Kirk Pepperdine
CTO ,  JavaPerformanceTuning.com, Sun Java Champion and co-author, ANT Developer's Handbook
Kirk is a Performance Consultant and has been focused on Object technologies and performance tuning for the last 15 years. Kirk is co-author of the book ANT Developer's Handbook (SAMS).

Holly Cummins
Tooling developer ,  IBM Java Technology Centre
Holly is a tooling developer within the IBM Java Technology Centre. She is the author of the GC and Memory Visualizer tool and leads development on a number of other tools. Her tooling work builds on her experience working as a performance engineer within the garbage collection development team. Holly has been with IBM for six years. Before joining IBM, she completed a doctorate in quantum computation at the University of Oxford.

John Davies
Technical Director and Head of Research ,  IONA
John Davies is a veteran speaker on global-scale enterprise architectures and high performance computing. John has nearly 30 years in IT from hardware through assembler, C, C++ to Java. Working mostly in investment banking, John has held several global architecture roles in the world's largest banks. John was CTO and co-founder of C24, a company specializing in complex integration (SWIFT, FpML, ISO-20022 etc.). C24 was recently sold to IONA, where John is now their Technical Director and Head of Research.

Gil Tene
Vice President of Technology and CTO, Co-Founder ,  Azul Systems
With almost two decades of technology engineering successes, Gil guides Azul Systems architectural vision and product design to align with business and market opportunity strategies. Prior to co-founding Azul Systems, Gil was Director of Technology at Nortel Networks, having joined Nortel through the acquisition of Shasta Networks. Gil architected Shasta's Broadband IP Services Platform and Service Creation System. He is a member of numerous technology advisory boards and has been granted three patents in computer technology.