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.

Billy Newport is a Distinguished Engineer working on WebSphere eXtreme Scale (ObjectGrid) and on WebSphere high availability. He's worked at IBM since Sept 2001. Besides his current activities, he helped add advanced APIs like the WorkManager APIs (JSR 236/237) and worked on the staff plugin architecture of WPS. Prior to IBM, he worked as an independant consultant at a variety of companies in investment banking, telcos, publishing, yellow pages over the previous 13 years in over 10 countries. He graduated from the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland with a Bachelors in Applied Computing in 1989.

Brian Oliver is a Global Solutions Architect at Oracle. He works within the Oracle Coherence Engineering group and predominantly focuses on enabling financial institutions across Europe and North America to implement massively scalable and high-performance Data Grid solutions.

Over the past 10 years he has been leading the development of large-scale multi-language and multi-currency Web, E-Commerce, Sports Gaming and Financial systems making extensive use of Java technologies. He's the founder of the Coherence SIG, probably the only regularly meeting Data Grid Special Interest Group in the world, and the Coherence Incubator, a site dedicated to providing reference implementations of architectural patterns on top of Oracle Coherence.

He's been using Java since 1996. He opens an IDE every couple of days to cook up new solutions. On alternate days he's in the air traveling around Europe and North America talking about Data Grids.

John Fallows is a pioneer in the field of real-time browser networking and co-founder of Kaazing Corporation. Originally from Northern Ireland, John graduated from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and has worked in the software industry for over fifteen years. Prior to founding Kaazing, John was a Consulting Member of Technical Staff for Server Technologies at Oracle Corporation. During his last 5 years at Oracle, John focused on designing, developing, and evolving Oracle ADF Faces to fully integrate Ajax technologies.

John is a popular speaker at international conferences and has written numerous articles for leading IT magazines such as Java Developer's Journal, AjaxWorld Magazine, and JavaMagazine (DE). John is co-author of the book Pro JSF and Ajax: Building Rich Internet Components, (Apress). In his role as chief technology officer, John formulates Kaazing Corporation's vision of bringing the capabilities of desktop applications to your plug-in free Web browser. He defines the architecture of the Kaazing product suite and oversees its development.

Nati Shalom is the CTO and Founder of GigaSpaces. He is also the Head of the Israeli Grid consortium. He has more then 10 years of experience with distributed technology and architecture namely CORBA, Jini, J2EE, Grid and SOA.

As a technology visionary, he is a frequent presenter at industry conferences and is actively involved in evangelizing Space Based Architecture and Data Grid patterns.