Speakers

Cyrus Broacha is the funniest man in the Indian subcontinent. Trained at the Lee Strasberg Acting Studio in New York, he is a VJ, RJ, columnist, actor and host. Cyrus has been the face of MTV India for almost a decade and is a multi-dimensional talent. He has hosted the Abbys, the Filmfare Awards, the Gladrags Supermodel Contest and the Kingfisher Calendar launch. Cyrus actively supports and works for the Welfare of Stray Dogs (WSD) in India. His ucoming films include Fruit n Nut, produced by Studio 18 and Directed by Kunal Vijaykar. Mumbai Chakachak Directed by Sanjay Jha. His repertoire of work includes Mtv Bakra, The Week that Wasnt on CNN IBN, Chevrolet Cricket Show Ten Sports, Jhalak Dikhlaja 2 Sony, Champion Chalbaaz - Sony.

Cyrus Broacha will host the awards evening and present a special show for Great Indian Developer Summit titled "The Developer Strikes Back". This year's Great Indian Developer Awards will be held at the J N Tata Auditorium, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Campus on Saturday, the 25th of April 2009. Cast your votes on the short list NOW! GIDS is offering an exclusive, FREE pass for Cyrus' show to 500 delegates registered and paid for any one of the conferences or workshops. By registering for GIDS 2009 you have access to unmatchable content, invaluable advise and mentoring, intangible peer-to-peer networking opportunities, presentation material, GIDS swag and unlimited Wi-fi to respond to that all-important e-mail at work. Register now win an assured GIDS Cult T-shirt!

Abhinav is a Senior Principal Product Manager with Oracle’s Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management division, which is a part of Oracle Fusion Middleware. He has been working with Oracle at its India Development Center in Bangalore since 2002. He manages the BI Standard Edition product management group at IDC, and is also the product manager responsible for Microsoft Office integration, Spatial analytics, BI visualizations, and integration with mobile platforms. Abhinav is the technical editor of the “Discoverer 10g Handbook”, a Mc-Graw Hill Oracle Press publication. Abhinav is a gold medalist from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, and holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering.

• Focused Session: Integrating Geo-Spatial Visualizations into Business Intelligence Dashboards

Amit is currently the General Manager for the Visual Studio Team Test Business at Microsoft. Working out of the Hyderabad Development Centre, Amit leads a distributed development team located at Hyderabad, Redmond, and Raleigh, on a mission to establish Microsoft as a key leader in the Testing Industry. Great Tools, Great Testers, Great Software is the vision that Amit and his team pursues. Amit has spent close to twenty years at Microsoft, and has played important leadership roles for Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Direct Show and Direct X Media, Services For UNIX, and Networking technologies developed at Microsoft. After eleven years in Redmond, Amit relocated to Hyderabad India, where he lives with his wife, two sons, parents, and two dogs. In addition to family time, Amit enjoys sports, reading, and learning about spirituality. Head over to the MSDN Blog to know more about Amit Chatterjee's preparation for GIDS 2009.

• Keynote: Next Generation ALM Tools from Microsoft – Visual Studio Team System 2010

Amit is VP, Product Management at Dapper.net, working on the confluence of the Semantic Web and Display Advertising. Previously, he was responsible for Yahoo! SearchMonkey and other semantic web technologies, and has a long career in Search, including stints at Inktomi and Verity/Autonomy.

• Focused Session: Functional Mashups - Building Desktop Applications in Plug-n-Play Fashion
• Focused Session: What If the Web Were a Database?
• Workshop: Synthesizing Data from the Web

P N Anantharaman (Ananth) is the Director of Engineering of Platform products at Adobe Systems. For the past 2 years, Ananth has been managing the Flex, AIR and ColdFusion product engineering and other business activities pertaining to RIA. Prior to Adobe, Ananth has extensive experience managing compiler products at senior management positions in HP. Ananth has rich engineering expertise in building real time embedded systems, operating systems and system software. Ananth holds a Masters degree in Electronics from IISc and has over 2 decades of experience in the software industry.

• Keynote: Trends in RIA Development

Dr. Anil Bhat is Director and Head - Cardiology at Manipal Hospital. With over 19 years of experience behind him, Dr. Bhat has conducted over 2000 balloon valvuloplasties, over 5000 coronary angioplasties, device closure of congenital defects and pacemaker implantations. Dr. Bhat has worked at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, G B Pant Hospital, New Delhi, Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute of Medical Sciences and Technology, Trivandrum. His area of specialization is Adult Interventional Cardiology.

• Special Keynote: Developer De-stress Advice From the Trenches

Anirudh is a technical evangelist at Adobe. He is a hardcore technocrat with expertise spanning a vast plethora of technologies ranging from LISP to C++, Java to Flash. Anirudh has been instrumental in building several open source libraries including the extremely popular FXStruts and Flex - C++ bridge. He is also very passionate about Computer Graphics and beautiful user experiences.

• Focused Session: Reusable Components for Building Killer RIAs
• Workshop: Building Enterprise Mashups using Adobe Flash Platform

Arockiaraj, co-founder and CTO of SednaSpace an Intranet-SaaS tool. He has about 15 years of IT experience in various technologies such as VC++, databases, java, .Net, SOA, BPM. He has worked in US for six years for various clients such as digital insight (a leader in online banking for community banks), Oakwood (a leader in hospitality). He is passionate about any technology that will improve the productivity of developers.

• Focused Session: Strategies for Building Scalable SOA and BPM Solutions

Ashish Masand is the Country Manager for Micro Focus in India. He is responsible for growing Micro Focus’s business in the country while providing strategic direction and operational focus. Prior to joining Micro Focus, Ashish has worked with companies like Max, Hewlett Packard India, EMC, TIBCO and Pramati Technologies.

• Keynote: COBOL in the 21st Century : Blending the Past with Future Opportunities

Bijoy is an Evangelist with Microsoft India and he works on evangelizing development technologies. His responsibilities include driving the awareness-excitement-readiness cycle around these areas, build a community and help incubate solutions on these technologies with the SIs and ISVs in India. He's been at Microsoft for two years, first working as a Technical Lead on the VC++/C#/.NET framework support team and recently moving into the present role. Prior to joining Microsoft he worked with a product development company on installation technologies and before that with a B2B startup as a software developer. When he is not working, he enjoys reading, watching movies, listening to music and sleeping. Head over to the MSDN Blog to know more about Bijoy Singhal's preparation for GIDS 2009.

• Focused Session: C# Implementation of LINQ - Deep Dive
• Focused Session: Visual Studio 2008 Tips and Tricks
• Focused Session: Openness within: CodePlex.com

Bruno Georges recently joined Red Hat APAC/Japan as the Middleware Solutions Director. Bruno has over 18 years IT experience working in the Banking, Trading, Insurance and Telco industries, where he has been primarily involved with the architecture of eCommerce Solutions and managing Software Development Teams. Since 2001 he has spoken at numerous international conferences about Web Services standards, Enterprise Application Integration, SOA, and the adoption of open source technologies. Bruno previously headed the Application Development Group at Glencore International AG, the largest private company in Switzerland. Bruno was responsible for initiating and driving the adoption of an Open source based SOA strategy, leading to a highly successful deployment. Prior to Glencore, Mr Georges was the Lead Architect at XBridge Ltd, the UK's leading SME Finance Portal, and also served in other major Investment banking and Insurance Companies.

• Focused Session: SEAM, Web Beans & JBoss

Chidambaran Kollengode (Chid) is a Systems Professional with over twenty years of progressively responsible experiences, with the last eight years in senior leadership roles. He is currently working as Director Cloud Computing at Yahoo! India R&D, exploring the boundaries of distributed computing for very large volume data processing with high availability. Prior Yahoo!, he worked with Amazon in building a highly scalable distributed architecture for processing huge amounts of search and advertisement (Internet) data.

Chid has a wealth of experience in technology development and organization building with a successful track record in building models and sustainable infrastructures for evidence-based management and quantitative fact-based analysis. He is a frequent presenter in enterprise architecture forums (India and abroad) He is the Founder President of Data Management Association, Bangalore (2006 – current). This is the first chapter in the South East Asia region. He is also a Member of the Data Management Association, Philadelphia (1996 onwards). Chid has a Masters Degree in Business Administration (M.B.A) from Pennsylvania State University (major in Information Systems) and a Bachelors in Engineering from NIT, Trichy (Formerly REC, Trichy). He has been a visiting professor at the University of Phoenix and continues to be a faculty member and faculty mentor, teaching masters and undergraduate courses.

• Focused Session: Cloud Computing and Hadoop

Christopher David, is the Director of Long term Platform Planning for Java at Sony Ericsson. He looks into Sony Ericsson’s Java Platform model, how it has evolved and where it is today with the new Java Platforms. Previously he was the Head of Java strategy planning at Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications. His main focus area is expanding Sony Ericsson’s developer relationship and looking for new applications and interesting partners to enrich Sony Ericsson mobile handset’s user experience. One of the key projects undertaken by him include Project Capuchin, a success in bridging the gap between Flash and the Java based phone API. He is newly appointed as -Head of Developer Engagement for Sony Ericsson.

• Focused Session: Rich User Interfaces by combining Java ME and Flash Lite
• Workshop: Capuchin - Bridging Java ME and Flash Lite

Craig is a Senior Staff Engineer for Sun Microsystems. His current responsibilities include being architect for a large scale next generation web application suite that utilizes many Web 2.0 technologies and design paradigms. Previously, Craig was architect for Java Studio Creator (now NetBeans Visual Web Pack), a visual IDE for building web applications based on JavaServer Faces. He was also co-specification lead for JavaServer Faces 1.0 (JSR-127), and the original creator of the Apache Struts framework.

• Focused Session: Computing in the Cloud
• Focused Session: RESTful? What's a RESTful?
• Focused Session: Building RESTful Applications with JAX-RS
• Focused Session: Building RESTful Applications with Ruby on Rails

David Rogers has worked for Micro Focus since 1998 specializing in Database Technology. Rogers is currently a Senior Technical Consultant and Solution Manager for Migration & Modernization based in the Micro Focus German office. He works with major International Companies creating and implementing Production Offload and Development Strategies to increase productivity and reduce costs related to the Z/OS Mainframe technology landscape. Rogers previously spent 3 years as Technical Lead at XDB a Database Technology Company, specializing in DB2 Z/OS related Emulation (which Micro Focus bought in 1998). Prior to this Rogers, spent 3 years as a Technical Consultant specializing in Version Control and Management at InterSolv now Serena. Before his tenure at Serena, Rogers spent 3 years as a Software Developer specializing in Financial and Travel Reservation (Amadeus) Software.

• Focused Session: The Eclipse COBOL Java Triangle – The Y generation IDE and COBOL Finally Unite!
• Workshop: Mainframe in a Box
• Workshop: Cobol - Achieving Platform Independence
• Workshop: Extending Cobol to SOA, Web Services and Beyond

Debu has more than 14 years of experience in the IT industry and has published articles in several magazines and has presented at many conferences. He is a Senior Principal Product Manager of the Oracle Application Server development team. He is co -author of EJB 3.0 In Action.

• Focused Session: Taming Wild Entities - Tuning performance of JPA Applications
• Focused Session: Diagnosing Production Java Applications

After graduating from Supelec (French "Grande Ecole"), Emmanuel has spent a few years in the retail industry as a developer and architect where he started to be involved in the ORM space. He joined the Hibernate team in 2003 and is now a lead developer at JBoss, a division of Red Hat. Emmanuel is the lead developer of Hibernate Annotations and Hibernate EntityManager, two key projects on top of Hibernate Core implementing the Java Persistence(tm) specification. He also leads Hibernate Search and Hibernate Validator. Emmanuel is a member of the JPA 2.0 expert group and the spec lead of JSR 303: Bean Validation. He is a regular speaker at various conferences and JUGs, including JavaOne, JBoss World and Devoxx and the co-author of Hibernate Search in Action published by Manning.

• Focused Session: JPA2 (JPA + Bean Validation)
• Workshop: Hibernate Search: Adding Search to your Java Applications - Deep Dive

Frank Nimphius is a principal product manager for application development tools at Oracle Corporation since 1999. Prior to this, Frank has worked for more than three years in the Oracle Sales Consulting Organization. Frank actively contributes to the development of Oracle JDeveloper and the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF). As a conference speaker, Frank represents the Oracle J2EE development team at J2EE conferences world wide, including various Oracle user groups and the Oracle Open World conference.

• Focused Session: How-to Win the RAD Race Against Microsoft .Net with Java
• Focused Session: A Hybrid Approach to Ajax with JSF - Developing Faster for the Future

Harish, a Web Developer Evangelist, helps companies and enterprises realize business value in adopting the latest Microsoft Next Web Technologies and helping them address their real world challenges over the web. Harish Ranganathan has been a Technology Specialist in ASP.NET and other web technologies. You can find a lot of his contributions in various technology forums. He is passionate about technology in general and the application of software to address real world problems & challenges in particular. Head over to the MSDN Blog to know more about Harish Ranganathan's preparation for GIDS 2009.

• Focused Session: Developing for Astoria: ADO.NET Data Services
• Focused Session: ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap
• Focused Session: Building Rich UI using ASP.NET AJAX, Ajax Control Toolkit & jQuery

Harish Sivaramakrishnan has over 10 years of experience working with Adobe Flash Platform and has been a part of its evolution to its glorious present. Immensely passionate about anything pertaining to Flash, Harish has donned multiple roles ranging from application development, quality engineering and product engineering at Macromedia/Adobe for the past 4+ years. As a platform evangelist at Adobe, he works with the developer community helping them adopt, appreciate and excel in building Rich Internet Applications on Adobe Flash Platform.

• Focused Session: Get that Killer Look For Your Rich Internet Application

As Engineering Manager, Hemant is leading efforts on next version of ColdFusion application server and brand new eclipse based IDE. He possesses several years of R&D experience in application-server internals and internet architectures writing worlds first EJB2.0 container when he was Pramati Technologies and was part of expert group committee for J2EE 1.4, EJB2.0 and EJB3.0 specifications. He has been associated with IIIT Hyderabad and Bangalore for middleware courses and has spoken at various conferences including JavaOne and Adobe MAX conferences.

• Focused Session: Architecting Next Generation RIA with Flash, AJAX and ColdFusion

Himanshu was last running the Software Large Deal business for SWG. Prior to assuming this role full time in January 2007, Himanshu led IBM’s software sales with Business Partner Solutions in India. This included software companies, systems integrators, and organizations who embed IBM software in their products. Prior to this role, he managed the Lotus Brand partners. Himanshu joined the IBM Software Group in May 2004 from Digite where he was the Head of Sales & Professional Services for a brief stint. Before Digite, Himanshu co-founded, Digital Publishing Solutions in Pune with private funding.

• Focused Session: Learn, Connect & Share in the Downturn to be Prepared for Smarter Times

Jatin Kakkar is a Senior Program Manager in the Live Mesh group based at Microsoft’s India Development Centre at Hyderabad. Jatin’s work is focussed on conceptualizing and driving the next wave of Mesh features for the Mobile Mesh platform. Since 2004 Jatin has been a Program Manager on various Microsoft Products including Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio Team Systems. Head over to the MSDN Blog to know more about Jatin Kakkar's preparation for GIDS 2009.

• Focused Session: Programming Microsoft's Live Mesh

Janakiram MSV works as a Program Manager with the JScript team at the Microsoft India Development Center. He started his career at Microsoft India as a Technical Specialist. He spent most of his time with the Developer & Platform Evangelism (DPE) group, evangelizing Microsoft application development platform and tools. In his current role, he works closely with the web developer community and drives the customer connection for the JScript product group. Janakiram spoke at any many premier events including Microsoft TechEd, DevDays, TechMela, Linux Bangalore, Linux Asia and Borland DevCon. In his free time, he enjoys playing high definition action games on his Xbox 360. He is an avid blogger and his blog can be found at http://www.janakiramm.net/blog. Head over to the MSDN Blog to know more about Janakiram MSV's preparation for GIDS 2009.

• Focused Session: Azure Services for Java Developers

Jens Greve is Senior Manager and Head of Sony Ericsson Developer World for Sony Ericsson. Jens has been with Sony Ericsson since the start of the joint venture in 2001. In his role as Head of Sony Ericsson Developer World, Jens leads a global support program and web portal for wireless application developers and overseas rolling out the program into new regions such as China and India. He is responsible for all technical support services provided to developers and his influence can be seen in the widely used developer resources available through the Sony Ericsson Developer World website – which today, is the topranked online developer resource and global developer support community.

Jens has also worked as Partner Manager for the company’s top game development partners and had global responsibility for managing the content acquisition from high profile third-party application developers for Sony Ericsson’s GSM/UMTS phones. Here his focus was to spark the development of high value business and productivity applications for Sony Ericsson’s Java ME and UIQbased phones. His expertise in all areas related to applications and content development has made him a leading driver of the industry’s smartphone and gaming markets and a well respected speaker and moderator at various industry events, including the Game Developers Conference (GDC), Wireless Developer Forum and UIQ Fast Track events.

• Keynote: How to Maximize your Business with Sony Ericsson

Dr. Jim Webber is director of professional services for ThoughtWorks where he works on dependable distributed systems architecture for clients worldwide. 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 and has extensive Web and Web Services architecture and development experience. As an architect with Hewlett-Packard, and later Arjuna Technologies, Jim was the lead developer on the industry's first Web Services Transaction solution. Jim is an active speaker and is invited to speak regularly at conferences across the globe. He is an active author and in addition to "Developing Enterprise Web Services - An Architect's Guide" he is working on a new book on Web-based integration. Jim holds a B.Sc. in Computing Science and Ph.D. in Parallel Computing both from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

• Focused Session: Guerrilla SOA
• Focused Session: Introducing REST: The Starbucks Example
• Workshop: GET Connected: A Tutorial on Web-based Integration

Jon, a Cornell Computer Science graduate has been engineering web applications since 1994. He has extensive experience with managing large-scale, high-profile web projects. His previous experience includes Alexa Internet and the Internet Archive. At Dapper, Jon serves as co-founder and CTO, managing US operations and strategic partnerships for the company in San Francisco.

• Focused Session: Functional Mashups - Building Desktop Applications in Plug-n-Play Fashion
• Focused Session: What If the Web Were a Database?
• Workshop: Synthesizing Data from the Web

As co-founder of Kaazing Corporation, Jonas Jacobi oversees all aspects of Kaazing's operations and mission to become the world-wide leader in real-time Web infrastructure. A native of Sweden, Jonas has worked in the software industry for more than sixteen years in roles ranging from consulting to product management. Before founding Kaazing, Jonas worked as VP of Product Management responsible for the product management at Brane Corporation, a Silicon Valley startup. Prior to his appointment at Brane, he worked eight years at Oracle as a Java EE and open source evangelist, and product manager responsible for the product direction of JavaServer Faces, Oracle ADF Faces, and Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client in the Oracle JDeveloper team. Jonas is a frequent speaker at international conferences and has written numerous articles on emerging technologies. He is also co-author of the best-selling book - Pro JSF and Ajax: Building Rich Internet Components (Apress).

• Focused Session: Re-architecting the Web with HTML 5 Communication
• Focused Session: 21st Century RIAs: Using HTML 5 Communication
• Focused Session: A Practical Guide to the Real-time Web

Roshan leads the Enterprise Adapters team, responsible for building system adapters for the various Progress infrastructure products including the App Server interceptors for the Actional SOA management product and the Cap Market adapters for the Apama CEP platform. Prior to the present role, Roshan was working in the Development Tools COE at Progress, building the Sonic Workbench (IDE for ESB solutions). Roshan is presently working on proposing a canonical event model. Roshan, an IIT Kharagpure graduate, has extensive understanding of the SOA and distributed computing space.

• Focused Session: EDA - Bringing SOA and CEP Together

Dr. Rangachar Kasturi is the Douglas W. Hood Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida. He received his BE (Electrical) degree from Bangalore University, India in 1968 and MSEE and Ph.D. degrees from Texas Tech University in 1980 and 1982, respectively. He was a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University during 1982-2003. Dr. Kasturi served as the President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) during 2002-04 and as the President of the IEEE Computer Society during 2008. He has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and the Machine Vision and Applications journals. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of IAPR. He was a Fulbright scholar during 1999.

Dr. Kasturi's research interests are in computer vision and pattern recognition. He is an author of the textbook, Machine Vision, and has published numerous papers and research reference books. He has directed many projects in image analysis, video sequence analysis and pattern recognition.

• Keynote: IEEE's Initiatives for the Developer Ecosystem

Energy, laughter and a contagious passion for coding - Mike brings it all to the podium. His career has taken him from minion to business owner, and he's been programming since the late '70s, when a friend brought a Commodore CPM home for the summer. He wrote his first software in Basic (including a math game that was shown at the University of Wisconsin in 1982) and later completed a degree in aerospace engineering. In 1994 he started a consulting firm with his brother, focusing on the effective use of relational technologies for scalable, high performance and mission critical applications. Mike has worked in a variety of roles including architect, project manager, developer and technical writer. The coolest part of his job? Running into people who are still using (and liking) his software applications. Mike is a published author with WROX Press and APress Books, writing primarily about getting the most from your SQL Server database. Since appearing in Microsoft's DevCast in 1994, Mike has presented technical information at seminars, conferences and corporate boardrooms across America. This music buff also plays piano, guitar and saxophone - but not at his MSDN Events. For more information visit Mike's website.

• Focused Session: Modern Data Applications on the Web
• Focused Session: Building Rich User Experiences with Silverlight
• Focused Session: SQL 2008 Spatial Data, AJAX and the Virtual Earth SDK
• Focused Session: Demofest: Linq to Amazon to Silverlight to Web Part to SharePoint
• Workshop: Building the DemoFest application

Mike Keith was a co-lead of the EJB 3.0 and JPA 1.0 specifications in addition to representing Oracle on the Java EE 5 specification expert group. He co-authored the premier JPA reference book called Pro EJB 3: Java Persistence API and has over 15 years of teaching, research and development experience in object-oriented and distributed systems, specializing in object persistence. He currently works as an architect for Java persistence strategies at Oracle and represents Oracle on the JPA 2.0 (JSR 317) and Java EE 6 (JSR 316) expert groups. He is a popular speaker at numerous conferences and events around the world.

• Focused Session: The Next Generation of Java EE
• Focused Session: OSGi in the Enterprise
• Workshop: Mixing ORM and XML Persistence

Milind Hanchinmani is currently an engineering manager at Intel with 13 years of industry experience. Milind currently manages the enterprise enabling team which works with software vendors to enable and optimize their applications for Intel Architecture. At Intel, for the last 6 years Milind worked as a member of the Intel on-site team at Microsoft in driving significant improvements in the quality and performance of three generations of Microsoft .NET Framework for Intel Architecture. He has great expertise in performance analysis methodologies and benchmarking. When not working he spends time with his 5 year old and likes hiking.

• Focused Session: Tips and Techniques for Writing High Performance Managed Code

Mukesh Gangadhar is a Senior Application Engineer working for Intel Corporation. He belongs to the Software Services Group, where his energy is focused on enhancing performance on latest Intel based platforms. He works on improving applications through architectural optimization, resolving scalability issues through multi core optimization, in both native and virtualized environments.

• Focused Session: Unleashing the Power of Java on Intel

I’m currently an engineering manager at Adobe Systems India Pvt. Ltd with 9 years of industry experience. I currently manage the customer engineering team which works with OEMs and other Adobe partners to enable Flash on their platforms. I have expertise in various mobile operating systems such as Nokia Series60, Microsoft WinMobile, etc. In my 9 years of experience, I have worked with Panasonic, Texas Instrument, Nokia, etc. When not working I spend time with my family and especially with my 4 years daughter.

• Focused Session: Rich User Interfaces by combining Java ME and Flash Lite
• Workshop: Capuchin - Bridging Java ME and Flash Lite

Narsimha is currently an executive manager at Broadridge Financial Solutions, India, where he is overseeing development strategy for Securities Processing Services in Fixed Income markets. He has worked in brokerage industry for over 15 years. He has helped in setting technical direction & strategy for various organizations. He has vast experience in architecting and designing Enterprise applications.

• Focused Session: AS/400 Platform Interfacing & Migration Strategies for Enterprise Java

Nav Saini is currently focused on strengthening the Micro Focus consulting capability and forging strategic partnerships within India, with a view to facilitating long term win-win business. Saini has centred principally on Mainframe systems in the blue-chip financial and retail sectors for the past 18 years in a wide variety of roles based across Europe. Having consulted for Micro Focus on a regular basis, Saini has specialised in the Micro Focus mainframe offload and migration business. Prior to his current involvement with Micro Focus, Saini was working with the Barclaycard India launch based out of Mumbai. He is a BSC computer sciences graduate from the 1989 class from University of Hertfordshire. Outside of technology Saini is passionately involved with charities/NGO's promoting the welfare of coral reefs, principally through local education programmes that focus on ecological land and sea management.

• Focused Session: COBOL – Getting younger with .NET!
• Focused Session: The Eclipse COBOL Java Triangle – The Y generation IDE and COBOL Finally Unite!
• Workshop: Mainframe in a Box
• Workshop: Cobol - Achieving Platform Independence
• Workshop: Extending Cobol to SOA, Web Services and Beyond

Nahas works a technology advisor at Microsoft working with leading organizations in the industry, enabling and empowering these companies to harness technology innovations available on the Microsoft platform. Over the 14 years of his career, he has worked in various capacities with organizations in designing, architecting and implementing large-scale solutions on the Microsoft Platforms for various global customers. Head over to the MSDN Blog to know more about Nahas Mohammed's preparation for GIDS 2009.

• Focused Session: Unravelling the New in Microsoft Silverlight 3

Niraj is a Technical Architect for a Bangalore based CMM Level 5 company. He is also a Microsoft MVP and a frequent speaker at various technical forums on cutting edge technologies. Niraj enjoys working on integration, architecture, performance, & review of enterprise applications with a specialized focused on enhancing team's productivity. In his glorious past bitten by entrepreneurship bug, Niraj successfully ran a consulting firm called Ardent Collaborations which he started right after graduating from college. During that tenure Niraj has done assignments for companies like Tesco, Wipro, Infosys, SAS, Synechron, HCL, IBM, Mphasis, L&T, Dun & BradStreet, Mastek, Logica CMG, etc. When he is away from his laptop, you will find him taking deep dives in automobiles, pottery, rafting, photography & financial statements though not necessarily in that order.

• Focused Session: Building Secure Web Services using WCF

Ola Bini is a Swedish developer currently working for ThoughtWorks in London, United Kingdom. He has been one of the core developers for JRuby since 2006 and is the author of APress book Practical JRuby on Rails. He has much experience with Java, Ruby and LISP. He has been involved with several other open source projects but JRuby takes most of his time. He has been known to like implementing languages, writing regular expression engines, YAML parsers and other similar things that exist at the border computer science. Ola has presented at numerous conferences including The Server Side Java Symposium Europe, RailsConf Europe.

• Focused Session: Introduction to JRuby
• Focused Session: Testing Java with Ruby
• Workshop: JRuby in Action

Padmanabhan Raghavan (Paddy) is a Co-Founder of 8KMiles, an online ecosystem of verified professionals and companies for outsourcing of software and other knowledge services completely over the internet. Prior to 8KMiles, Paddy had worked at EMC in their Storage and Backup groups. Paddy has a Masters in Information Technology from International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT-B).

• Focused Session: Leveraging the Cloud to Enable "Software development-as-a-Service"

Pandurang works as a Developer Evangelist at Microsoft focusing on next generation web technologies. He is very excited about the Microsoft technologies around Windows Live, ASP.NET AJAX, SharePoint Portal Server and other web technologies that herald the beginning of a new era on the Internet. He has over 8 years of industry experience creating complex web applications and working on several Microsoft technologies. Apart from technology, his interests include reading, writing, travel and photography. His blog can be found at www.thinkingMS.com/pandurang. Head over to the MSDN Blog to know more about Pandurang Nayak's preparation for GIDS 2009.

• Focused Session: Deep Dive - Microsoft Silverlight Pipelines
• Workshop: A Lap Around Silverlight 3.0

Building on his career as a Senior Software Engineer, with twenty year’s product management experience, Peter Anderton has created and launched products for both start-up, and multinational companies including IBM, Samsung and Misys. This mix of technical and business experience is put to good use as Anderton is currently the global head of the Application Development business for Micro Focus, based in the UK, where he manages the exciting technology that powers the modern world.

• Focused Session: Enterprise .NET
• Focused Session: Enterprise 2.0 - Putting your Weight behind Business Agility
• Focused Session: COBOL – Taking you into the Cloud
• Focused Session: Java and COBOL : Working Together

Prabhu Sunderaraman is a software mentor and corporate trainer with DuraSoft. He presents seminars and conducts corporate training workshops on Open Source Technologies (Spring, Hibernate, JSF, etc) and .NET Technologies (WPF, WCF, .NET 3.5 and LINQ) for companies in India. He has conducted close to 200 training sessions and workshops for software firms during the past six years. Prabhu is a hands-on software developer who likes to code all the time and has a passion for speaking and teaching. His interests include Agile Development, Test First Coding and Web Technologies. He has a Master of Engineering degree in Software Systems and Bachelors degree in Engineering Technology, both from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, Rajasthan.

• Focused Session: Struts 2.0 Deep Dive
• Focused Session: Building Web Services Using Spring
• Focused Session: Building Applications Using WCF

Praveen is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Asthra (www.asthra.net) – a Technology Consulting company that he founded in 2004. He has over eleven years of experience in delivering solutions on Microsoft platforms.

A graduate from REC, Surathkal, Praveen has worked for over 5 years with iFlexSolutions and then moved onto Aditi and Orbit-e Consulting working with clients in Europe, North America and East Asia. As part of the MSDN Regional Director Program since 2000, he has spoken at a large number of MSDN sessions and is a regular speaker at premier Microsoft events like Tech.Ed, DevDays, and the Software Architect Forum where he has consistently got top ratings. A speaker for INETA (International .NET Association) and PASS (Professional Association of SQL Server), he is also part of the Technical Advisory Board of HSBSoft.

At Asthra, Praveen is working at consulting and delivering workshops on the latest Beta products. Asthra helped Microsoft ramp-up the BetaOne support teams in India and China by conducting workshops on SQL2005, VS2005, VSTS, Vista and Office12. These were in-depth sessions and primarily focused on hands-on labs aimed at ramping up the support staff. Asthra has also been enrolled to assist in the Migration Labs efforts for SQL Server 2005 and for Vista. In India, Asthra is currently engaged in consulting with select partners to migrate their applications onto the new technology platforms.

• Focused Session: Silverlight and .NET RIA Services – Building LOB and Business Applications with ease

Priyank Garg is Director of Product Management at Yahoo! India. He is leading Product Management efforts for the Yahoo! Search team based out of Bangalore. Before this, he was in the Silicon Valley for the last 4 years as the lead Product Manager for Yahoo! Search Technologies, the search engine that powers Yahoo! Search used by 100’s of millions of users worldwide. With Yahoo!, he has introduced many new products successfully to the market, including Site Explorer and SearchScan and has been an advocate of opening up the Yahoo! Search index to the community at large through his efforts. Before that he worked at a technology startup, Ensim Corporation, providing high-tech solutions for software-as-a-service vendors, where he provided leadership in development and Product Management functions. He started his career as a consultant with Deloitte Consulting in Chicago providing IT solutions to large corporations to solve their business needs.

Priyank has a Masters in Computer Science from Stanford University and a B. Tech in Computer Science & Engineering from IIT Delhi where he graduated among the top 5 students of his class. He has published multiple papers and filed for more than 12 patents over his professional career. Priyank has been an active member of the IIT Delhi Alumni network during his stint in Silicon Valley, and continues to maintain strong ties with his alma mater.

• Focused Session: Yahoo! Search Opens up – BOSS & SearchMonkey

Punit works as a Technical Lead for IIS-ASP.NET Team at Microsoft PSS. He has been working with Microsoft for over 3 years. Prior to joining Microsoft, he primarily worked on Web based Media and Mobile Applications. In his current role, he helps developers across the globe solve their issues within the ASP.NET-IIS domain. He takes active interest in working on new age technologies for the web and is very passionate about developing web based applications targeted for the devices. Head over to the MSDN Blog to know more about Punit Shah's preparation for GIDS 2009.

• Focused Session: Understanding ASP.NET Under the Hood

Rajesh Ramachandran, Director; Fusion Middleware R&D is part of Server Technologies division of Oracle Corporation and is responsible for innovating and building key products for the past 10 years. He carries rich experience in the areas of enterprise computing, middleware, development tools, networking, and industrial automation and real time systems. Prior to Oracle, Rajesh has worked in Siemens AG, Future Software and Lakshmi-Barmag AG. Rajesh holds a Bachelor of engineering degree in Electronics, Master of Computer science degree from Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago and a management degree from ICFAI. Rajesh is a regular speaker in technology conferences.

• Focused Session: Enterprise 2.0 Is No Future Vision, It’s Current Reality

GS joined Satyam in 2005 as Sr Vice President to set up ADMS practice. He has rich experience in Application Delivery in the areas of Finance, Healthcare and travel and is well versed in managing diverse technologies. At Satyam, in the first two years of joining, he was heading the HCU - ADMS practice and he was instrumental in building expertise on technology, processes and tools for application development, maintenance and Re-Engineering projects. With effect from April 1st 2008, he has taken the responsibility of managing Java & C/S circle as part of the newly formed ADMS group. He has 25 years of experience in the IT industry with a career spanning TCS, the Tata group of companies, Perot Systems.

• Focused Session: Beat the Downturn with Agile Development Practices

As a Platform Evangelist at Adobe, Raghunath Rao Thricovil spearheads the community and developer relations activities for the Adobe Flash platform. He is an incredibly renowned speaker and is a common phenomenon in leading tech conferences across India. Raghu was part of the Flex product engineering across multiple releases and brings with him a great amount of Flex/ActionScript experience.

• Workshop: Building Enterprise Mashups using Adobe Flash Platform

Ramesh leads the Platform Evangelism initiatives of Adobe India. He has a wealth of experience working on a broad range of technologies ranging from Databases, Search Technologies, Expert Systems, RIA and Web 2.0 technologies. In his 18+ years of industry experience, he has led R&D initiatives for leading software companies. Ramesh loves teaching school students and has a passion for computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.

• Focused Session: Developing RIAs for the Enterprise using Adobe Flash Platform

Rakshith works as a Computer Scientist at Adobe Systems in the ColdFusion Engineering team. He has built various features for ColdFusion, including the popular Ajax support in ColdFusion 8. Rakshith loves presenting at conferences. He has presented at various international conferences such as Adobe Max (Chicago, 2007 and San Francisco, 2008), CFUnited at Washington DC, CFUnited Europe at London and webDU at Sydney. Rakshith also has a blog that focuses on ColdFusion. For the fitness freak that he is, you might bump into him running at one of the parks when he is not at work.

• Focused Session: Architecting Next Generation RIA with Flash, AJAX and ColdFusion

Presently, Managing Director (and Vice President- Products), Progress Software India, responsible for leading product development at the India Development center, Ramesh is responsible for providing strategic guidance to all the product teams, scale the product operations, with specific focus on cross-product considerations for the SOA and Data integration products. Prior to taking the above position, Ramesh was Vice President of Middleware Technologies at Pramati. Since 2000 Ramesh was heading Product Engineering at Pramati, then helped setup the team (for Progress Software) that built the Sonic Workbench on Eclipse, eventually transitioned to Progress Software- India. Returned to Pramati in 2006 to start the Technology consulting division offering high value consulting around middleware infrastructure, applications design and architecture, Web2.0 collaboration in the enterprises, SOA and emerging architectures such as Web Desktops based solutions.

• Focused Session: The Four Enterprise Integration Layers in the Emerging Computing Cloud

Sachin is Architect Advisor with Microsoft India. Over the period of 12+ years he has been leading and architecting enterprise products, provided architectural direction, technology assessment, and technical team leadership on legacy product re-architecture and modernization. Head over to the MSDN Blog to know more about Sachin Vinod Rathi's preparation for GIDS 2009.

• Focused Session: Software + Services: The Convergence of SaaS, SOA and Web 2.0

Saranya works as a Developer Evangelist in Microsoft India focusing on Microsofts latest cloud services technology. Inherently interested in Microsoft technologies and developer tools, she has spent considerable time in other Microsoft business units in India and Redmond. She is a graduate from BITS Pilani in Computer Science and Masters in Physics. She is passionate about technology, community meetups, presentations , demos and 2 way dialogues. Through upcoming Microsoft Virtual TechDays, she seeks to reach out to the developer community audiences to make aware of the next generation in software computing , where the future is headed towards ; the power and need of software + services Microsofts Azure Services Platform. Head over to the MSDN Blog to know more about Saranya Sriram's preparation for GIDS 2009.

• Focused Session: Introduction to Cloud Computing and Windows Azure
• Focused Session: Azure Services Platform - A Lap around .NET Services & SDS

Srini has over 14 years of experience & has worked in several leadership roles. Working in Application Development Horizontal as Integrator / AVP in Satyam, he is responsible for Java & Open Source group, Application Architecture and SOA Competency.He started his career in Oracle & as Director of Global business solutions, Oracle, he led a team out of India. As a Technical Director at IRI Srini successfully managed a global team responsible for Architecture and Delivery of Market Knowledge factory. As a Chief Technology Advisor at City of Chicago, he directed PMO, Application Development and IT Strategy. His management expertise spans IT Organization Assessment, IT Strategy, Portfolio Management and IT Process Improvements. As founder and CEO of PlanCube, he has developed a Strategy Framework which help the Clients to realize their vision. He holds a bachelors degree in Engineering from Bangalore University followed by a MS from University of Texas.

• Focused Session: System Integration Made Cheaper & Better Using Spring

Stephen Forte is the Chief Strategy Officer of Telerik, a leading vendor in .NET components. He sits on the board of several start-ups including Triton Works and is also a certified scrum master. Prior he was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and co-founder of Corzen, Inc, a New York based provider of online market research data for Wall Street Firms. Corzen was acquired by Wanted Technologies (TXV: WAN) in 2007. Stephen is also the Microsoft Regional Director for the NY Metro region and speaks regularly at industry conferences around the world. He has written several books on application and database development including Programming SQL Server 2008 (MS Press). Prior to Corzen, Stephen served as the CTO of Zagat Survey in New York City and also was co-founder of the New York based software consulting firm The Aurora Development Group. He currently an MVP, INETA speaker and is the co-moderator and founder of the NYC .NET Developer User Group. Stephen has an MBA from the City University of New York.

• Focused Session: The Daily Scrum
• Focused Session: Building RESTful Applications with Microsoft Tools
• Focused Session: Data Access Hacks and Shortcuts
• Workshop: Introduction to Oslo

Sujit works at Adobe as a Technical Evangelist. Sujit brings with him a great deal of expertise building enterprise applications on the J2EE platform. He specializes in architecting Rich Internet Applications on Adobe Flash Platform.Sujit is an extremely popular blogger focusing on Adobe LiveCycle Data Services.

• Focused Session: Developing RIAs for the Enterprise using Adobe Flash Platform

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. He has significant experience in architecture, design, and development of software applications. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects. He is a frequent invited speaker at various international software conferences and user groups and a Great Indian Developer Summit Alumni.

Venkat is author of .NET Gotchas (OReilly), coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer (Pragmatic Bookshelf), and author of Programming Groovy(Pragmatic Bookshelf).

• Focused Session: Agile Web Development with Grails
• Focused Session: A Two-Pronged Approach to Debugging AJAX
• Focused Session: Know your Java?
• Focused Session: Programming Groovy
• Workshop: Test Driven Development in .NET
• Workshop: Developing External DSLs in Java

Vedant works as a "Technology Specialist - SharePoint" at Microsoft India, helping customers and partners build solutions on Microsoft SharePoint technologies. Vedant is a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) and Certified Lotus Professional (CLP). He frequently blogs about SharePoint, including posting sample code snippets, programming tips, products or useful tools built on it. You can also find Vedant's take on reports published by research analysts or news items appearing on SharePoint or about a competing product on his blog: http://blogs.technet.com/vedant/. Head over to the MSDN Blog to know more about Vedant Kulshreshtha's preparation for GIDS 2009.

• Focused Session: Enterprise Search: FAST ESP Overview and integration with MOSS 2007

Vijay Nag, is the Solution Architect for SAP Business Objects. He joined Business Objects in May 2008 and has been instrumental in empowering and enabling partners and customers. He has been engaged with most of the organizations in the space of Finance, Telecom, Manufacturing, Insurance, Banking etc. Have provided consultancy and presales support on most of the Business Objects range of products. He has good understanding of Reporting and Dashboarding in the Business Intelligence Market space. As an Engineer, he has over 12 years of experience in the area of Reporting, Document and Knowledge Management and Productivity Enhancement.

• Keynote: Crystal Reports for .NET Developers
• Keynote: Crystal Reports for Web Developers
• Keynote: Crystal Reports for Java Developers

works as a Technology Evangelist (Databases and BI) with Microsoft India specializing primarily on SQL Server. With the love and passion for SQL Server he would want to help the community to maximize their investments on SQL Server by utilizing the product in the right way in their design, development, architecture and deployments. He has been working in the industry on various Microsoft technologies for the past 8+ years and been MVP - SQL Server for more than 3+ years before joining Microsoft. He has been a regular speaker at many of the MS Events like TechEd, MSDN, TechNet and many more. Also loves the local Microsoft Communities and has helped them in every single opportunity available. Apart from SQL, his part-time love is around Office suite of products which he plays a lot with. He codes, writes actively and shares his finding with the global developer and administrative community at his web space, www.ExtremeExperts.com and blogs about technology at http://blogs.sqlxml.org/vinodkumar. He also has been writing actively on many of the SQL Server Worldwide communities. Head over to the MSDN Blog to know more about Vinod Kumar's preparation for GIDS 2009.

• Focused Session: 5 Hidden Gems Developers Must Know about SQL Server