Schedule: Keynote sessions

Bruce Armstrong is a database industry veteran who brings 25 years of technology-specific development, marketing and sales expertise to his position as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Kickfire.

Armstrong began his career at data warehousing giant Teradata Corporation where he spent 15 years as part of the team that established the company as the leader in the market. After the company’s successful initial public offering (IPO) and acquisition by AT&T/NCR, he was named Vice President and General Manager of the $500M Enterprise Solutions Division, President of the Teradata subsidiary, and a company officer of AT&T. Following Teradata, Armstrong held the position of Vice President and General Manager of the Server Products Group at Sybase, where he ran the company’s $700M enterprise database management business.

Previously Armstrong served as President and CEO of publicly-traded KNOVA Software, a leading provider of customer service, self-service and intelligent search applications that he grew from a private venture with innovative technology to a public company serving some of the world’s largest call centers.

He also held posts as partner at Internet Capital Group (ICGE), where he helped lead the strategy and management of software infrastructure investments; President and CEO of CMPnet, where he led CMP Media’s web-based applications and services subsidiary; and Executive Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Broadbase Software (now KANA), where he helped create the analytic application category for CRM.

Armstrong has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Kaj Arnö is VP MySQL Community at Sun Microsystems. He promotes the 3 Ps of the MySQL Community: Popularity, Participation and Pioneering—connecting the external and internal MySQL developers with each other. Kaj believes there are internal connections between his favourite topics which include arranging meetings in a virtual organisation, coping with timezones, managing cross-cultural teams and singing drinking songs (a practice of his native Finland that he is promoting with varied success in Munich, Germany where he’s currently living).

Mark lead the MySQL Engineering team at Google for 2.5 years. His current focus is on making MySQL perfect. He has more than 13 years of database internals experience at Informix, Oracle and now Google. He has an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He maintains a large MySQL patch at code.google.com and a smaller patch at launchpad.net. His blog is at mysqlha.blogspot.com.

Mike Culver joined the Developer Relations Group of Amazon Web Services in 2006. He brings with him fifteen years of technology leadership experience, including at companies such as Microsoft. In addition Mike has a strong background running an IT organization, with over a decade of experience in the Electrical Wholesale Distribution industry. As a Web Services Evangelist at Amazon, he helps developers take advantage of disruptive technologies that are going to change the way we think about computer applications, and the way that businesses compete.

Once a game programmer, then a Unix admin for Pomona College, since 2006 Mikey has worked in the Site Reliability department at Google, where he manages one of the largest MySQL deployments in the world.

Brian brings to JasperSoft a 23-year track record of success in helping to build and lead prominent technology companies’ product and go-to-market strategies. Most recently, Mr. Gentile was Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Informatica Corporation, the industry-leading data integration software company, where he helped the company grow consistently and substantially. Previously, Mr. Gentile served as executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Brio Software, a leading business intelligence software provider, where he was responsible for the company’s global market position and strategy, product marketing, corporate marketing and strategic partner relationships. Prior to Brio, as a Vice President at Sun Microsystems, Brian created Sun’s first-ever worldwide Developer Relations team and helped build the Sun and Java Developer Connection Programs, which reached over 2 million active members during his tenure. And prior to Sun, Brian led Apple’s Evangelism and Developer Relations team, enabling10,000 independent software vendors to work closely and successfully with Apple’s products and technologies.

Mr. Gentile’s professional affiliations include nearly seven years as a Public Governor on the board of the Pacific Stock & Options Exchange (now owned by the New York Stock Exchange) and he continues to serve as a public member of the NYSE’s Ethics and Business Conduct Committee. Additionally, Mr. Gentile has provided founding Board member assistance for several Silicon Valley start-up ventures and currently serves as a Supervisory Board member for WCC, a Netherlands-based searching and matching technology company. Mr. Gentile has earned a Master of Business Administration degree from Arizona State University and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration degree from the University of Arizona

Ian has worked in the computing industry for over ten years at telecom giants and Internet startups. He founded and implemented an anti-spam blackhole list using MySQL that grew to be the most-queried on the Internet. Eventually, the pull of Google brought him to California, where he now works doing administration and development around Google’s MySQL deployment.

Steve was the Site Reliability Engineering Lead for a large MySQL installation at Google from 2005-2008. Late in 2008, he volunteered at Obama For America helping with big-data analytics. Upon returning to Google, he’s been working with networks. Steve has more than 15 years experience as a UNIX and OpenSource generalist from Purdue University, Progeny Linux Systems, FedEx, and Google.

Chuck Hagenbuch leads the software infrastructure team at Blue State Digital, building the core of the company’s tools and working with new technologies. He brings years of experience writing web applications and software libraries to the job of growing the company’s software to new uses and broader scale.

Prior to joining Blue State Digital, Chuck worked for Zend Technologies, providing professional services to many prominent companies, including Google, PayPal, and Portugal Telecom. He founded the open source Horde Project in 1998 and remains active leading its development.

Leigh Heyman has been the Lead System Administrator for Blue State Digital since 2005, where he heads up the team that manages all aspects of the company’s server, network and database infrastructure. His expertise covers most aspects of UNIX system management, and he approaches his role with a holistic view developed from over ten years of experience, ranging from technical support, infrastructure design and network security.

Prior to joining Blue State Digital, Leigh was a system administrator at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Sheeri K. Cabral has a master’s degree in computer science specializing in databases from Brandeis University. She has background as a systems administrator; has worked with Oracle, Sybase, DB2, Solaris, RedHat/Fedora, AIX, and HP-UX. Unstoppable as a volunteer and activist since age 14, Cabral founded and organizes the Boston, Massachusetts, USA, MySQL User group, and co-wrote The MySQL Server Administrator’s Bible, to be published in May 2009. Keep up with all this at www.technocation.org

Chander is the CEO and founder of Zmanda. Chander provides a unique combination of leadership in open source and data protection software. He has been involved on both the technology and business sides of open source software and was named one of the “Top 20 Linux Luminaries” by Linux World Magazine in 2004. Prior to Zmanda, Chander founded and ran LinuxCertified, Inc., an open source product and services company. Earlier in his career, Chander was a business development executive at VERITAS software and served as a product line manager for storage software at SGI. Chander holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (where he did research work in Database Management Systems) and a BS in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

Vijay Karamcheti is a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Virident Systems, and an Associate Professor of Computer Science in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Before starting Virident, Vijay spent a sabbatical year as a Visiting Scientist at Google working closely with their core system infrastructure group.

Vijay is an internationally recognized expert in parallel computing, and has published over 70 well regarded journal and conference papers in the areas of cluster and grid computing. He has frequently served on program committees of the premier technical conferences of the field, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. Vijay is a recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and numerous research awards from NSF, DARPA, and multiple industry sources.

Vijay’s academic degrees include a B. Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, an M.S. from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Justin Lin is co-founder and VP Products at Mamasource, a consumer Internet startup taking a deep and unique approach to serving the needs of moms, who control 80% of US household spending. Mamasource has created an online network of local Mom communities all across America with two million registered users as well as the Mamapedia: a searchable compendium of mom wisdom with over a million answers to thousands of mom questions – all written by the ultimate experts: other moms. Mamasource is Justin’s third venture-backed technology startup.

Don grew up during the best time ever, when he could beg, build, hack, and play with the goodies he loves so much.

He got the opportunity of a lifetime at age 17 when he became person #5 at Best Internet, where he designed the networks that powered brands like eBay and Hotmail.

In 2002 when no investor was investing and a dozen respected brands were vying to dominate photo sharing, he bootstrapped what is now one of the leading photo sharing sites – SmugMug. With the help of a user interface designer, he built everything it takes to run a high-traffic, feature-rich photo sharing site, from the router to the customer experience. And he did what few Internet CEOs have done: he made his company profitable.

Mark Madsen is the founder of Third Nature, a consulting and technology research firm focused on new and emerging technology and practices in business intelligence, data integration and information management. Mark is also a well-known consultant and industry analyst who frequently speaks at conferences and seminars in the US and Europe and writes for a number of leading industry publications.

Prashant is an Engineer at Facebook, where he helped architect and build Cassandra and a number of search solutions. Cassandra is a distributed storage system and helps run Facebook’s Inbox search and other applications supporting more than 200M users and over 40TB of data. It is also an open source project now. Prior to Facebook he was at Microsoft for over 9 years where he helped ship over 8 enterprise products and filed 6 patents. He holds a B. Tech in Computer Science from IIT Delhi.

As Vice President of Sun’s MySQL & Software Infrastructure group, Karen Tegan Padir leads a global business and engineering organization focused on the delivery of market-leading software products that are the platform of choice for the network economy. In this role, Karen is spearheading Sun’s transformation into the fastest growing and most valuable open source software business in the world. She reports to Anil Gadre, EVP of Sun’s Application Platform Software business.

Karen is responsible for the core products, platforms and technologies including: MySQL, the world’s most popular open source database, GlassFish, the world’s most downloaded application server, Identity Management products for single sign on and user and role provisioning, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) products for integration and flexible IT infrastructure, and the complete Java Enterprise System. MySQL was acquired by Sun in February 2008 and Karen led both the technical due diligence and the technology and engineering integration of MySQL after the close of the agreement. Karen’s organization spans the globe in more than ten geographies.

Karen rejoined Sun after spending a year at Red Hat Inc., where she was Vice President of Engineering for Infrastructure Technologies responsible for Red Hat Identity Management products including Directory and Certificate server products, as well as Quality and Release Engineering of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux bundle.

As one of the founding members of the J2EE organization at Sun, Karen managed the creation of specifications, compatibility test suites, blueprints and guided implementations of Java in the enterprise. Under her leadership, J2EE captured more than 96 percent market share in the application server market, which represents the fastest Java technology adoption in its history.

Prior to Sun, where Karen has served since 1993, she was with Stratus Computer Inc. She holds a Masters Degree in Business Administration and a Bachelors of Science Degree in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Karen serves on WPI’s board of trustees.

Monty Taylor is an Engineer for Sun. He’s the crazy guy who wrote the NDB/Bindings in the first place (why write one language when you can have six?) and is currently one of the crazy guys hacking on Drizzle full time. Up until a few days ago, he was also a Senior Consultant for MySQL, where he focused on MySQL Cluster, DRBD and other High Availability solutions.

Monty is a Python programmer by first choice (and yet he hears the obvious joke surprisingly infrequently) but seems to be spending all of his time recently in C, C++ and Java.

Lew Tucker is Vice President and CTO of Cloud Computing at Sun Microsystems, Inc. His focus today is on the evolution of computing as it moves into the cloud, but his contributions span several waves of technology innovation over the last twenty years. Prior to re-joining Sun Microsystems, he was a Vice President at Salesforce.com where he created the AppExchange, advancing the company’s strategy to become the leading SaaS platform for business applications. He went on to be CTO at Radar Networks, an innovative semantic-web based Internet service for tracking interests. During his previous tenure at Sun Microsystems, Tucker was an early member of the JavaSoft executive team at Sun driving developer adoption of the Java platform, and later became Vice President, Internet Services, with overall responsibility for Sun’s Internet sites and services. Tucker’s interest in distributed computing started in the mid 80’s as a research scientist and Director of advanced development at Thinking Machines, working on machine vision and system architecture to create the massively parallel Connection Machine. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and has a background in Artificial Intelligence, Neurobiology, and large-scale parallel algorithms.

Miriam, CEO of Infobright since January, 2006, possesses a proven track record of building high growth businesses in emerging technology. Miriam has 20+ years high-tech experience including leadership positions in the consulting and telecommunications sectors. Miriam holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Waterloo.

Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Inc. and employee number one, is a product architect with the Systems Group. Andy works with the Systems Group to help drive next generation X64 and storage servers product architecture as well as HPC opportunities.

Bechtolsheim has more than 25 years of Network Computing knowledge and expertise. He was a co-founder of Sun Microsystems where he held a variety of roles including Vice President of Technology and Chief Architect of Sun’s highly successful workstation product line. He invented the “Stanford University Network workstation” that eventually became the Sun-1 Workstation and was instrumental in launching other successful Sun products, including the SparcStation 1.

Bechtolsheim left Sun in 1995 to found Granite Systems, a Gigabit Ethernet start-up company, that was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996. Andy became Vice President of Engineering and later Vice President General Manager of Cisco’s Gigabit Systems business which developed the Catalyst 4000 family, the industry’s highest volume modular Ethernet switching platform.

Bechtolsheim returned to Sun in 2004 via the Kealia, Inc. acquisition, a company which he co-founded to develop advanced server technology.

Bechtolsheim received a MS in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1976 and he was a PhD student in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University from 1977 to 1982. He has been honored with a Fulbright scholarship, a German National Merit Foundation scholarship, the Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the year award, the Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Thorsten von Eicken is founder and CTO of RightScale, Inc. Before joining RightScale, Thorsten was Chief Architect at Expertcity.com and Citrix Online, makers of GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and GoToAssist. He was responsible for the overall architecture of these online services and also managed the 24/7 datacenter operations which allowed him to acquire deep knowledge in deploying and running secure scalable online services. Thorsten received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and was a professor of computer science at Cornell University.

Jeremy joined craigslist after over eight years in a variety of roles at Yahoo! He now hacks on various back-end pieces of craigslist, including MySQL and search.

Jeremy blogs at http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/ and flies both small airplanes and gliders in his spare time.