoperability efforts.

Kirk is an industry analyst at Burton Group. For 15 years, he has worked in the trenches on real software projects. He takes a keen interest in design, architecture, application development platforms, agile development, and the IT industry in general, especially as it relates to software development.

In 2002, Kirk wrote the book Java Design: Objects, UML, and Process, published by Addison-Wesley. He has also written numerous whitepapers and articles, including The Agile Developer column for The Agile Journal. Kirk is the founder of Extensible Java, a growing resource of component design pattern heuristics for Java that can easily be applied to most other platforms, including .Net. Kirk has trained thousands of software professionals, teaching courses on UML, Java J2EE technology, object-oriented development, component based development, software architecture, and software process. He enjoys hacking in a variety of languages, including Java, .Net, Ruby, and PHP.

Mark Fisher is an engineer within the SpringSource division of VMware and lead of the Spring Integration project. He is also a committer on the core Spring Framework and the Spring BlazeDS Integration project. Mark has provided consulting services for clients across numerous industries, and he has trained hundreds of developers how to use the Spring Framework and related projects effectively. Mark speaks regularly at conferences and user groups in America and Europe.

Dr. Mark Pollack has worked extensively in the financial sector as an architect and developer on various front office trading systems that involved a mixture of Microsoft and Java technologies. Always interested in best practices and improving the software development process, Mark has been a core Spring (Java) developer since 2003 and founded its Microsoft counterpart, Spring.NET, in 2004 which he continues to lead.

Prior to joining SpringSource, he was a founding partner at CodeStreet, LLC, an independent software vendor in the financial services industry. This year Mark has been recognized as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for his involvement in the technical community.

Mark Thomas is a Senior Software Engineer with SpringSource. At SpringSource Mark leads the integration of Tomcat with tc Server and has also had a hand in the development and integration of the additional serviceability functionality.

Mark has been using and developing Apache Tomcat for more than five years. He became involved in the development of Tomcat when he needed better control over the SSL configuration than was available at the time. After fixing that first bug, he started working his way through the remaining Tomcat bugs and is still going. Along the way, Mark became a Tomcat committer and PMC member, volunteered to be the Tomcat 4 release manager, created the Tomcat security pages, became a member of the ASF, joined the Apache Security Committee and is an Apache Commons PMC member where he contributes to Commons Pool, DBCP and Daemon. He also helps maintain the ASF's Bugzilla instances.

Mark has a MEng in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.

Marty is Director of Support Services at SpringSource. Prior to the acquisition of Hyperic by SpringSource, Marty was the Director of Customer Success at Hyperic.

Before Hyperic, Marty was Director of Global Support Services and Operations at Red Hat, one of the world's leading open source providers. While at Red Hat, Marty lead various global initiatives from policy transparency to systems efficiency to support readiness while dealing with the occasional angry Enterprise customer. During his tenure at Red Hat he built the Asia-Pacific Support operations from the ground up while on assignment for two years in Australia. Additionally he held Developer and Director roles in the Information Technology department as part of the Enterprise Application Development team.

Marty holds a BS degree from North Carolina State University in Computer Science and now resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Matt is the Group Leader of Research Application Development in the Research Informatics Division of Information Sciences at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Matt has been developing and supporting enterprise Java applications in support of life sciences research for St. Jude since 2001. Matt is a committer to multiple open source projects and is the founding member of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group. Matt is also the Zone Leader at http://agile.dzone.com, and his articles have also appeared in GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine. His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, modularity and OSGi, mobile application development (iPhone/iPad/Android), web development (HTML5, etc.), and Groovy/Grails.

Before working for G2One and SpringSource doing Groovy and Grails development, Matt worked as a Java developer, FORTRAN77 programmer, and military intelligence analyst. During his time with G2One / SpringSource, he was the lead programmer for the GrailsUI plugin, a team lead on an internal Contegix application, and main contributor on several other projects, including the Grails.org plugin portal.

Since leaving SpringSource, Matt has been a freelance Groovy/Grails developer and contributed to several other projects. He is currently very interested in jQuery, Flex, and the upcoming technological singularity that will change life as we know it for all humanity.

Learn more about Matt on his website at Dangertree.net.

Maudrit Martinez is a manager at Accenture, where he focuses on technology architecture and custom enterprise application development. Maudrit is passionate yet pragmatic about technology and its effect on people and businesses.

Prior to joining Accenture, Maudrit worked as a software architect for Tracfone Wireless, one of the top pre-paid wireless service providers in the US, and as a software development manager for Todo1 Services, a company that provides technology services and consulting to banks in the US and Latin America. He also is the founder and former leader of the Miami Java Users Group.

Maudrit has more than 15 years of professional experience in software design and development across multiple industries, including financial services, telecommunication, media and entertainment. He holds a BSc. in Computer Engineering and a Master in Business Management from the Universidad Rafael Urdaneta. His interests include software architecture, agile software development, framework design, system scalability, process improvement and project management.

Michael Coté is analyst at RedMonk covering primarily enterprise software, specializing in open source, IT management, software development, collaborative, the web, and social/collaborative software. He is RedMonk’s IT Management Lead. His blog is available at http://www.PeopleOverProcess.com and he produces
the RedMonk podcast as well as the video podcast RedMonkTV.

Before joining RedMonk, Coté worked at BMC developing the BMC Performance Manager family of enterprise systems management products. Prior to BMC, Cote’ worked at a wide variety of tech companies and startups such as The Cobalt Group, Coral Technologies, and one of the first, and still thriving, online banking companies, FundsXpress. He also produces the popular code monkey podcast, DrunkAndRetired.com.

Coté was selected for the Texas Social Media Awards in 2009. Technobabble 2.0, a popular blog about analyst relations, ranked Coté’s blog #8 in its ranking of “Top 100 analyst blogs”. He was recently named the 3rd most regarded analyst in the U.S. and 5th globally by the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations. (Thanks!)

See my LinkedIn page for even more information.

Oleg is an IT professional with 14+ years of experience in software engineering across multiple disciplines including software architecture and design, consulting, business analysis and application development. He currently focuses on delivering simple but powerful Spring based solutions and training to the North American market.

After starting his career in the world of COBOL & CICS, Oleg has been focusing on professional Java and Java EE development since 1999. Since 2004 he has been heavily involved in using several open source technologies and platforms with Spring Framework at the forefront, while working on a number of projects around the world and spanning industries such as Telecommunication, Banking, Law Enforcement, US DOD and others.

Oleg's current passions include Event Driven Architecture (EDA), Grid Computing, Aspect Oriented Programming while his Spring passions are aligned with OSGi, Spring Integration and Spring Web Services, a combination which he believes will evolve in simple, light weight and yet powerful SOA platform.

A resident of the Philadelphia area, Oleg enjoys windsurfing, scuba diving, snowboarding, hockey and traveling when he can find some spare time.

Paul King leads ASERT, an organization based in Brisbane, Australia which provides software development, training and mentoring services to customers wanting to embrace new technologies, harness best practices and innovate. He has been contributing to open source projects for nearly 20 years and is an active committer on numerous projects including Groovy. Paul speaks at international conferences, publishes in software magazines and journals, and is a co-author of Manning's best-seller: Groovy in Action.

Prasad works as Sr. Member of Technical Staff in VMware’s EcoSystem Engineering Group, mainly focusing on the vCloud and vSphere Web Services API. Currently he is working with vCloud Service Providers and ISV partners for smooth adoption of VMware’s vCloud vision.

Prasad has more than 15 years of experience in Enterprise Software technologies in various technical and management capacity.

Prior to VMware Prasad worked in Vitria Technolgy Inc. where he developed and managed product in Business Process Management software suite. His main interests include enterprise java technologies and XML.
Prasad holds B.S. in Computer Engineering and M.S. in Software Engineering with emphasis on Enterprise Technologies. He also teaches graduate classes as a visiting faculty in San Jose State University.

Pratik Patel wrote the first book on 'enterprise Java' in 1996, "Java Database Programming with JDBC." He has also spoken at various conferences such as the Net Database Summit, WWW7 and the Atlanta Java User's Group (AJUG). Pratik currently runs the Atlanta Groovy and Grails User Group (ATL2G) as well as actively participating & presenting in the Atlanta Spring UG and Atlanta Java UG.

Pratik's specialty is in large-scale Java applications for mission-critical use. He has designed and built enterprise applications in the retail, health care, financial services, and telecoms sectors. Pratik holds a master's in Biomedical Engineering from UNC, has worked in places such as New York, London, and Hong Kong, and currently lives in Atlanta, GA.

Ramnivas Laddad is a SpringSource Principal Enginner. He has over a decade of experience in applying his enterprise Java and aspect-oriented programming (AOP) expertise to middleware, design automation, networking, web application, user interface, and security projects.

Ramnivas Laddad is a well-known expert in enterprise Java, especially in the area of AOP and Spring. He is the author of AspectJ in Action, the best-selling book on AOP and AspectJ that has been lauded by industry experts for its presentation of practical and innovative AOP applications to solve real-world problems. Ramnivas, a Spring framework committer, is also an active presenter at leading industry events such as JavaOne, JavaPolis, No Fluff Just Stuff, SpringOne, Software Development, and has been an active member of both the AspectJ and Spring communities from their beginnings.

Randy MacBlane is responsible for Product and Project Management of SpringSource tc Server. He also runs the Commercial Engineering team within SpringSource responsible for Enterprise support across the Spring and Hyperic product lines as well as handling direct customer relationships with Engineering.

Previously Randy was at BEA Systems with a variety of responsibilities including Tuxedo design, development and architecture; Engineering management for WebLogic Platform and worldwide Customer Centric Engineering for the WebLogic family of products.

Randy has a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology and a MS in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.

Rob Harrop is a respected speaker, author, entrepreneur and technologist.

As Lead Engineer of SpringSource dm Server, Rob is driving SpringSource's enterprise middleware product line and ensuring that the company continues to deliver high-performance, highly scalable
enterprise soutions. With a thorough knowledge of both Java and .NET, Rob has successfully deployed projects across both platforms. He has
extensive experience across a variety of sectors, in particular banking,retail and government. Prior to joining SpringSource, he co-founded UK-based software company Cake Solutions Limited and worked as Lead Developer for a successful dotcom start-up.

Rob is the author of five books, including Pro Spring, a widely acclaimed, comprehensive resource on the Spring Framework.

Rob is a member of the JCP and is involved in the JSR-255 Expert Group for JMX 2.0. Rob is an experienced, highly-sought after, technical speaker who can communicate complex topics in a way that any developer can understand. Over the past 3-4 years, Rob has also presented at JavaOne, QCon, AOSD, The Spring Experience, SpringONE, OSCon, and OreDev on a variety of topics to rave reviews.

Robert Fischer is a multi-language open source developer currently specializing in Groovy in Grails. In the past, his specialties have been in Perl, Java, Ruby, and OCaml. In the future, his specialty will probably be F# or (preferably) a functional JVM language like Scala or Clojure.

Robert is the author of Grails Persistence in GORM and GSQL, a regular contributor to GroovyMag and JSMag, the founder of the JConch Java concurrency library, and the author/maintainer of Liquibase-DSL and the Autobase database migration plugin for Grails.

Rod is one of the world's leading authorities on Java and J2EE development. He is a best-selling author, experienced consultant, and open source developer, as well as a popular conference speaker.

Rod's best-selling Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (2002) was one of the most influential books ever published on J2EE. The sequel, J2EE without EJB (July 2004, with Juergen Hoeller), has proven almost equally significant, establishing a comprehensive vision for lightweight, post-EJB J2EE development.

Rod has extensive experience as a consultant in a wide range of industries: principally, finance, media and insurance. He has specialized in server-side Java development since 1996. Prior to that, he worked mainly in C and C++.

His experience as a consultant has led him to see problems from a client's perspective as well as a technology perspective, and has driven his influential criticism of bloated, inefficient, orthodox approaches to J2EE architecture, which have delivered very poor results for stakeholders.

Rod is the founder of the Spring Framework, which began from code published with Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development. Along with Juergen Hoeller, he continues to lead the development of Spring.

He regularly speaks at conferences in the US, Europe and Asia, including the ServerSide Symposium (2003, 2004 and 2005), JavaPolis (Europe's leading Java conference), and JAOO (2004). Engagements in 2005 include two presentations at JavaOne 2005 and a keynote at the JavaWorld 2005 conference (Tokyo, June).
Rod serves in the JCP on the Expert Groups defining the Servlet 2.4 and JDO 2.0 specifications.

Rod continues to be actively involved in client projects at Interface21, as well as Spring development, writing and evangelism.

Ryan is a Principal Engineer at SpringSource. Prior to the acquisition of Hyperic by SpringSource, Ryan was the co-founder and Chief Architect at Hyperic. In addition to his responsibilities as the technical lead on the project, Ryan is heavily involved in customer deployments of Hyperic HQ, gaining critical knowledge of how operations teams deal with the rapid technological advances in IT infrastructure.

Before Hyperic, Ryan was a Senior Software Engineer at Covalent Technologies, a provider of commercial support and add-on modules for the Apache web server. While at Covalent, Ryan was on the team that developed Enterprise Ready Server (now known as SpringSource ERS) and was the author of mod_ftp, a protocol module for Apache that adds FTP support. mod_ftp entered the ASF incubation process in 2005 and was graduated to a subproject of the HTTP Server Project in 2007.

Ryan holds a BS degree from the University of Nebraska in Computer Engineering and lives in San Francisco with his wife Amy.

Scott Davis is the founder of ThirstyHead.com, a training company that specializes in Groovy and Grails training.

Scott published one of the first public websites implemented in Grails in 2006 and has been actively working with the technology ever since. Author of the book Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java and two ongoing IBM developerWorks article series (Mastering Grails and in 2009, Practically Groovy), Scott writes extensively about how Groovy and Grails are the future of Java development.

Scott teaches public and private classes on Groovy and Grails for start-ups and Fortune 100 companies. He is a regular presenter on the international technical conference circuit (including No Fluff Just Stuff). In 2008, Scott was voted the top Rock Star at JavaOne for his talk "Groovy, the Red Pill: How to blow the mind of a buttoned-down Java developer".

Scott Vlaminck has been developing web applications for over a decade, and has spent most of that time using Java and J2EE. For the past two and a half years, however, he's been enjoying the freedom of programming in Groovy using Grails. He's an active member of the
Groovy Users of Minnesota and has contributed to both the Grails and Groovy projects. His weblog can be found at http://refactr.com/blog/and he can be contacted at scott@refactr.com.

Dr Stefan Schmidt has been a Software Engineer with SpringSource since early 2008. He is currently based in the Sydney, Australia office, where he has been a key Roo developer since the project began. Stefan's work on Roo focuses on many of the most popular add-ons, including those which provide web, search and messaging features.

Stefan has been developing Java enterprise applications since 2003. Prior to his work at SpringSource, Stefan has been teaching various Enterprise Java subjects at the University of Technology in Sydney. He mentored hundreds of students in the design of enterprise software architectures with focus on scalability, separation of concerns and design patterns using enterprise Java technologies.

Steve Jin is the author of the first VMware SDK book: VMware VI and vSphere SDK by Prentice Hall. Currently he is a senior MTS at VMware, where he provides guidance to strategic partners, such as IBM, HP, Dell, NetApp, BEA, who build applications using VI (vSphere) SDK. In his spare time, he founded VI (vSphere) Java API open source project, which is widely used by various commercial companies and developers.
Jin received his BA, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in control theory (EE) from prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing. Prior to his current job, Jin worked at IBM Research, Rational Software, and ASDC in various engineering and management roles.

Thomas has been a developer on the Spring Framework project since early 2003, contributing to enhancements of the JDBC framework portion.

Thomas currently works as a consultant for SpringSource specializing in Java EE and database projects. He has been involved with developing database applications, both as a DBA and as an application developer for over 20 years, using a wide variety of languages and databases.

Thomas is co-author of "Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework" together with Rod Johnson, Juergen Hoeller, Alef Arendsen, and Colin Sampaleanu, published by Wrox in 2005.

Tom McCuch is a Senior Sales Engineer for SpringSource with over twenty years of experience in software engineering. Tom specializes in the architecture, implementation, and deployment of distributed systems requiring high Reliability, Availability, and Scalability (RAS) features. Before joining SpringSource, Tom consulted enterprise clients across multiple industries in the architecture of mission-critical solutions based on open source software as well as led the engineering of enterprise Java middleware supporting next-generation telecommunications products deployed at tier-1 telcos both in the U.S. and Europe.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. He is author of ".NET Gotchas," coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer," author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" and "Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

Vipul Savjani is an experienced consultant in the Accenture technology architecture organization. Vipul has more than eight years of diverse experience in technical architecture, and software engineering and management. Vipul’s technology background includes extensive project work which utilizes the entire Java and Microsoft .NET platforms. In addition to technical architecture, Vipul has successfully led product and IT solutions development initiatives that generate substantial client value. Vipul is currently pursing a master’s degree in computer science.