Ben Alex is a respected technologist, entrepreneur and speaker. Ben has been working professionally in software since 1995. The software project Ben is most widely known for is Spring Security, which he founded in 2003 and continues to lead at SpringSource. Spring Security is a popular, open-source security framework that is used in numerous government, banking and military installations. Whilst written in Java, the success of Spring Security has seen its architecture ported to other platforms such as Microsoft .NET and Python. Ben's career history also includes other accomplishments in software development and business. Most recently, Ben led the establishment and exponential growth of SpringSource's operations in Asia-Pacific. Before that he founded and grew a successful Australian software company, Acegi Technology Pty Limited. In his spare time, Ben has also been a director and advisor to businesses in industries as diverse as business services, intellectual property licensing and ecommerce. In recent years Ben has presented at technology conferences including The Spring Experience (2005, 2006, and 2007), SpringOne (2005 and 2006) , JavaOne (2008) and The Server Side Java Symposium (2007 and 2008). Ben is also a regular guest presenter at user groups across the world, with recent appearances in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, Singapore, Wellington, Auckland and Stockholm. He also authored the security chapter of the Wiley book, "Professional J2EE Development with Spring Framework."

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.

Dr. Jim Webber is the Global Head of Architecture for ThoughtWorks where he works with clients on delivering dependable service-oriented systems. Jim was formerly a senior researcher with the UK E-Science programme where he developed strategies for aligning Grid computing with Web Services practices and architectural patterns for dependable Service-Oriented computing. Jim has extensive Web Services architecture and development experience as an architect with Arjuna Technologies and was the lead developer with Hewlett-Packard on the industry's first Web Services Transaction solution.

Jim is an active speaker in the Web Services space and is co-author of the book "Developing Enterprise Web Services - An Architect's Guide" in addition to being a contributing author to other books and articles.

Jim holds a B.Sc. in Computing Science and Ph.D. in Parallel Computing both from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. His blog is located at http://jim.webber.name.

Martin Fowler is an author, speaker, consultant and general loud-mouth on software development.

He concentrates on designing enterprise software - looking at what makes a good design and what practices are needed to come up with good design. He has pioneered object-oriented technology, refactoring, patterns, agile methodologies, domain modeling, the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and Extreme Programming.

He's the Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks - an international application development company, and has written five books on software development: Analysis Patterns, UML Distilled (now in its 3rd edition), Refactoring, Planning Extreme Programming (with Kent Beck), and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. I also write articles regularly on my site at Martin Fowler.

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.

Thilo Frotscher is an independent Software Architect and Trainer. Besides working in software projects of various clients he also regularly facilitates training courses, seminars and workshops. Thilo is an internationally acknowledged expert for Java and Web service technology and has been frequently invited to present at conferences. He has trained hundreds of developers worldwide, written numerous articles for trade magazines and (co-)authored three books about Java, Web Services and SOA. Currently, Thilo is based in New Zealand.