Speaker Informaion and Bio's

Keynote Presentations:

Dr. Ambuj Goyal, IBM Software Group

Dr. Goyal was named General Manager, Information Management Software in August 2005. He served in his previous position as the General Manager of Workplace, Portal, and Collaboration Software (WPLC) from January 2003 to August 2005. In that position, Dr. Goyal architected the transformation of Lotus software by expanding its focus beyond the traditional "Collaboration" marketplace to encompass the "People Productivity" market. He was responsible for setting the business strategy and direction for the WebSphere Portal product set, the Lotus Software product set, and the IBM Workplace product set.

Prior to serving as General Manager of Workplace, Portal, and Collaboration Software, Dr. Goyal served as the General Manager, Solutions and Strategy, IBM Software Group, from February 2001, to January 2003. In that position, he was responsible for setting business strategy for IBM's Software Group, the WebSphere Business Integration product set, and delivering industry-specific middleware solutions.

Prior to serving as General Manager of Solutions and Strategy, Dr. Goyal served as Chief Technology Officer, Application & Integration Middleware Division, which includes the WebSphere and MQ product families.

Dr. Goyal joined IBM Corporation in 1982 as a research staff member at the T.J. Watson Research Center. He was named Vice President, Services and Software, and Director, Computer Sciences in 1996. In this dual role, he was responsible for setting IBM's long-term research direction in computer sciences, as well as ensuring that the best emerging technologies contribute to IBM's services offerings and software products. He had approximately 1500 researchers reporting to him in seven labs worldwide.

Dr. Goyal's main research interests are in high performance systems, databases and distributed systems. His early work in scalable databases led to IBM's Universal Database (DB2) family. He was also responsible for setting the early direction in web application servers which led to the WebSphere product family. He also led the research efforts to create the RS/6000 SP supercomputer and the Deep Blue World Chess Champion computer.

Dr. Goyal has authored over 25 articles in various fields and has received five outstanding innovation awards from IBM for his work. He was elected an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to the theory and practice of highly dependable systems; elected an ACM Fellow in recognition of outstanding technical and professional achievements in the field of information technology.

Dr. Goyal received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 1982, and his Bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 1978.

Dr. Arvind Krishna, IBM Software Group

Arvind Krishna is the vice president for database servers within Information Management for IBM Software Group. In this role, Dr. Krishna defines the business & technical strategy, and is responsible for the development, delivery, sales, and ecosystem of the data servers segment.

Previously, Arvind was the vice president for technical and business strategy for IBM Software Group. In this role, Dr. Krishna is responsible for setting the platform technical strategy and defining the key growth opportunities for IBM software. His organization was also responsible for key software standards, industry alliances, and nurturing key emerging technologies.

Arvind has been the vice president of provisioning and security development for Tivoli Software within IBM's Software Group. In this role, Dr. Krishna was responsible for setting the technical strategy for IBM's security/identity middleware, provisioning and orchestration middleware and delivering the products in support of the strategy.

Prior to his roles in SWG, Dr. Krishna was the director of Internet infrastructure and computing utilities research at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. In that role, he was responsible for setting IBM's long-term research direction in web infrastructure, network and computer security, mobile and distributed computing, as well as ensuring that the best emerging technologies contribute to IBM's software products and service offerings.

Dr. Krishna joined IBM in 1990, and since then has held executive, product management and technical research positions. He has been active on the editorial boards and program committees of several IEEE and ACM technical journals and conferences. He has a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, both degrees in electrical and computer engineering.

Techinical Presentations:

Nancy Balsbaugh, Cisco Systems

Nancy has almost 15 years of practical experience with Informix. As a Senior DBA/Engineer at Hewlett-Packard, The Bureau of Land Management and The Department of Defense she has extensive knowledge of IT system set-up and process improvement.

Thomas Beebe, Advanced DataTools Corp

Tom has been working for Advanced DataTools for over 4 years now, offering DBA and applications development support for a number of very diverse Informix run sites. In his spare time he normally spends it writing PHP applications or occasionally even sleeping.

David Beulke, Pragmatic Solutions, Inc

Dave Beulke is an internationally recognized DB2 consultant, author and lecturer and performs system, database design and application performance reviews. He is known for his performance tuning expertise in systems, database designs, data warehouses and internet applications. He is currently member of the IBM DB2 Gold Consultant program, co-author of the IBM V8 and V7 z/OS DB2 Certification exams, co-author of the Business Intelligence Certification exam, past president of the International DB2 Users Group (IDUG).

Don Bizzell, Four J's Development Tools

With six years at Informix, and now Five at Four J's Don is a long time member of the Informix community.

Carlton Doe, IBM

Carlton Doe had over 10 years of Informix experience as a DBA, Database Server Administrator and 4GL Developer before joining Informix in 2000. During this time, he was actively involved in the local Informix user group and was one of the five founders of the International Informix Users Group (IIUG). He served as IIUG President, Advocacy Director, and sat on the IIUG Board of Directors for several years. He is best known for having written two Informix Press books on administering the IDS database server as well as several IBM whitepapers and technical articles. Carlton currently works for IBM as a Sr. Certified Consulting IT Specialist in the Global Technical Partner Organization. He lives in Dallas, TX.

Sean Durity, CornerCap Investment Counsel

Sean is the IT Manager for CornerCap Investment Counsel, a small asset management company. Thus, he has to be involved in all the real-world details, including DBA and software development work. CornerCap builds internally used software in .Net that accesses Informix IDS on Linux. Sean has over 7 years experience with Informix. He has also successfully taught the Bible to teens, so you won't fall asleep.

James Edmiston, Quest Information Systems, Inc.

James started using Informix in 1996 and is a certified Informix System Administrator. He has been a consulting DBA in the Washington, DC area in database design and administration, data warehousing and application support. Previously, he worked as an IT professional for EDS, Mobil Oil, and SAIC, among others. He has also been active in the WAIUG and was an IIUG Board of Directors member from 2000 to 2003.

Kevin Fennimore, UCI Consulting

Kevin Fennimore has been working with Informix for over 17 years, specializing in the area of performance tuning. His company, UCI Consulting, Inc. has concentrated on tuning Informix applications and has become one of the top companies in this field. He has also done substantial work in data warehouse environments. He can be reached by phone at 1-888-UCI-FOR-U or by email at kfenn@uci-consulting.com.

Sergio Ferreira, IIUG

Informix user since 1986. CTO of MoreData in Portugal IIUG board of directors.

Keith Gardenhire, IBM

Keith Gardenhire started with IBM in 1973 as a Customer Engineer. Through his career with IBM he has had several jobs involving database from DL/I Change Team programmer, SQL/DS development and support for VSE/VM operating systems, and many areas involved in DB2 support. He is currently a DB2 IT Specialist in Federal Software Group. He is IBM DB2 V8.2 Certified Advanced Database Administrator and DB2 V8.2 Certified Applications Developer.

Jerry Hamilton, Fleishman-Hillard

Mr. Hamilton has worked in the information technology industry since 1979. He concentrates on database-driven applications and system administration. He has worked in many different industries including banking, real estate, consulting, insurance, and others. He has over 10 years experience with Informix products. Mr. Hamilton is a former president of the International Informix User Group (IIUG).

Carsten Haese, Unique Systems, Inc

Carsten Haese is a custom software developer for Unique Systems, Inc. with several years of experience in Informix based application development. In addition to Informix 4GL, Carsten uses open-source programming languages such as PHP and Python to develop Informix applications. He is the current maintainer of the InformixDB Python API module.

Hubert Hoelzl, Querix

This session will be used to demonstrate the migration of a simple application to a modern looking GUI application. This will be shown step by step using scripting, 4GL language and form extensions.

Syed Kamal, Gillani

Kamal has over 12 years of application development experience ranging from strategic systems planning to process management. Kamal helped a number of Fortune500 companies develop business critical applications.

Larry Kintisch, ABLE Information Services

He holds an engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Masters in engineering from Union College.

Lester Knutsen, Advanced DataTools Corporation

Lester Knutsen has been developing database applications with Informix databases since 1983. He is president of Advanced DataTools, an IBM-Informix Consulting, Training, and Tools Partner specializing in data warehouse development, database design, performance tuning, and Informix training and support. Lester is also president of the Washington Area Informix User Group, and is one of the founding members of the International Informix Users Group. Lester is also a member of the IBM Gold Consultant program.

Jonathan Leffler, IBM

Jonathan Leffler started using Informix products in 1986, joined Informix UK in 1990, and moved to California in 1993. He led the I4GL maintenance team and helped introduce D4GL. He is now a Senior Technical Staff Member for IBM working as an architect for IDS, was a founding member of the IIUG, and actively participates in the comp.databases.informix news group. He wrote the book 'Using Informix-SQL', the program SQLCMD, and the Perl DBD::Informix module.

Jack Parker, DBAgnostics

Jack Parker is a Database Consultant with over 20 years experience across a wide variety of industries, systems and database technologies. He is the author of several utilities and articles and an occasional speaker at user group meetings. He is a practitioner, not a theorist. He is database agnostic.

Jean Georges Perrin, IIUG

Jean Georges Perrin has been working in software engineering for more than decade, of which 8 years in project management in international and heterogeneous environments. Always dedicated to a "business-aware" and "customer-driven" way of managing projects; he started web development in 1994 and has experience in most innovative trends ever since. Jean Georges has a Master's Degree in Computer Sciences. He is married, has 2 sons and lives in France.

Phil Philbin, Sun Microsystems

Phil has worked for Sun Microsystems since 1990 and has been part of Sun's ISV Partner Field Organization since 1996. He has provided SE support for Sun ISV partners who have developed applications ranging from CAD to E-Commerce to development tools and as of 2003, IBM software.

Darryl Priest, DLA Piper US LLP

Darryl Priest was introduced to Informix databases in 1992 and has been using and administering them ever since. He started programming Perl in 1997 and was very happy to discover that Perl and Informix could be combined. He currently works for a large law firm supporting their Accounting and Human Resources systems.

Madison Pruet, IBM

Madison is the replication architect for Informix Dynamic Server. He has been working in IDS for over 10 years. Prior to working with Informix/IBM, Madison was employed at La Quinta Inns, Sperry Corp., and Xerox.

Serge Rielau, IBM Canada

Serge Rielau is part of the DB2 Solutions Development team, where he closely works with customers and business partners to port or migrate their applications from competitive RDBMS to DB2 for Linux. UNIX, and Windows. Prior to this role, he worked for 7 years as a team lead and technical manager in the DB2 SQL Compiler Development team. As an expert in the SQL language, Serge is an active participant in the comp.databases.ibm-db2 newsgroup.

Jacques Roy, IBM

Jacques Roy is a member of the IBM worldwide sales enablement organization, supporting IDS.

Sathish Sadagopan, IBM

Sathish has been working with relational databases for over 13 years, primarily with Informix and DB2. Has played various roles such as DBA, Developer, and System Administrator.

Tom Smith, Fourth Generation Software

Education: BS, High Point College (1966), MS, UGA (1972) Employment beginning with most recent: Fourth Generation Software 1998-2006. Experience in C, C++ and Informix Classic 4GL as well as FourJs BDL and Genero. Pennington Seed Inc 1988-1998: Informix Classic 4GL and 'C'.

Dwaine Snow, IBM

Dwaine R. Snow is a senior product manager for DB2 Data Server. In this role, he is helping to determine the future direction of the product and decide what functional enhancements need to be made to it to ensure that it meets customer requirements.

Young Tan, Cobrasonic Software Inc.

M.S. - Computer Science, Clemson University 1986, Informix 4GL programmer/DBA 1987-1989, Informix Platform engineer 1990-1992, Informix Software Development Engineer 1993-1996, Informix Performance Tuning Tool (DBSonar, Cobrasonic) vendor 2005-Present.

Kate Tomchik, The Home Depot

Kate has worked for The Home Depot as a DBA for 12.5 years, using Informix, Unix DB2 and SQL Server 2000. She has used Informix for 18 years now. Last year she was featured in DB2 Magazine in the DBA Dream Job column. She has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a MS Computer Information Systems from Georgia State University.