Information and Registration for ZapThink Events

Mr. Aghili is a veteran of the performance monitoring industry. Prior to founding Managed Methods, he was Vice President of Engineering at Newmerix. He has also been Director of Technology for Mercury Interactive responsible for all aspects of design, architecture, and release of the performance monitoring software product Mercury obtained through its acquisition of Freshwater Software, where Mr. Aghili was a Senior Software Engineer. Mr. Aghili has also held senior software engineering positions at OneRealm Software, Parexel Corp, and Rogue Wave Software.

As the Chief SOA Evangelist, David leads HPs SOA thought leadership activities with customers, industry analysts, and the sales and services organizations. David is a leading contributor to the development and execution of HP's SOA strategy, positioning, and customer advocacy working with product and marketing teams across HP Software, Services, and related TSG groups. David is the chair of the SOA Customer Advisory Board which supports the development of our SOA products and represents HP on selected SOA industry groups and initiatives. David recently was the VP of Marketing and SOA Evangelist for Systinet, where he defined and established the product and marketing vision for Systinet's SOA Governance and Lifecycle Management solutions. He led the company's strategy for the creation of the Governance Interoperability Framework which established a unique partner community and model to support the Systinet Registry. He was instrumental in driving market leadership and awareness with customers, industry analysts, and with the media.

Dan Finerty serves as Director of Product Marketing for DataDirect Technologies’ Shadow mainframe integration products. Dan has over 20 years of varied experience in integrating disparate technologies into new systems. Over the last several years he has focused on using SOA based solutions to assist with the challenges associated with mainframe integration.

Mike Kavis has over 22 years of experience in applications development. Mike has worked in the health, retail, manufacturing, and loyalty marketing industries. Mike has worked on some of the largest databases in the world and has a broad range of experience from BPM, SOA, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Architecture, mainframes, client server, embedded systems, linux clusters, data warehousing, business intelligence, enterprise portals, and financial applications to name a few. Mike currently serves the role of the Chief Architect and is responsible for setting the strategic direction for IT. Mike earned a BS in Computer Science from RIT in '88 and his Masters in Information Technology from Colorado Tech in 2007. He is currently enrolled in an Executive MBA program. Mike maintains a technology blog on ITToolbox under the pen name of Mad Greek (http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/madgreek)

Jeff Kessler has been working with Wall Street firms for the last 10 years. In his most recent position, he was in charge of Service Oriented Architecture initiatives at Lehman Brothers. During this time, Jeff designed and built a SOA runtime visibility system which gave Lehman the ability to manage, monitor, and govern all service offerings in the organization.

Chris is an expert testing and architecture strategist, with a 17 year background in computer software development, product management, and sales support for enterprise software. As Product Manager for iTKO's LISA SOA Testing software suite, Chris applies both project management and development experience to refine LISA features to best suit customer quality needs throughout the software delivery lifecycle. Chris was previously a Retail and Manufacturing Industry Manager at the enterprise software platform firm webMethods, overseeing requirements, customer presales and training for the $16M annual group. At supply chain software provider i2 Technologies he worked in i2's infrastructure group, with responsibility for the release of business process, workflow and monitoring engines. Prior to i2 at Software AG, Chris specialized in cross platform product installation and administration. As a software engineer, project manager, and solution architect, Chris has a great breath of industry knowledge from working with companies like Citi, TD Ameritrade, Lenovo, Tandy, Rubbermaid, TI, and TxDoT.

Martin Milani is an industry recognized thought-leader and expert on SOA with more than 19 years of experience in distributed systems architecture, product design and development spanning the evolution of distributed systems. As CTO, Martin is responsible for setting the strategic direction for Tidal's product line. Martin joined Tidal Software in 2006 through the acquisition of Intersperse Inc., a leading provider of monitoring and management solutions for the service-oriented enterprise, where he was president & CEO. Prior to Intersperse Mr. Milani was CTO of iBuilding, a Web services process-flow management and orchestration company where he led the design, application development, product management, support, and consulting teams. Under his leadership, iBuilding was named by CIO magazine as providing one of the 100 most innovative products of 2001. Previously Mr. Milani was at the Times Mirror Corporation where he held the position of Chief Internet Technologist and Strategist as well as Chief Enterprise Architect for Times Mirror and Los Angeles Times. Before joining Times Mirror, Milani held senior level technology, consulting and distributed system architect positions at Wells Fargo Bank, IBM, Retix, and Locus computing. Milani's areas of expertise include: massive parallel systems, asynchronous messaging systems, distributed operating systems and kernels, Enterprise Application Integration, systems and network management, and Directory Services. Mr. Milani obtained a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with a minor in mathematics from University of Pittsburgh.

Benjamin Moreland is presently employed at The Hartford as the Director of Foundation Services within the EA group, which is responsible for the realization of The Hartford's P&C SOA direction. He is a recognized leader in the SOA domain, having developed The Hartford's SOA Maturity Model, SOA Governance best practices, led the design and implementation of over 80 course grained services, deployed a UDDI registry, WSM engine, service bus, BPEL engine and helped set the SOA standards for The Hartford. He has 24+ years of IT experience that includes management, research, presentations and development, with a strong background in artificial intelligence. While at United Technologies and The Univ. of Conn., he led and participated in many research and development efforts. Mr. Moreland has a BA in mathematics, and an MS in Computer Science & Engineering from The Univ. of Conn.

Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst and founder, is a well-known expert in the field of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, and XML-based standards. Ron has been featured in and has written for periodicals, and has spoken at numerous industry conferences and in front of some of the largest businesses in the world.

Ron Schmelzer was the lead author of XML And Web Services Unleashed (SAMS 2002) as well as co-author ofService-Orient or Be Doomed (Wiley 2006) with Jason Bloomberg. Ron has served as the chair of the RosettaNet Cluster 1 Workgroup, working group member of CPExchange, member of the UDDI advisory group, and was a member of the CompTIA Electronic Commerce Standards Board (ECSB). Prior to ZapThink, Ron was founder, CTO, and "ePostle of Partners" of ChannelWave Software, as well as founder and President of VirtuFlex Software, and founder and CEO of VirtuMall, one of the first online eCommerce sites in 1994.

Ron was named "Geek of the Week" in Internet Magazine and was listed in Boston Magazine's Internet Top 40. Ron received a B.S. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).