Virtual Appliances Leadership Summit 2008 - Speakers

As research vice president of system software, Al Gillen is responsible for research and analysis on server and client operating systems, focusing primarily on Linux, Unix and Windows. Al also covers related system infrastructure software including the use of operating systems aboard virtual machines and the emerging software appliance market. He brings 25 years of computer industry experience to IDC. His research at IDC has included participation in studies on total cost of ownership for Linux, Windows and Unix systems in both client and server configurations, as well as assisting in IDC's recurring demand-side research covering the growth and evolution of the Linux market. In addition, he has tracked the changing licensing programs used by Microsoft and by the major Linux vendors.

Bruce Richardson brings more than 20 years of experience to his current role at AMR Research. Bruce has spent most of his career analyzing the software industry with a distinct emphasis on ERP and supply chain. Since joining AMR Research in 1988, he has been responsible for spearheading new market research and contributing to the company’s analysis of leading market trends in areas such as: ERP, supply chain management, service-oriented architectures, and software-as-a-service. Bruce has made many early market predictions that have been realized, such as the rise of the advanced planning market and the evolution of MRP to ERP. Bruce also coined the term MES early in his role at AMR Research when he was responsible for all the written research that came from the firm. Bruce graduated cum laude from Boston College.

Mark Lewis is President of the Content Management and Archiving Division of EMC Corporation. With 2006 revenues of $11.2 billion and more than 33,000 employees, EMC is the world’s leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. In this role, Mark is responsible for accelerating the growth and expanding the market presence of EMC’s Content Management and Archiving Division.

Billy founded rPath along with Erik Troan in 2005 with a vision for dramatically simplifying the creation and maintenance of software solutions. In late 2005, rPath was the first company to use the term "software appliance" to describe a new, simplified format for providing software applications. With the dramatic increase in adoption of virtualization by the server industry, software appliances are poised to become the new standard for application delivery as virtual appliances. Billy holds an Aerospace Engineering degree from Georgia Tech as well as MS degrees in Management and Engineering from MIT.

An industry evangelist for the Xen™ open source hypervisor, Simon Crosby is Chief Technology Officer of the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix Systems, formerly XenSource, Inc. In his career Simon has served as a tenured faculty member at the University of Cambridge, UK, where he led research on network performance and control, and multimedia operating systems. He is author of over 35 research papers and patents on a number of datacenter and networking topics including security, network and server virtualization, resource optimization and performance. Simon is a frequent speaker on the topic of enterprise-grade virtualization with open source technologies. Simon has just been named one of the "15 Innovators and Influencers Who Will Make a Difference in 2008" by InformationWeek.

Jeff Barr is an evangelist responsible for furthering awareness among software developers of the opportunity to innovate and build businesses using Amazon Web Services. Launched in July 2002, Amazon Web Services exposes Amazon.com technology and product data that enables developers to build innovative and entrepreneurial applications on their own. He joined Amazon in August 2002 as a senior software developer on the associates team.

Daniel Chalef is the Chief Operating Officer of KnowledgeTree and a board member of Jam Warehouse, KnowledgeTree's parent company. Prior to commercializing KnowledgeTree, Daniel, as a member of Jam Warehouse's executive team, helped secure and deliver enterprise software projects for world-benchmarked retailers and consumer goods companies including Tesco Stores Limited, Britvic Softdrinks Limited, Foschini Group Ltd and Woolworths South Africa. Daniel has in the past held a number of management and engineering positions at Internet, and mobile and telecommunications companies (including Verizon Business).

Dr. Monica Lam is a founder and chief scientist at MokaFive. She has been a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford since 1988. Her research passion is in making computing and programming easier. She co-authored the latest edition of the Dragon book, and is one of the top 50 most cited computer science researchers in the world. She helped found Tensilica, a leading configurable processor core company on her last sabbatical in 1998. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.Sc. from University of British Columbia.

Mark H. Webbink is a Senior Lecturing Fellow at the Duke University School of Law and advises and writes on open source software issues. He also serves on the board of directors of the Software Freedom Law Center. For over seven years he represented Red Hat, Inc. as general counsel and deputy general counsel for intellectual property. During his tenure there he developed a number of groundbreaking intellectual property practices, including Red Hat's Patent Promise and the legal foundations for the company's subscription model for open source software. Mark has written and spoken extensively on the subjects of open source software, software patents, and patent reform.