Dave Thomas has a wide spectrum of experience in the software industry as an engineer, professor, consultant, architect, executive and investor. Dave is founder and CEO of Bedarra Corporation; which provides virtual CTO and CEO, business mentoring and seed investment to emerging companies. Recently formed Bedarra Research Labs undertakes speculative research on applications of emerging software technologies.

He has many years of experience in structured documents including the design of laser printer controllers, early commercial applications of Tex. He has advised on the IBM B2B strategy, and is on the MS Customer Advisory Council and with OLL contributed to the SCORM elearning standard, and authoring tools. He is Chairman of Xia Systems, Online-Learning.com (OLL), and a director of Stilo/Omnimark, Bitflash, Amikanow and Synop and several other software companies.

Dave is best known as the founder and past CEO and president of Object Technology International Inc. (formerly OTI, now IBM OTI Labs) and led the commercial introduction of object and component technology. The company is often cited as the ideal model of a software technology company.

He was also the principal visionary and architect for IBM VisualAge Smalltalk and Java tools and virtual machines including the initial work on popular multi-language Eclipse.org IDE. OTI pioneered the use of virtual machines in embedded systems with Tektronix shipping the first commercial products in 1988. He was instrumental in the establishment of IBM's Pervasive computing efforts and in particular the Java tooling.

Dave is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University, and the University Of Queensland and is widely published in the software engineering literature. He is a popular humorous albeit opinionated keynote speaker. Dave remains active in various roles within the technical community including ECOOP, AOSD, Evolve, and Agile Development Conference, Agile/XP Universe and OOPSLA Onward. He is a founding director of the Agile Alliance and most recently a founder of Open Augment Consortium. Dave writes expert columns in Otland Online in Germany, and the Journal Of Object Technology in Switzerland where he also serves on the editorial board.

Gregor Hohpe is a software architect with Google, Inc. Gregor is a widely recognized thought leader on asynchronous messaging and service-oriented architectures. He co-authored the seminal book "Enterprise Integration Patterns" (Addison-Wesley, 2004), followed by "Integration Patterns" and "Enterprise Solution Patterns", both published by Microsoft Press. He was nominated a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) Solution Architect for his contributions to the developer community and recognized as an active member of the patterns community by the Hillside Group. In 2005, Joel Spolsky selected Gregor's article "Starbucks Does Not Use Two-phase Commit" for his "Best Software Writing" (APress).

Gregor speaks regularly at technical conferences around the world. He likes to cut through the hype surrounding service-oriented architectures and captures nuggets of advice in the form of design patterns that can help developers avoid costly mistakes. Find out more about his work at eaipatterns.com

John is CTO/co-founder of C24. Founded in 2000, C24 hit the market a year later with an innovated Java-binding technology for financial services messaging standards. Integration Objects (IO) can generate Java code for almost every financial services messaging standard, from FpML (including validation rules) to SWIFT. It is unique niche in the market has seen it OEMd by many of the leading middleware, messaging and application server vendors. The largest clients now feed over $500million of trades a day through the code, the fastest process thousands of messages second.

The wide coverage of C24-IO has given John a unique view into the internals of many of the world leading financial institutions. John has nearly 20 years in Investment Banking and over 25 years in IT, mostly as a consultant. He has co-authored several books on Java and J2EE, was the author of Learning Trees distributed Java course and a regular speaker on grid, Jini and JavaSpaces in the Java and banking world. Over the years John has held more than one high-profile position as Head of Technical Architect in banks such as JPMorgan.

Rene W. Schmidt is a Principal Engineer at VMware, Inc., and is the technical lead for the advanced development center located in Aarhus, Denmark.

Rene is a key contributor to the VirtualCenter product line and spends most of his time fiddling with ideas on how to simplify application development and datacenter operation using virtual machine technology.

Before joining VMware in 2002, Rene worked at Sun Microsystems. Rene was the technical lead of the Java Web Start product, and also part of the development team that shipped Java(TM) Hotspot(TM) Virtual Machine 1.0. Rene holds an MS in Computer Science from University of Washington, Seattle, and from the University of Aarhus, Denmark.

Stefan Tilkov is co-founder and principal consultant at innoQ, a technology consulting company with offices in Germany and Switzerland. He has been involved in the design of large-scale, distributed systems for more than a decade, using a variety of technologies and tools ranging from C++ and CORBA over J2EE/Java EE and Web Services to REST and Ruby on Rails.

Stefan is lead SOA editor of InfoQ, author of a numerous articles and a frequent speaker at conferences around the world.