Prior to founding Terracotta in 2003, Ari was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Accel Partners. Before joining Accel, Ari was the Chief Architect at Walmart.com, where he led the innovation and development of the company's new engineering initiatives. At Walmart.com, he built and led a team of core engineers focused on performance management, and operations cost-saving measures.

Prior to Walmart.com, Ari worked as a consultant at Sapient and before that at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. During these years, he managed development and advised businesses on high technology strategy and deployment. His accomplishments at Sapient include the successful launch of Walmart.com, as well as successful engagements with Gap.com and Nike.com. At PriceWaterhouseCoopers, he worked with Harrod's of London, Siemens, Intel, Compaq, Barnes & Noble, and others.

Ari's career started as a software engineer for a subsidiary of Motorola, where he wrote groundbreaking wireless paging software. Since then, his software development accomplishments also include projects revolving around statistical analysis and data warehousing. In the mid 1990's, Ari invented a new object relational database that still exceeds the capabilities and performance of database technology today.

Ari holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering Computer Science as well as in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley.

Randy Shoup is a Distinguished Architect in the eBay Marketplace Architecture group. Since 2004, he has been the primary architect for eBay's search infrastructure.

Prior to eBay, Randy was Chief Architect at Tumbleweed Communications, and has also held a variety of software development and architecture roles at Oracle and Informatica. He received a BS in Mathematical and Computational Science, and an AB in Political Science, from Stanford University.

Mr. Smith is responsible for Kaazing's business and product strategy. Prior to joining Kaazing, Mr. Smith was Principal Product Manager for Oracle Application Development Tools. In his role as Principal Product Manager he was responsible for the evangelism and product direction of Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client as well as Oracle's AJAX and Java EE Web Tier offerings.

Prior to joining the application server team, Mr. Smith worked for Oracle's consulting business as a Principal Consultant, specializing in Java EE and AJAX development. In addition, Ric is a frequent speaker at Oracle events and has written articles featured in industry publications such as Java Developer's Journal and AJAX World Magazine.

He was also a representative to the OpenAjax Alliance and a graduate of the University of Arizona.

As the Chief Architect for GemStone Systems, Jags is responsible for the technology direction for its high performance distributed data management infrastructure platform. He has been directly involved in guiding several large customers in adopting and successfully deploying high performance data architectures.

With more than 17 years of experience, Jags helped GemStone architect their J2EE application server platform embedding an object database as a core cache in the 90's. As the Web Services Architect for BEA, Jags represented BEA in the W3C SOAP protocol specification, JAXM and other standards. Jags has also represented GemStone in the J2EE platform specification and the EJB expert group in the past. He has presented in several conferences on high performance data management.

Guy is heading GigaSpaces' research & development team. Prior to joining GigaSpaces, Guy has had over 10 years of experience in Software Development at leading technology organizations where he held key roles in the areas of software development, team leadership and consultancy.

Most recently, Guy was Chief System Architect of the Load Testing Products Division at Mercury Interactive. Prior to that, Guy worked for IBM as Chief Architect leading the implementation of large scale enterprise systems in various industries such as finance, military and telecommunication.

Prior to IBM, Guy filled leadership positions at various early-stage software companies.

Brian predominately works in the Financial Services, Investment Banking and Sports Gaming domains focusing on the introduction, use and integration of Data Grids (Oracle Coherence) into systems and/or global system infrastructure/architectures. Brian also delivers architecture workshops, developer training and strategy planning / reviews for Oracle customers.

Brian is heavily involved in setting project strategy, architecture and direction. Brian holds a First Class Honors Degree in Informatics and a University Medal from Griffith University (Australia) in areas of Object-Oriented and Declarative Programming Languages, Deductive Database Systems, Distributed Computing and Microelectronics.