2009 Conference Speakers

Joshua Aune
HPC Systems Architect/Product Manager
Fusion-io

In his position, Joshua Aune oversees customer solutions design, product feature set-up for existing and future products, support and sales engineering. Formerly, Josh worked as Systems Architect for Linux Networks. There, he designed and deployed several supercomputing (HPC) systems that debuted in the worldwide top-20 fastest. Josh lives with his wife and son in the Salt Lake City, Utah area.

John Bair
Chief Technology Officer
LaunchPoint

John works as CTO LaunchPoint, helping information-centric startups to innovate and thrive. Before joining LaunchPoint, John worked as the lead technologist for HP's Information Management practice, responsible for BI and IM technology strategies, reference architectures and methodologies. John previously worked as Senior Principal and CTO West for Knightsbridge Solutions, which HP acquired in 2006.

John joined Knightsbridge from Amazon.com, where, as data warehouse architect, he created high performance scalable e-commerce business intelligence systems including Amazon's enterprise data warehouse and analytic services.

Linda Bernardi
Founder
StraTerra Partners

With leadership experience spanning over two decades, Linda Bernardi has a strong vision and passion for emerging and future technologies. Linda has launched StraTerra Partners, a consultancy offering strategy services in enterprise oriented technologies. StraTerra Partners works closely with large enterprises and technology providers.

She is an active technology investor, entrepreneur and board member. Linda is a successful entrepreneur and has held several senior executive leadership positions in high-tech across key verticals, and strategic consulting. In 2001 she founded ConnecTerra, Inc., the leading software provider connecting RFID technology to large enterprise IT. As the CEO, Linda successfully grew the business, and sold ConnecTerra to BEA Systems in 2006. Most recently she was the VP of Strategy and Innovation at Capgemini, involved in building the global technology ecosystem of the company.

Linda was the SVP of strategic development at PPD (Pharmaceutical Product Development), Inc. where she focused on strategic acquisitions/integration of various technology and genomics companies and new innovations in clinical trials. Prior to that, Linda was the SVP of global business development and alliances at BBN (Bolt, Beranek & Newman), a think-tank based in Cambridge, MA, where she had spent the first decade of her career.

Linda has a Masters degree in applied statistics from UCLA. She serves on the boards of the SETI Institute, the International Museum of Women, on the council of advisors for Astia, and is Emertius board member at the Anita Borg Institute. She has been elected as chair of the high-tech chapter of the National Defense Industry Association (NDIA) effective January 2009.

Gary Bhattacharjee
Business Intelligence Services, Capital Markets
HP

Gary brings a wealth of experience in the field of information management, business intelligence and technology strategy. Over the past couple of decades he has provided thought leadership to support, enhance and improve business strategies primarily in the Financial Services and the Retail industry sector. Gary started his career at IBM Australia, where he was involved with building some core technologies in the area of data management. He played a significant role in Citigroup in the late nineties to lead the consolidation of information across the global corporate banking portfolio. As the leader of the Enterprise Architecture Group at A&P, a US Grocery Retailer, he drove an information oriented IT strategy to achieve substantive savings and increased productivity in operations. Currently he leads the business intelligence services portfolio for the Financial Services (Capital Markets) vertical at Hewlett-Packard.

Jeff Birnbaum
Managing Director
Chief Technology Architect & Global Head of Architecture and Engineering
Merrill Lynch

Jeffrey M. Birnbaum is Chief Technology Architect and Global Head of Architecture and Engineering at Merrill Lynch. In this role he is responsible for all aspects of the core architecture and engineering of the enterprise including compute, network, storage, middleware, database, grid, market data and high availability. Mr. Birnbaum is also heavily involved in emerging parallel application development for low latency messaging and computational finance.

In 2006, Birnbaum founded 60East Technologies which developed "AMPS" (Advanced Message Processing System) which is a highly parallel low latency content based publish/subscribe engine that delivers unprecedented levels of performance on commodity computers and 10GbE networking. Birnbaum's previous experience includes Managing Director, Chief Technology Architect and Global Head of Enterprise Computing at Morgan Stanley (1991-2006). Prior to joining Morgan Stanley, Mr Birnbaum worked as a systems engineer in the aerospace industry and for the CIA. He holds a BS is Electrical Computer Engineering from the University of California Santa Barbara.

Wim Coekaerts
Vice President - Linux Engineering
Oracle

Wim Coekaerts is the Vice President of Linux Engineering for Oracle Corporation, where he leads the team responsible for both Oracle VM server virtualization and Oracle Unbreakable Linux support. Mr. Coekaerts joined Oracle Belgium in 1995 as a technical engineer for Oracle Support Services. In 1997, he moved to Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores, California where he held various positions in program management for Oracle's worldwide solutions support group. Two years later he began work on the prototype of Oracle Database Appliance, focused on the tight integration of the database with operating system such as Solaris and Linux. In 2000, Mr. Coekaerts was asked to design, prototype and develop an Oracle Linux-based Internet appliance. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison later spun it off into a new company now called the New Internet Computer. Prior to joining Oracle, Mr. Coekaerts oversaw software projects and Linux migration for the data center at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Mr. Coekaerts received a degree in computer science from Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium.

Angelo Corsaro, Ph.D.
Product Strategy and Marketing Manager
PrismTech

Dr. Angelo Corsaro leads OpenSplice DDS product strategy and marketing, addressing technology positioning, planning, evolution, and evangelism, as well as extending the technology adoption to new markets. Dr. Corsaro leads the strategic standardization at the Object Management Group (OMG), where he co-chairs the Data Distribution Service (DDS) Special Interest Group, and the Real-Time Embedded and Specialized Services Task Force. Angelo is a widely know and cited expert in the field of real-time and distributed systems and has over 10+ years of experience in technology management and design of high performance mission- and business critical distributed system.

Angelo received a Ph.D. and a M.S. in Computer Science from the Washington University in St. Louis, and a Laurea Magna cum Laude in Computer Engineering from the University of Catania, Italy.

David Crosbie
CTO
Leostream

Leostream is David's third venture. Previously, he founded two other successful startups: Adero and Bluesocket. Adero was sold to COLT in 2001, and was a major player in the Content Distribution Network space. Bluesocket is the market leader in the wireless LAN management space. Prior to Adero, David was the first employee at Sitara Networks, a QoS product company. David is an engineering graduate of Oxford University, England and has an MBA from INSEAD, France.

Jacob Farmer
CTO
Cambridge Computer

Jacob Farmer is an industry-recognized expert on storage networking and data protection technologies. He has authored numerous papers and is a regular speaker at major industry events such as Storage Networking World, VMWorld, Interop, and the Usenix conferences. Jacob’s no-nonsense, fast paced presentation style has won him many accolades. Most recently Jacob was honored as the top-rated speaker at Storage Networking World, the preeminent conference for the data storage industry. Jacob is a regular lecturer at many of the nation’s leading colleges and universities. Of recent he has given invited talks at institutions such as Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, Harvard, and Yale.

Inside the data storage industry, Jacob is best known for having authored best practices for designing and optimizing enterprise backup systems and for his expertise in the marketplace for emerging storage networking technologies. He has served on the advisory boards of many of the most successful storage technology startups, and is well respected in the analyst community. Jacob is a graduate of Yale University.

Al Gillen
Program Vice President, System Software
IDC

As program vice president, system software, Al Gillen is responsible for IDC's operating systems and virtualization research for both client and server systems on a worldwide basis. This coverage area includes in-depth analysis on operating system adoption and deployments, the emerging software appliance market, as well as oversight for research on both server virtualization and client virtualization software.

Nimrod Gindi
Director of Corporate Strategy
Mellanox Technologies

Nimrod Gindi is Director of Corporate Strategy at Mellanox Technologies, which specializes in Ethernet and InfiniBand adapters and system products. Mr. Gindi has been in charge of business development mainly in the USA financial market. Between 2000 and 2005, he was Team Leader for Network Adapter Architecture and Design validation projects and Team Leader for PCI Bridge design projects. Between 2003 and 2005, Mr. Gindi was the company's official representative in standard Architecture working group at the InfiniBand Trade Association, and Workgroup Leader in Compliance and Interoperability Working group (CIWG). Mr. Gindi holds a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from Israel Technion Institute of Technology.

Anthony Golia
Executive Director
Morgan Stanley Enterprise Computing

Anthony has been in the Enterprise Computing group at Morgan Stanley for the last ten years. He has been evaluating existing technologies and designing some new ones in spaces such as automation and tooling for large Linux environments, fault tolerant network architectures (using Linux), and low latency OSes.

Before that, he was a network engineer at another bank where he designed a high capacity Internet infrastructure for web farms. Anthony holds a Master of Science in Telecommunications from Pace University, NY and a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from Polytechnic University, NY.

Duncan Johnston-Watt
CEO
CloudSoft

Duncan Johnston-Watt is the Founder & CEO of stealth startup Cloudsoft Corporation. Cloudsoft is headquartered in Scotland and is a spin out from Duncan's previous company Enigmatec Corporation. Duncan has over twenty years experience developing technology for the financial services industry specialising in the development of large-scale distributed systems.

In April 1998 Duncan joined the Reuters Group subsidiary, Instinet Corporation where he led the development of their new Fixed Income brokerage platform that was launched in March 2000 becoming Managing Director, Fixed Income Technology in May 2000. At Instinet he pioneered the use of Java enterprise technologies in Financial Services. In recognition of this work he was nominated for a Computerworld Smithsonian Award in April 2000. Duncan holds an MSc in Computation from Oxford University.

Ramakrishna Karedla
Performance Architect, High Performance Computing
Financial Services
Intel

Rama Karedla works as a Performance Architect for Intel’s High Performance Engineering team, focusing on the Financial Services vertical.

He consults with clients from the industry, helping them analyze and optimize their applications for the Intel architecture. Some of his areas of focus are, Latency impact on Market Data applications, multi threading applications to take advantage of Intel’s multi core strategy, evangelizing Intel’s software productivity tools such as the VTune Performance Analyzer, Thread Profiler and the Intel’s Compilers.

Prior to joining Intel, Rama worked for IBM’s Notes Domino Performance Group on architecting the Tivoli System Health Monitoring tool, and at HP working on research issues dealing with caching for large storage controllers.

Rama holds a Bachelor’s in Physics and Math, and a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University.

Inna Kuznetsova
Director, Linux Strategy
IBM

Ms. Inna Kuznetsova is responsible for IBM Linux strategy across all company brands, and manages a marketing and business development organization, as well as strategy and business development projects in IBM System p. In this role she coordinates cross-company strategy in Linux, acts as IBM spokesperson in the Linux space and ensures rapid response to changes in the market environment. In addition, she also manages IBM System p inorganic growth through partnerships and acquisitions.

In her previous role as Director of Marketing Planning and Execution Ms. Kuznetsova ran the world wide strategy, channels, channel enablement and marketing programs work in IBM System p marketing organization. In May 2007 her mission was expanded to include Business Development for System p as well as Linux Strategy for all IBM company.

Prior to joining IBM System p in March of 2006, Ms. Kuznetsova managed an Express Team in IBM Small & Medium Business Group. The team worked on the coordinated marketing strategy and branding efforts for Express, a strategic set of offerings for 100-1,000 employees companies across all IBM product divisions.

Earlier in her career Ms. Kuznetsova directed branding initiatives and marketing campaigns world wide for IBM internal start-ups. She was a member of the senior management team that launched one of such start-ups - IBM Life Sciences, developing IT systems for biotech and pharmaceutical research – and brought it to the position of a market leader in less than 3 years.

Ms Kuznetsova held various marketing, business development and managerial positions in IBM Corporation since 1993. She has an MS in Mathematics & Computer Science from Moscow State University, Russia, and an MBA from Columbia Business School.

Gordon S. Linoff
Founder
Data Miners

Eleven years ago, Gordon started a consulting company with his business partner and co-author Michael Berry to focus on their passion: doing, teaching about, and writing about data mining and advanced analytics. Since then, Gordon has taught thousands of students the fundamentals of data mining and written four books. His most recent book, Data Analysis Using SQL and Excel provides practical examples of data analysis using readily available tools. His earlier books, written with Michael Berry, include Data Mining Techniques for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Relationship Management, and cover the fundamentals and algorithms of data mining in a business context.

Prior to co-founding Data Miners (www.data-miners.com) in 1998, Gordon worked at Naviant Technology Solutions where he learned the business of consulting and Thinking Machines Corporation where he learned parallel computing and data mining algorithms. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in theoretical mathematics. Gordon has consulted for a wide range of companies including Bank of America, BT, The Limited, The New York Times, T-Mobile, The Teaching Company, and Pfizer.

Charles Milo
Member of Senior Staff
Enterprise Technical Specialist
Intel

Charlie Milo is an Enterprise Technical Specialist with Intel Americas. He has been at Intel 11 years working with Wall Street customers as an Application Engineer. He is a member of Intel Americas Senior Staff due to his outstanding knowledge of Intel systems and its benefits to Wall Street. Charlie and has been deeply involved in understanding customer issues and providing input on the next generation Intel Xeon processor. He will share many insights and that can help you unlock outstanding performance for Intel’s next generation of Xeon servers.

Bill Morton
Vice President of Sales
iSys

Bill Morton has a forty-year career in Information Technology and Business Consulting sectors. His areas of expertise include enterprise facilities management, operations and planning, software development, systems architecture, as well as corporate financial planning and management. Bill is the developer of a unique “blueprinting” approach to IT architecture called, Enterprise Systems Architecture (ESA), which based on neutral building blocks.

Currently, as Vice President of iSys Corporation, Bill has been working with Financial Market Enterprises in developing solutions to handle today’s market requirements. This includes ultra low latency systems as well resolving data center growth. Bill has a BS in Electrical Engineering with Minor in Computer Science.

Alan Paris
Executive Director
Ernst and Young

Alan L. Paris is a New York based executive director in the Financial Services Office of Ernst and Young LLP, focusing on trading and market risk technology solutions. Alan has over 25 years of experience providing strategy, business development and technology implementation services to investment banks, broker/dealers, exchanges and clearing houses, hedge funds, investment management companies, e-commerce entities and energy/commodities trading organizations. He has led 200+ person teams in implementing trading and risk technologies from the front to back office for global firms in Fixed Income, Equities, FX, Energy, Commodities, Options and OTC Derivatives environments.

As former global head of trading floor support at Deutsche Bank, Alan led enterprise wide projects in application development and implementation of risk systems, portfolio management, portfolio accounting, trade management and execution technologies, strategic planning, technical and business process design and vendor management. Alan has authored articles for leading business publications including Securities Industry News and Wall Street & Technology and has been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, ComputerWorld, Smart Money Magazine and CNN.

Richard Reichgut
Director of Financial Services
Collaborative Software Institute

As the director of financial services for the Collaborate Software Initiative (CSI), Richard Reichgut is responsible for leading the company’s entire financial services practice. In this role, he developed the CSI Open Market Data (OMD) initiative and spearheaded its successful customer participation program.

Previously, Reichgut was director of financial services strategic solutions and alliances at AMD, where he was responsible for the company’s financial services strategy. Reichgut served as the liaison between the financial services community and AMD – relaying their unique industry needs to AMD’s engineering and product management teams. While at AMD, Reichgut managed market data, algorithmic trading and multicore programming issues and worked closely with key financial institutions, independent software vendors (ISVs) and market-data providers.

Reichgut also spent ten years at Sun Microsystems, where he was influential in spearheading its Java development and sales venture divisions. Additionally, he has held positions at New Era of Networks, Inc. (NEON), Novera Software and Quotron (now a subsidiary of CitiCorp).

A graduate of the University of Texas, Reichgut holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science.

Anil Sharma
Executive Director, IDEAS Practice Areas
Morgan Stanley

Anil is an Executive Director at Morgan Stanley and is currently leading the Information Management group focusing on Global Operations Risk and Control. He has over 15 years of experience in building enterprise wide Middleware and Database systems. He joined Morgan Stanley in 2000 and was responsible for designing multiple Rapid Application Development toolkits that were instrumental in numerous renovation efforts for many ageing Mainframe systems. For the past 5 years, his primary focus has been on development of large-scale active data warehouses on Linux clusters to provide cost effective, scalable solutions for meeting risk and regulatory requirements. As a key member of the database strategy group, he helped shape the current technology platform for database development at Morgan Stanley.

Sumeet Shendrikar
Technical Account Manager, Financial Services
RTI

Sumeet Shendrikar has been with RTI for more than 4 years, where he has directed and engaged in the development of real-time distributed systems across multiple industries in all development phases: requirements, system architecture and design, integration, and post-deployment support. He has been focused on RTI Financial Services engagements for the past 2 years, and recently joined the RTI New York office as a Lead Financial Services Specialist.

Sumeet holds an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, and a BS EECS from the University of California at Berkeley.

Justin Steinman
Vice President, Solution & Product Marketing
Novell

Justin Steinman is responsible for solution and product marketing at Novell, including solution definition and go-to-market strategy. His team is responsible for the market research, positioning and messaging, customer-facing content, competitive intelligence, and campaign planning required to take Novell's products, services and solutions to market through direct and indirect sales channels, including global strategic partners and solution providers. Justin is also responsible for Novell's solution incubator and open source community marketing efforts. Prior to this position, Justin was the Director of Product Marketing for Linux and open platforms solutions at Novell, including the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform.

Previously, Justin worked for Novell on the North America field marketing team and on the market strategy team. Prior to business school, Justin worked in solutions marketing for Tilion, Inc., a venture-backed start-up that developed web services software for the supply chain. Justin started his career as a SAP consultant for Accenture.

Justin holds a Master’s of Business Administration from the MIT Sloan School of Management with a focus in New Product and Venture Development. He graduated from Dartmouth College, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, with a dual degree in English and History.

Larry Tabb
Founder and CEO
TABB Group

Larry Tabb is founder and CEO of TABB Group, the financial markets’ research and strategic advisory firm focused exclusively on capital markets. Founded in 2003 and based on the interview-based research methodology of “first-person knowledge,” TABB Group analyzes and quantifies the investing value chain from the fiduciary, investment manager, broker, exchange and custodian, helping senior business leaders gain a truer understanding of financial markets issues.

Before founding TABB Group, he was vice president of TowerGroup’s Securities & Investments practice where he managed research across the capital markets, investment management, retail brokerage and wealth management segments. As the founding member of TowerGroup’s Securities & Investments business, he was instrumental in growing the business into a global brand representing over 150 research clients around the world.

Quoted extensively and in virtually all industry and general news publications, he has been cited in The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Associated Press, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, Reuters, Dow Jones News, Barron’s, Forbes, Business Week, Financial News, Wall Street & Technology, Securities Industry News, Waters, Global Investment Technology, Computerworld, eWEEK, American Banker, The Banker, Lipper HedgeWorld, Hedge Fund Review and Wall Street Letter. He continues to be a featured speaker at major industry and business conferences throughout the US, Europe, Asia and Canada.

Prior to joining TowerGroup, he managed business analysis for Lehman Brothers’ Trading Services Division and was responsible for overseeing the specification, testing and implementation of dozens of major systems during his tenure. He also led capital markets technology planning at Lehman Brothers where he developed one- and three-year technology plans from 1988 through 1992. He began his financial markets career managing various operations for the North American Investment Bank of Citibank, including front office trading and finance operations, back-office money market operations and, for US Treasury debt, proprietary trading clearance and settlement operations.

Geno Valente
Vice President of Sales and Marketing
XtremeData

Geno Valente is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for XtremeData, Inc., a firm that specializes on large structured database analytics appliances, HPC infrastructure, and other accelerated solutions. He has responsibility for XtremeData’s World-Wide sales efforts and marketing strategy, and brings to that role 15 years of experience helping customers solve the toughest computing challenges for size, weight, and power. Prior to being at XtremeData, Geno spent 11 years at Altera Corporation, a world leader in FPGA, structured ASIC, and custom logic solutions. Most recently at Altera, Geno lead their sales efforts in HPC and Financial Analytics for North America. Geno has a Bachelors Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Antonio Zurlo
Technology Specialist for HPC
Microsoft

Antonio Zurlo is a Technology Specialist for HPC covering Financial Services for Microsoft world-wide, based in New York. Previously, he was at Platform Computing where he worked closely with JP Morgan Chase, helping build a grid infrastructure known as CBB (compute back-bone). JPMorgan is now running one of the largest grids on Wall Street. At Platform, Zurlo has also worked with Lehman Brothers and Citigroup, both in London and New York and with Societe Generale in Paris.

Before Platform, he was as a middleware architect, at Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stears, with previous experience at Standard & Poor's and Dow Jones.

Zurlo has a MS in computer science from the University of Pisa, Italy.