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.

Erik Dörnenburg is an application architect and developer at ThoughtWorks Inc., where he is helping clients with the design and implementation of large-scale enterprise solutions. Building on his experience with J2EE, Microsoft .NET and other environments, Erik is continually exploring new patterns of enterprise software.

Before joining ThoughtWorks Erik was Technical Director at Pixelpark UK, a new media company, where he integrated enterprise systems with web-based solutions and a variety of digital delivery channels. His career in enterprise software began in the early nineties on the NeXTSTEP platform and Erik has been an advocate of agile, test-driven, object-oriented development and Open Source software for many years. He holds a degree in Informatics from the University of Dortmund and has studied Computer Science and Linguistics at the University College Dublin.

Erik Meijer is an architect in the Microsoft SQL server division where he currently works together with the Microsoft Visual C# and the Microsoft Visual Basic language design teams on data integration in programming languages.

Prior to joining Microsoft he was an associate professor at Utrecht University and adjunct professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute.

Erik is one of the designers of the standard functional programming language Haskell98 and more recently the Cw language.

Patrick Linskey has been involved in object/relational mapping for 5+ years. As the founder and CTO of SolarMetric, Patrick drove the technical direction of the company and oversaw the development of Kodo.

Now at BEA, he leads the EJB team in designing and implementation of the WebLogic Server EJB solution. Patrick is one of the leaders on the EJB3 and the JDO specification teams, and is BEA's representative on the EJB3 expert group. Patrick also leads the OpenJPA open source project in Apache.