GENERAL SESSIONS:

John Bates – Progress Software

Dr. John Bates is Senior Vice president, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and head of Corporate Development for Progress Software.

In this role Bates is responsible for four key areas: creating and evolving Progress business strategies; acquiring companies to support Progress business strategies; evangelizing the Progress strategy and solutions to the company’s customers, partners and other constituencies; and driving product synergies across the company to support the Progress strategy to deliver solutions of the highest value and quality to the company’s customers.

Bates is a recognized visionary and entrepreneur in the software industry and has a strong track record of innovation in areas such as event-driven architectures, smart environments, and business activity monitoring. In particular, Bates is recognized as one of the foremost driving forces behind the emergence of complex event processing (CEP) and has pioneered the commercial use of event processing applications in business solutions that empower operational responsiveness, including capital markets trading, risk and compliance, telecommunications, fraud prevention, smart logistics and many more.

Dr. M.A. Ketabchi, Vice President, Strategy – Progress Software

Progress Software acquired Savvion, Inc., in January 2010. Dr. M.A. Ketabchi founded Savvion in 1994 and was the President and CEO of Savvion at the time of acquisition. Under his leadership Savvion launched the first business process management (BPM) product in the market in 1999 and built a strong customer base consisting of leading enterprises around the world. Over the past 15 years, Dr. Ketabchi has been engaged with many Savvion customers and partners, helping them improve their business through BPM and BPM-enabled solutions. Dr. Ketabchi is well-known for his pioneering research in business process management technologies and methods, including business rule and event management; process-centric, domain-oriented business solutions; object-oriented database management systems; and application development technologies. He has published and presented extensively in these areas and made significant contributions to advancing the state of the art and technologies in BPM and process-centric, domain-oriented business solutions.

Dr. Ketabchi received his Pd.D. in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Rick Kuzyk – Progress Software

Joining Progress Software in 1993 as a Solution Consultant, Rick Kuzyk is currently a Senior Portfolio Specialist in Field Enablement. He has helped to launch many Progress products and initiatives over the years. Based on his product knowledge and experience looking at problems from the customer’s perspective, gleaned from his years in the field, Rick specializes in helping customers, prospects, and the Progress field organization bridge the gap between technology and value-added solutions--to make “the light go on.” He also serves as a Power Messaging facilitator at Progress. Previously, Rick sold software for Cognos.

Peter Mellow – Progress Software

Peter Mellow is the VP of OpenEdge Development at Progress Software. He is currently responsible for the product requirements, development and delivery of the OpenEdge products.

Peter joined Progress in 1995 with a background in application and operating system development. He was initially responsible for bringing the first 64-bit Progress products to market as well as the porting of various other platforms. He continued to take on more responsibility for the development and delivery of the entire product from the 4GL language, development tools and the OpenEdge database. Peter’s focus is on getting the right features into the hands of the customers so they can continue to build the world’s best business applications.

Rick Reidy – Progress Software

Rick Reidy is the President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Progress Software Corporation. Reidy is responsible for the strategic direction and day-to-day operations of Progress Software.

Reidy joined Progress Software in 1985 as one of the original developers of the Progress® OpenEdge® application development platform. He has held numerous technical and management positions and served for several years as vice president of product development for the company's existing and new, high growth product lines. Reidy also served two years in Europe where he helped build Progress Software's network of distributors in Europe and the Middle East.

Reidy then led DataDirect Technologies, a division of Progress Software, where he and his management team more than doubled the revenue to over $70M in four years. In a more recent assignment, Reidy led the high growth divisions of Apama, DataDirect, and DataXtend. In 2008, Reidy was promoted to chief operating officer of Progress Software with responsibility for product development, marketing, sales, customer services and support for all the company’s products and solutions.

Rob Straight - Progress Software

Rob Straight has been a member of the OpenEdge Product Management team for over 5 years, with a primary focus on integration technologies along with overall product requirements and release definition. Recently Rob has been working to make it easier for both Progress and the OpenEdge customers to take advantage of Cloud Computing.

Ken Wilner – Progress Software

Ken Wilner is Vice President of Technology at Progress Software. In this role, Ken is responsible for defining the technical strategy for the Progress OpenEdge application development platform and for ensuring that products are technically sound, meet business requirements, and are architecturally consistent with customer and partner needs.

Ken joined Progress in 1995 and since that time has played a key role in defining, evolving, and implementing the strategies associated with almost all aspects of the OpenEdge platform. With over 29 years of experience in the software industry, Ken has experience in a wide range of areas including distributed databases, distributed object systems, SQL, sales force automation, and aircraft engine simulation.

UI FLEXIBILITY

Scott Blaubach - App Technologies, Inc.

Scott Blaubach is co-founder of App Technologies, Inc., which is a provider of development tools and consulting services to the Progress Software market. App Technologies specializes in web business application development for desktops, tablets and handheld devices.

Scott has over 20 years experience with Progress Software. His extensive background in creating development and run-time environments for character and client-server systems led to the development of the AppPro for WebSpeed toolkit used for web business application development utilizing Progress WebSpeed. Scott also has been serving as president of the Wisconsin Progress User Group since 2006.

Shelley Chase – Progress Software

Shelley Chase is a Development Architect in the Progress Software OpenEdge Engineering group. She joined Progress in 1995 with experience in enterprise application development and object-oriented programming on both UNIX and Windows. Working with OpenEdge products, Shelley has focused on creating an open SOA interface for OpenEdge and enhancing the Advanced Business Language (ABL).

Shelley has been part of the development, design, and architecture of many features within OpenEdge including ActiveX, Web services, open clients (COM, Java and .NET), object-oriented extensions to the ABL and, most recently, the OpenEdge GUI for .NET.

Mike Fechner – Consultingwerk Ltd.

Mike Fechner started using Progress and OpenEdge in Version 5 almost 20 years ago and ever since has supported Progress Application Partners and end customers in adopting the features of the latest OpenEdge and Progress releases to enhance the capabilities of existing applications. With his framework design skills he has set the groundwork for development of many successful OpenEdge applications.

Recently he has specialized on the OpenEdge GUI for .NET, working closely with Progress Software during the development of this great feature. Together with his team at Consultingwerk (http://www.consultingwerk.de), he supports OpenEdge developers during the adoption of the .NET UI in new and existing applications and has developed tools used by Progress Application Partners to ensure productive, successful adoption of the .NET UI.

Mike has over 15 year of international IT, business and consulting experience and is equally effective in management and technical roles. Mike works as a self-employed IT consultant and as director of his company, Consultingwerk Ltd. He is a well known and active member of the international OpenEdge community and is board member of the German PUG and the committee of the EMEA PUG Challenge 2010 (www.pug-challenge.eu).

Paul Guggenheim – Paul Guggenheim & Associates

Paul founded Paul Guggenheim & Associates (PGA) in 1984. He has been training Progress students since 1986. He has developed several comprehensive, high-quality OpenEdge training courses and provides both public training classes in the Chicago area and private training classes on-site. In addition, Paul provides clients with OpenEdge consulting services that include database design, database migration and conversion, performance tuning, and application development.

PGA’s clients are from industries such as manufacturing, distribution, gaming, banking, healthcare, insurance, government and non-profit. Paul has created the S.M.A.R.T.S. (Sales Management and Record Tracking System) sales force automation application and the Sharp Menu System, a GUI database-driven menu and security application for developers.

Paul has spoken at several regional, national and international conferences and has published articles in Progressions. Paul is also the chairperson of the Chicago Area Progress Users Group.

Frank Hilhorst – Progressive Consulting Inc.

Frank started working with Progress in 1992. As the Principal Software Architect of SDD Inc., he managed the design and development of the JAZZ hospitality billing system. JAZZ has been implemented in over 1000 hotels in more than 10 countries. The JAZZ system owed its success to its ability to integrate with other systems in terms of sharing data and UI components. This project allowed Frank to gain a broad knowledge and deep appreciation for Progress capabilities related to integration and support for non-native UIs.

Building upon this experience, Frank started his own consulting firm, Progressive Consulting Inc. (PCI) in 2006. PCI focuses on helping its clients gain a competitive advantage through integration and adaptability. The key to achieving this adaptability is to use layering as a way to isolate the business logic. This allows for easy integration and makes investments in UIs that can easily be ported to other platforms. Frank has been a regular speaker at the South Florida Progress User Group.

Peter van Dam – Future Proof Software

Peter van Dam brings to the table over 25 years of development and consultancy experience in Progress and OpenEdge. He is the founder of Future Proof Software, a Dutch Progress shop providing consultancy in OpenEdge architecture and modernization. His experience ranges from CHUI to GUI for .NET and from SOA to Ajax. Innovation is his middle name.

Peter is well known in the international Progress community as a publisher of technical articles and speaker at Progress conferences and user group meetings. He is the author of “Making Progress with Ajax.” Peter has been working with OpenEdge GUI for .NET since the first beta versions and is currently involved with several different OpenEdge GUI for .NET projects.

SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE/CLOUD COMPUTING

Richard Banville – Progress Software

Richard Banville is a Progress® OpenEdge® Fellow at Progress Software. He joined Progress in 1993 with a background in operating system test and development. While working on OpenEdge products, Richard has focused primarily on the database storage manager and the SQL query processor. His areas of interest include performance, concurrent programming, and multi-tenancy. He is also one of the few engineers at Progress who still programs in assembler when the need arises. Richard likes nothing more than discussing potential new features for the database with others. If you've used any new feature of the OpenEdge database in the past 15 years, you can bet that Richard had a hand in its conception, architecture or development.

Brian Bowman – Progress Software

Brian Bowman has been working for Progress Software for over 16 years. He has performed database tuning and disaster planning for customers of all sizes around the world. Brian has worked in Technical Support in the United States and Europe and in product development and as a Product Manager for OpenEdge Replication and OpenEdge Management. He is currently working with Progress Application Partners in the field, focusing on Software as a Service (SaaS) and business continuity. Brian has a Master of Science degree in Business Continuity and Emergency Management from Boston University and loves to talk about planning for disasters.

Roy Ellis – Progress Software

Roy Ellis has been working for Progress Software since 1995. He started in Technical Support before transitioning into development. He supported the Progress database on all operating systems for versions 6 to 8 while in Technical Support. He was a member of the development teams that brought you WebSpeed, AppServer, NameServer, AdminServer, and most recently OpenEdge Explorer and Management (formerly Fathom Management).

His most recent project is with the Cloud, investigating and helping customers leverage the power of Amazon EC2 and OpenEdge. As a Principle QA Engineer he still regularly participates in customer calls with Technical Support. He is a contributor on the Communities Forums and has presented at Exchanges and Face2Face Forums.

Sarah Marshall – Progress Software

Sarah Marshall is the QA Architect for the OpenEdge Engineering group at Progress Software. Previously she worked for a Progress customer as a programmer before joining Progress Technical Support in 1995. Sarah joined the development organization in 1997 and has worked toward delivering high-quality products to Progress customers ever since. She is an expert in the ABL and has worked most recently on the object-oriented extensions to the ABL, structured error handling and the GUI for .NET. She is currently working on language support for multi-tenancy.

Colleen Smith, Moderator – Progress Software

Colleen Smith is Vice President, Software as a Service and OpenEdge Product Marketing at Progress Software. In this role, she is responsible for strategic planning/marketing for OpenEdge and its global partner channel, in addition to SaaS industry thought leadership. Colleen joined the company in 2005 with 20 years of enterprise software marketing, sales, and product strategy experience and has helped transform software companies into industry leaders, built strategic partnerships, designed acquisition strategies, and moved companies through aggressive growth stages.

She holds a bachelor's degree in Business and Computer Information Systems from Stonehill College and an MBA from Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts. Colleen has published many research articles on technology best practices and is a frequent guest speaker at industry events. Her current area of focus/expertise is Software as a Service (SaaS), the growth opportunities, along with the technology challenges facing ISVs associated with this new business model.

DEVELOPER TOOLS AND PRODUCTIVITY

Sunil Belgaonkar – Progress Software

Sunil Belgaonkar is a lead Architect at Progress Software Corporation. Sunil is responsible for strategy, architecture and design of OpenEdge Architect, the new generation of OpenEdge development tools based on the Eclipse platform. Sunil has been with Progress since 2002 and has a strong background in the architecture and design of tools and business applications in ABL, Java and Web technologies.

Prior to joining Progress, Sunil has worked for various companies in a wide range of areas including CRM, MRP, and sales force automation. He also has expertise in application infrastructures like ABL, EJBs and different Web technologies.

Wayne Henshaw – Progress Software

Wayne has been a developer in the OpenEdge language group for 12 years. During that time he has worked on ActiveX support, the ABL SAX-READER, Web services, and the object-oriented extensions to the language. Most recently he worked on making it possible to subscribe to .NET events from ABL code and then for OpenEdge 10.2B, define and use ABL class events. Prior to joining Progress, Wayne worked for several other firms in the software industry.

Peter Lecuyer – Progress Software

Peter Lecuyer is a Principal Software Engineer working in the Server Technologies and Tools group at Progress Software, where he is primarily responsible for AppServer and WebSpeed networking infrastructure. Prior to this, he developed client/server networking for the AS/400 group.

Before joining Progress in 1992, he developed distributed applications for the financial services industry.

Jeff Ledbetter – Tugboat Software

Jeff Ledbetter is the Roundtable Product Architect for Progress technology alliance partner Tugboat Software. He is responsible for defining technical strategy and managing development for the Roundtable family of software products.

In addition to his active role in the implementation of product changes, Jeff also manages Roundtable customer support and assists in marketing and sales. Jeff has been a member of the Progress community since 1995 and has IT experience as a software engineer, analyst, and network administrator.

Gunnar Schug – proAlpha Software AG

Gunnar joined proALPHA 11 years ago after studying mathematics at TU Kaiserslautern. He is Director of Development and responsible for the proALPHA Framework & Tools area. The proALPHA Group is an international business service provider. With its integrated range of services, this ERP company offers not just a business solution, but also a comprehensive range of business services.

Sidhartha Singh – Progress Software

Joining Progress Software in Hyderabad, India, in 2007, as a Senior Software Engineer , Sidhartha designs and implements OpenEdge Architect features. He also has experience working with Web technologies and developing Eclipse plug-ins. He has a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology.

BEST PRACTICES AND APPLICATION MODERNIZATION

Gus Bjorklund – Progress Software

Gus Bjorklund, aka “the wizard,” is a geek who has been at Progress Software since 1989. Currently in the OpenEdge Technology group, Gus has worked on many different parts of the OpenEdge product over the years, starting with version 4.2. A popular speaker at many Progress and user-group-sponsored conferences, Gus is well known in the OpenEdge community.

His main interest is in database technology. He believes that the OpenEdge RDBMS is “the best RDBMS on the third planet from the sun” and likes using Linux and Mac OS X. Though he has heard that there are other programming languages, he prefers the 4GL but still refuses to call it by its current name, the “OpenEdge ABL.”

David Cleary – Progress Software

David Cleary is a Principal Software Engineer at Progress Software. David joined Progress Software through the acquisition of Crescent Software in 1995 and has been involved in the development of many Progress products over the years. David was part of the Progress® WebSpeed® 2.0 team and was the lead developer in adding XML support to the ABL. David has been part of the teams that delivered open client support to the ABL, as well as the OpenEdge AppServer, Web services, and AppServer Internet Adapter products. More recently, David has been the lead developer for the Progress® SonicMQ® and Progress® Sonic® ESB adapters. David represented Progress Software at the W3C and was part of the working groups that delivered the XML Schema, XForms, and XML Protocol (SOAP) recommendations. David is currently implementing support for Progress® Actional® throughout the OpenEdge product suite.

Anne Disney – Great Valley Technologies

Anne has been working at Great Valley Technologies since 1991 as a software engineer and project manager and is currently a member of the GUI development team. She has spent three years working in the Collaborative Software Development Lab. Anne has a .B. S. from the University of Maryland and a M.S. from the University of Hawaii.

Michael Forest – BravePoint

Since 2007 Michael Forest has been with BravePoint, where he specializes in Progress, Java, and Web technologies. He has been instrumental in bringing object-oriented principles and practices to BravePoint. He has developed multiple products using OOABL including an implementation of the OERA specification and an RPC adapter to enable Ajax clients to use Progress applications.

Thomas Mercer-Hursh – Computing Integrity Inc

Thomas Mercer-Hursh, Ph.D., is currently working in the areas of architectural best practice, modernization strategies and tools, and object-oriented programming best practice. He has worked with 4GL applications since 1979 and Progress since 1985 and has a long history of innovation and accomplishment in a variety of computing realms as well as in biological anthropology and education. Thomas has been doing professional software development since 1966, using in excess of 50 languages and covering a wide range of financial, scientific, statistical, and other applications. In particular, he has been developing financial applications since 1975 and applications in distribution accounting since 1980.

Mike Ormerod – Progress Software

Mike Ormerod is an Architect in the Applied Architecture and Strategy team responsible for SaaS and Cloud Computing. In this role, Mike is responsible for defining the SaaS and Cloud Computing architecture best practices for both internal and external customers and partners.

Mike joined Progress in 2004, initially in Europe as an Architect helping customers and partners implement best practices around the OpenEdge platform. Since moving to the US in 2007, Mike leads the team responsible for the OpenEdge Reference Architecture (OERA) and other best practice initiatives within Progress. Prior to joining Progress, Mike was CTO of an award-winning Progress Application Partner in the UK for 13 years.

OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY

Tom Bascom – White Star Software

Tom Bascom has been working with Progress since 1988 and is well known to the Progress community for his consulting expertise and experience with OpenEdge. Tom is a frequent contributor of technical articles and a speaker at Progress Exchange and Progress User Groups. His widely acclaimed and freely downloadable Progress tool set, including the ProTop database monitoring, ReadProbe performance benchmarking, PACE load simulation, and the Highly Parallel Dump and Load Toolkit is used by Progress DBAs around the world.

Tom is also known for his vertical market success as a founder and Chief Architect for Lakewood Corporation. After selling Lakewood Corporation to EDS in 1995, Tom worked for EDS as an Enterprise Architect on various projects until the summer of 2000. He then joined printChannel.com, the leading vendor of Web-based print procurement solutions, as VP of Engineering, where he was responsible for software development and IT operations in support of printChannel's global service offering. After the dot-com collapse, in 2002 Tom founded Greenfield Technologies to serve the needs of Progress users worldwide. He joined White Star Software and DBAppraise, LLC in 2007.

Roy Ellis – Progress Software

Dan Foreman – BravePoint

Dan Foreman is an instructor and consultant for BravePoint and has been using Progress since 1984. He is recognized worldwide as an expert in Progress Performance Tuning and Database Administration.

Dan is the author of several best-selling Progress books including the Progress Performance Tuning Guide, the Progress Database Administration Guide, V10 DBA Jumpstart, and Progress Virtual System Tables. He has also developed several tools for the Progress database administrators including ProMonitor, Pro Dump & Load, Balanced Benchmark, and the Progress Database Resource Kit.

Edsel Garcia – Progress Software

Edsel Garcia is a Principal Software Engineer in the Progress Software OpenEdge Engineering group. Edsel has a long history of first-hand experience using Progress Software products, having been a Progress customer and application developer nearly 20 years ago. During his 13-year tenure at Progress, Edsel has been a member of Customer Support, Solution Engineering development, the OpenEdge Architect product development team, and currently, the OpenEdge Management and Tooling development team.

David Lund – Progress Software

David is a Senior Product Training Manager. With over 20 years of Progress experience, he is responsible for educating Progress employees worldwide on new and enhanced features added to OpenEdge. David joined Progress Software in 1990 and has contributed to the OpenEdge product line in a variety of ways including as a Principal Software Engineer working on the design and development of OpenEdge DataServers; on other areas of OpenEdge, as a Senior Consultant assisting hundreds of Progress Customers with technical solutions; and in Product Management as a Data Management Advocate.

In addition, David worked for Epicor as a Senior Developer; led development projects for an ERP product at Benchmark Computer Systems on a team developing a Progress-based healthcare management package; and as a consultant to IBM managing a development team focused on office products and internationalization.

David received his degrees, including one in Computer Science, at the University of Minnesota in Minnesota, USA.

David Moloney – Progress Software

David Moloney is a Development Architect in the Progress Software OpenEdge Engineering group. He joined Progress in 1992 with experience in server technology and development, specializing in mid-range platforms. David initially developed all the utilities for the Progress/400 DataServer product and later broadened his focus to other DataServer products.

David has also contributed other tools to OpenEdge including the OpenEdge AppServer and Unified Broker and made core enhancements to the ABL. David has been part of the development and design of many different features in OpenEdge but has retained his specialty in DataServers throughout. He is currently the architect for the team of developers covering all OpenEdge DataServer offerings and related technologies.

Christopher M. Wolff – Progress Software

Chris Wolff is a Senior Software Engineer in the Progress Software OpenEdge Engineering group. In this role, he is responsible for design, development, and implementation of new OpenEdge SQL enhancements and performance improvements. He has concentrated on optimizer improvements, general query performance, and encryption.

Chris joined Progress in 2004, after getting his BS and MS in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

INTEGRATION AND PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Sri Ampalavanar – IFDS Group

Sri Ampalavanar is the Senior Manager of Architecture for International Financial Data Services group in Toronto Canada. He has been with IFDS for 8 years and is a key member of the Architecture Office, where he responsible for overseeing the implementation and operation of the OpenEdge-based applications for IFDS’ services offering to customers around the world.

Gary Clink – Progress Software

Gary Clink, a Senior Solution Engineer with Progress Software Northern Europe, has worked with Progress solutions for over 16 years: initially with a Progress Application Partner, then a direct end-user and finally as a technical consultant and solution engineer for Progress Software. Gary now focuses on helping existing OpenEdge customers to create a combined business and technical strategy to take their existing applications to "the new frontier" of Service Oriented Architecture, Operational Responsiveness and Responsive Process Management.

Peter Easton – Progress Software

Peter Easton has been with Progress since 2001. He is a Principal Engineer experienced in both the SonicMQ and SonicESB product lines. He was a member of the core engineering team that designed and implemented the patented Continuous Availability Architecture(CAA) for Sonic MQ. More recently, he has been responsible for introducing RESTful capabilities to the Sonic ESB as part of the 8.0 Sonic Connect feature. For this latest release, he also enabled AOP–styled logic enhancement to ESB services.

Dr. Kamyar Jambor-Sadeghi – Progress Software

Dr. Kamyar Jambor-Sadeghi joined Progress Software with the acquisition of Savvion in January 2010. He has been involved in developing Savvion BPM since its inception and managed tool development (BPM Studio, Process Modeler and PAM) since 1995.

Kamyar is currently a Director of Engineering at Progress, managing the Progress® Savvion™ Studio/Modeler, as well as the most recent offering webBPA, a Web-based tool for collaboratively developing business processes. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University, with a research specialty in the application of object-oriented databases in software maintenance.

Peter Judge – Progress Software

Peter Judge is a Principal Software Engineer in the Progress Software OpenEdge Engineering group. Peter joined Progress in 2003, with a background in application and application toolkit design, development, and consulting, primarily for the transportation and financial services industries.

Currently, Peter is working on migration, adoption, and best practices for the OpenEdge GUI for .NET. He is also one of the lead developers for Progress Dynamics and the ABL-based tools, responsible for multiple aspects of the product.

Dr. M.A. Ketabchi, Vice President, Strategy – Progress Software

Dr. Ketabchi received his Pd.D. in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Mahesh Nair – Progress Software

Mahesh Nair is a Software Architect with more than 10 years at Progress and specializes in SOA, BPM and messaging applications. Over the years he has worked on various Sonic products and on integrating other Progress products like Actional, Apama and DXSI with Sonic. Recently, for Sonic ESB 8.0, he has pioneered major architectural improvements in the ESB process engine and has been responsible for the design and implementation of new features like Fault Handling and Message Mapping.

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