John is CTO/co-founder of C24 (and just now: Technical Director of IONA). Founded in 2000, C24 hit the market a year later with an innovated Java-binding technology for financial services messaging standards. Integration Objects (IO) can generate Java code for almost every financial services messaging standard, from FpML (including validation rules) to SWIFT. It is unique niche in the market has seen it OEMd by many of the leading middleware, messaging and application server vendors. The largest clients now feed over $500million of trades a day through the code, the fastest process thousands of messages second.

The wide coverage of C24-IO has given John a unique view into the internals of many of the world leading financial institutions. John has nearly 20 years in Investment Banking and over 25 years in IT, mostly as a consultant. He has co-authored several books on Java and J2EE, was the author of Learning Trees distributed Java course and a regular speaker on grid, Jini and JavaSpaces in the Java and banking world. Over the years John has held more than one high-profile position as Head of Technical Architect in banks such as JPMorgan.

Alexis Richardson is a co-founder of CohesiveFT, developers of Elastic Server On Demand (ESOD) and sponsors of RabbitMQ AMQP. ESOD delivers production-line assembly of custom application stacks for any virtual format and the cloud.

Previously he was CEO and co-founder of MetaLogic, a middleware company specialising in high throughput caching and transaction management products. A past consultant for Fortune 1000 corporations, Alexis most recently worked on various high performance front office trading solutions. Before that he worked in proprietary trading of fixed income derivatives at Goldman Sachs, after researching and teaching mathematical logic and computer science at Oxford University.