Expert Series Design Previews

Speakers for the 2006 Design Previews

John Goodson, Vice President of Product Operations
John Goodson leads the product strategy, direction and development efforts for DataDirect products. For over ten years, John has worked closely with Sun and Microsoft on the development and evolution of database connectivity standards including J2EE, JDBC, .NET, ODBC and ADO. His active memberships in various standards committees, including the JDBC Expert Group, have helped John's team develop the most technically advanced data connectivity technologies. John is a frequent speaker at major industry events and has most recently been published in Java Developers Journal, Integration Developer News, and Sun Developer Source. John holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Virginia Tech.

Royce Willmschen, Director of Program Management
Royce is Director of Program Management for DataDirect Technologies and Program Manager for Connect for ODBC. He joined DataDirect in 1994 and has held a several positions, including Director of Product Development. Royce has over 20 years of software development experience working for the Georgia Tech Research Institute, IBM, Data General, Ziff-Davis, and DataDirect Technologies. He is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science in Information and Computer Science.

Carol Esau, Sr. Director, Global SupportLink and Custom Engineering
Carol Esau leads the technical support team for all of the DataDirect products. She has over 20 years experience working directly with customers providing project management and technical support. Prior to joining DataDirect in 2002, Carol was responsible for a group of major accounts in the telecom industry. Carol's focus at DataDirect has been continually improving the customers' experience with the technical support team. Her team is a 5 time winner of the prestigious Northface Award for customer service excellence. Carol holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Virginia Tech and an MBA. She is also a certified PMP (Project Management Professional).

Gregg Willhoit, Chief Software Architect
Gregg Willhoit provides technical leadership for the mainframe based Shadow products which include z/Services, z/Direct, and z/Events. Gregg has architected and developed several commercially successful systems software products which include DBMS Catalog Management tools, MVS and DB2 performance monitors, the first XA/DTP product for mainframe data, as well as being the co-author of Shadow Direct, the first commercially successful ODBC to mainframe data (DB2, IMS, VSAM, CICS, ADABAS) product which is used daily in many of the largest and most active mainframe database environments in the world.

Mark Biamonte, Program Manager
Mark Biamonte is Program Manager for DataDirect's Connect for JDBC product. He is responsible for defining the functionality and future direction of the Connect for JDBC product. Mark has over 20 years of experience designing computer hardware and software. He is currently an active member of the JDBC Expert Group defining the next version of the JDBC specification. Prior to assuming the Program Manager position Mark developed the Connect for ODBC and Connect for ADO XML driver and developed core modules for the Connect for JDBC drivers. He has held software and hardware design and development positions with Eastman Kodak Company, Raytheon and Applied Research Associates. Mark holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Worchester Polytechnic Institute in Worchester, Mass and a Batchelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vt.

Jonathan Bruce, Program Manager
Jonathan Bruce is a Program Manager for DataDirect Technologies. His responsibilities include DataDirect for XQuery APIs for Java (XQJ), .NET and Windows platforms, while continuing to fuel adoption of XQuery in the market place. Jonathan joined DataDirect after seven years at Sun Microsystems where he served as the JDBC Specification Lead and Architect for the Java platform. A technical and specification architect with significant experience in leading industry standards such as Java, J2EE and SQL, he led four Java specification request efforts that have contributed to the J2SE and J2EE platforms and generated a number of patents. His background also includes business development, sales support as well as inbound and outbound licensing consulting for the Java platform and database-dependent components of Sun's Java Enterprise System. Jonathan is co-author of the book JDBC API Tutorial and Reference, Third Edition. He frequently speaks at industry conferences and is most recently published in JDJ and DevX.com while regularly publishing blogs on Java.net, O'Reilly and DataDirect. Jonathan holds a bachelor's degree in computer engineering and a master's degree in mathematics from the University of Dublin's Trinity College in Ireland.

Jonathan Robie, XQuery Technology Lead
Jonathan Robie is XQuery Technology Lead for DataDirect Technologies, and a member of the XQuery Working Group and co-inventor of XQuery. Jonathan has been involved with the XML Query Working Group since the beginning, and has been an editor since the first documents were published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). At DataDirect, Jonathan is responsible for DataDirect XQuery, an enterprise-grade XQuery engine that supports the latest working draft of the XQuery specification.
Prior to joining DataDirect, Jonathan worked as an XML Research Specialist at Software AG, where he helped design architectures for XML servers and represented Software AG on the XML Query and XML Schema Working Groups. He has been on the architecture team for three XML databases or repositories, at Software AG, Texcel Research, and POET Software. Since 1985, he has been working professionally with advanced database systems and complex database applications, especially object-oriented databases, multimedia databases, workgroup database applications, and XML/SGML databases. He has an M.S. in Computer Science from Michigan State University. Jonathan has written an XQuery tutorial for the book XQuery from the Experts, which is now available from Addison-Wesley.

Carlo Innocenti, Architect, XML Technologies
Before joining Data Direct as Program Manager for XML technologies, Carlo Innocenti (Minollo) served as Principal Software Architect of Stylus Studio at Progress Software and eXcelon Corporation. While at eXcelon Corporation, Minollo managed an engineering group responsible for the overall tools strategy of the XML Database division, overseeing product design and development. Prior to that, he served as Development Manager for tools at Object Design, Inc., an object database company. Minollo began his software development career at ViVi Software, an Italian company he co-founded and that was recognized by the European community for successful and innovative software products. Minollo holds a MS in Computer Science and a Ph.D in Robotics from the University of Genoa (DIST).

Guest Speaker

Boston

Lance Andersen, Senior Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems
Lance is a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc. He is also the JDBC 4.0 and RowSets specification lead as well as the Java EE technical lead for Java Partner Engineering. Prior to joining Sun in September 2000, Lance worked at Sybase as a senior manager and staff engineer within Product Support Engineering. When he is not burning the midnight oil for Sun, Lance teaches tennis.