Biography: Dave Thomas

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.

Dave is best known as the founder and past CEO and president ofObject 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 technologycompany.

He was also the principal visionary and architect for IBM VisualAgeSmalltalk and Java tools and virtual machines including the initialwork on popular multi-language Eclipse.org IDE. OTI pioneered the useof virtual machines in embedded systems with Tektronix shipping thefirst commercial products in 1988. He was instrumental in theestablishment of IBM's Pervasive computing efforts and in particularthe 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.