2008 Conference Speakers

Conor Allen
VP Technology
Wombat/NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions

Conor Allen is VP of Technology and Director of Research & Development at NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions.

Conor Allen runs the High Performance Messaging Division of NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions which produces the Wombat Data Fabric, a multi-transport shared memory based messaging system providing breakthrough messaging performance in terms of latency and throughput.

Allen is also responsible for Research and Development within NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions, evaluating new and emerging technologies and determining their applicability within the NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions product stack.

Allen holds a BEng in Aeronautical Engineering and a MSc in Computer Science from Queen's University of Belfast.

NYSE Euronext Advanced Trading Solutions offers a suite of comprehensive, best-of-breed commercial technology solutions that include advanced end-to-end market data management, global exchange connectivity and matching technologies, co-location services, and super low-latency order routing capabilities. Its products attract and enable the free flow of liquidity for high-volume markets around the world.

Neil Bartlett
CTO
Algorithmics

Neil Bartlett is Chief Technology Officer with Algorithmics, where he oversees scientific and technical issues across the organization. As CTO, Neil is responsible for the research, development, engineering, architecture and delivery of the company's risk solutions. Prior to joining Algorithmics, Neil worked as a consultant developer with global technology companies including Nortel, the Toronto Stock Exchange, and Promis. He has also worked with British Telecom Labs and IBM Research Labs, developing network control systems and software development tools, respectively. The author of three books on computer development, Neil holds a Bsc degree (honours) in Computer Science and Electronics from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

Bryan Che
Product Manager
Red Hat

Bryan Che is the Product Manager at Red Hat for Red Hat Enterprise MRG, Red Hat's Messaging, Realtime Linux, and Grid offering. In this capacity, Bryan manages the product strategy and direction for Red Hat's high performance distributed computing technologies. Bryan graduated with his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Brian Clark
Vice President, Chief Software Architect
NYSE Euronext

Brian W. Clark is Vice President, Chief Software Architect for NYSE Euronext. In this role, Mr. Clark is responsible for creating efficiencies through systems integration and overseeing the use of innovative strategies and technologies to introduce new products, reduce costs and ensure customer satisfaction. These solutions have also enabled the rapid integration with Archipelago, and provided NYSE Euronext with a competitive edge using and managing a rapidly growing information environment.

Prior to joining the NYSE in 2004, Brian was Chief Information Officer and employee number two at Emagine Solutions, Inc. (a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank), where he contributed to the rapid development of the startup, growing it from $0 to $2 million in revenues within the two years of operation. The client base included such Blue Chip corporations as Deutsche Bank, Citibank, and Verizon.

Prior to that, Mr. Clark was Chief Information Officer of Tokyo-based Nikko Securities International, where he was responsible for all Information Technology activities in North and South America. Reporting to the CEO and a member of the Management Committee, Mr. Clark was actively engaged with each of the trading business product heads in formulating strategies and executing the rollout of new finance and technology products. He also reduced costs by 20% for an annual savings of $4 million through vendor negotiations and technology platform consolidations.

Before joining Nikko, Mr. Clark spent a considerable amount of his career at Citigroup, where he was consistently promoted to increasing levels of organization and financial responsibility. Beginning as a project manager of financial systems, Mr. Clark’s accomplishments soon evolved to leading the technology effort in the turn around of the bank’s commercial real estate business, leading multiple teams in the deployment of new trading platforms for Citi’s significant fixed income businesses, leading a global architecture program to provide consistent, reusable components to the Investment Bank businesses Japan, Europe and North America.

Mr. Clark received his associated degree in Architecture from SUNY at Farmingdale, and his bachelor’s degree, Cum Laude, from the University of Phoenix. Mr. Clark is President of the New York Chapter of the Association of Enterprise Architect, and is on the advisory board of Xpheria, LLC.

Don Clegg
Vice President, Marketing & Business Development
Supermicro Computer

Heading up Supermicro's Marketing & Business Development groups, Don brings more than 20 years of direct experience in Sales, Marketing and Computer Design. Focused on long term growth opportunities, Don and his team are responsible for working with key partners to develop new business initiatives. Prior to Supermicro, Don was vice president of marketing for Netcell Corporation, a VC backed storage semiconductor start-up as well as vice president of marketing and strategic sales at Tyan Computer Corporation.

Don has also held design and marketing positions at Opti, Inc., Chips and Technologies, Wyse Technologies and Northstar Computers. Don graduated with High Honors from Brigham Young University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering.

Richard Dracott
General Manager, HPC
Intel

Richard is the General Manager of High Performance Computing in the Server Platforms Group. He is responsible for driving a cross organizational team to grow Intel’s overall business in this fast growing market segment including silicon, platforms and software products, in addition to industry initiatives and collaboration.

Richard joined Intel in Canada in 1982 and has held a variety of international sales, marketing and strategy positions in Europe and North America, including Director of Marketing for the Microprocessor Products Group, Director of Marketing for the Desktop Product Group and Business Manager for Intel Online Services Europe. From 2001 to 2004, he was the General Manager of Marketing & Planning for the Enterprise Platforms Group, focused on the Intel® Itanium® 2 processor and Intel® Xeon(tm) processor families for servers and workstations. Until November 2006, he was the Director of Strategic Marketing for the End-User Platform Integration organization, focused on engaging end users to help drive future product planning.

Prior to Intel, Richard was in software development for aerospace and communications, and holds a BSC in Mathematics from the University of Southampton in England.

Deniz Ergener
Equity Linked Technology
Merrill Lynch

Bio to come.

William Fellows
Principal Analyst
The 451 Group

As Principal Analyst William created and drives 451’s user research program with IT early adopters and innovators across a range of vertical markets, including the Grid Adoption Research Service (GARS) and Cloud Computing. In addition to published research and survey reports, the program convenes strategic technology summits and chairs discussion groups for IT decision makers, especially in the financial services sector. William’s team leads 451’s research activities within European Commission Framework Program projects and works directly with industrial and community partners. William also covers innovation in enterprise IT - wherever it is occurring - for 451’s vendor research programs and provides strategic counsel.

William is a regular speaker and moderator at industry and 451 conferences and sits on numerous advisory boards and planning committees for industry bodies including OGF and the UK DTI’s GCN. William’s opinions are regularly sought and cited in newspapers such as the New York Times, Financial Times, magazines and trade publications.

As a co-founder of The 451 Group William assumed management of business development, recruitment and editorial activities at company formation in 1999, lead development of technical infrastructures – specifically mobile operations – and worked with investors, partners and suppliers to launch the company on time and on budget in April 2000.

Before starting 451 William worked for 11 years in technology and business journalism, building an extensive knowledge of European and U.S. technology markets, financial models and its business leaders. William joined ComputerWire in London 1988, developing its coverage of the open systems sector and founded company subsidiaries in the former Soviet Union (1990) and the US (1992). Based in New York he built and managed an editorial team across several US locations and edited the influential Unix industry newsletter Unigram.X.

William has an MSc in Information Systems & Theory from Portsmouth Polytechnic and a BA Hons Government & Sociology from the University of Essex.

Lee Fisher
Worldwide FSI-HPC Business Development
Hewlett-Packard

Lee is Worldwide Business Development manager for HP’s scalable, high performance solutions in Financial Services. He is focused on developing and communicating HP’s turnkey solutions in the areas of low latency market data as well as compute-intensive quantitative analytics. He works with HP partners who offer hardware, middleware, and application components employed in these solutions to ensure production-worthy deployable systems. He helps HP regional teams and customers understand these value-added systems, optimized for FSI-HPC performance. Lee previously served as HP’s Business and Alliances manager for the Computer-Aided Engineering industry for over a decade.

Lee has a Sc.B. in Engineering from Brown University, an Sc.M. in Management from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and over 25 years of industrial experience in manufacturing, software engineering, product marketing, alliance management, and technical sales.

Silvano Gai
Fellow
Cisco Systems

Silvano Gai, who grew up in a small village near Asti, Italy, has over twenty-seven years of experience in computer engineering and computer networks. He is the author of several books and technical publications on computer networking and has written multiple Internet Drafts and RFCs. He is responsible for 30 issued patents and 50 patent applications. His background includes seven years as a full professor of Computer Engineering, tenure track, as Politecnico di Torino, Italy and seven years as a researcher at the CNR (Italian National Council for Scientific Research). For the past eleven years, he has been in Silicon Valley where in the position of Cisco Fellow, he was an architect of the Cisco Catalyst family of network switches and the Cisco MDS family of storage networking switches. Currently he is a senior fellow with Nuova Systems (Cisco) where he has been active in defining the new Data Center architecture and in making FCoE a reality.

Debra Goldfarb
President & CEO
Tabor Communications

A 20-year veteran of the High Productivity Computing industry, Debra Goldfarb is a globally recognized industry opinion shaper. Previously, Goldfarb spent 16 years with IDC where she was one of the foremost industry analysts covering market segments for servers, workstations, and High Performance Computing. Goldfarb was instrumental in launching a Life Sciences practice at IDC as well as starting IDC’s HPC practice. Following IDC, Goldfarb spent several years with IBM as vice president of strategy and products for IBM’s Deep Computing group and vice president of strategy for IBM’s Systems and Technology group.

Martin Harris
Financial Services Market Director
Platform Computing

Martin has over a decade of experience in product management and solution consulting of software and hardware solutions for the financial services sector. Prior to joining Platform in 2005, Martin played key roles at NCR, Hitachi Data Systems, and Microsoft, managing products and solutions for top financial institutions worldwide. Martin holds a Bachelor of Mathematics degree in Business Administration.

James Hartley
Vice President, Research
A-Team Group

Mr. Hartley, as VP Research for A-Team Group, is charged with developing research products on behalf of A-Team, as well as contributing to consulting projects, events, and other A-Team activities.

Previously, as Chief Technologist of SIIA/FISD, Mr. Hartley developed and supported MDDL - Market Data Definition Language - and he facilitated the global conversation on Securities Processing Automation (SPA) including Reference Data and Straight-Through Processing related topics.

Previously, Mr. Hartley was employed by Reuters Group (aka Bridge Information Systems) for five years as Catalyst, Office of the Chief Scientist and then Senior Architect for the Chief Architecture Office. At Bridge, Mr. Hartley concentrated on the development of leading edge technologies, including delivery mechanisms and user interface platforms, for the dissemination and representation of quotes, news, charts, and other financial information. Mr. Hartley has had global involvement and responsibilities in furthering new capabilities and products through training and technical leadership.

Mr. Hartley has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering (Computer option) from The Ohio State University and a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Duncan Johnston-Watt
CTO
Enigmatec Corporation

Duncan is the principal founder of Enigmatec Corporation. He has over twelve years experience developing technology for the financial services industry specialising in the development of large-scale systems including the global FX and Money Markets data delivery infrastructure for BNP and the Fixed Income analytics infrastructure at UBS. In April 1998 Duncan joined the Reuters Group subsidiary, Instinet Corporation where he led the development of their new Fixed Income brokerage platform that was launched in March 2000 becoming Managing Director, Fixed Income Technology in May 2000. At Instinet he pioneered the use of Java enterprise technologies in Financial Services. In recognition of this work he was nominated for a Computerworld Smithsonian Award in April 2000. Duncan holds an MSc in Computation from Oxford University.

Patrick Kerpan
CTO
CohesiveFT

Pat is the former CTO of Borland Software and previously General Manager of one of Borland's most successful business units. Borland's acquisition of Bedouin Inc. (founded by Pat) led to the growth of ALM products in the Borland portfolio, including Pat's lead in the acquisition of the public company Starbase. Pat spent 13 years in Derivatives Technology as Managing Director at CIBC, Executive Director at Swiss Bank Corp and a VP O'Connor & Associates.

Ambreesh Khana
Global Head, Financial Services Industry
Sun Microsystems

Ambreesh Khanna is the Global Head of the Financial Services Industry organization for Sun Microsystems. He has been with Sun for almost 12 years. He is the former Chief Technologist for FSI. He specializes in Capital Markets, and has helped key broker-dealer firms deal with their latency issues. He was also a Board Member of the Operating Systems Ambassador community. He has worked with Wall Street customers for most of his tenure at Sun, most recently helping them adopt Solaris 10.

Prior to Sun, Ambreesh was a Senior Software Developer at Syncsort Inc., a company specializing in high performance systems software. Ambreesh holds two Masters Degrees in Computer Science, and a Masters Degree in Economics. He is published in the Journal of the ACM.

Moiz Kohari
VP, Engineering, Financial Services
Novell

Moiz Kohari is Vice President of Engineering, Financial Services at Novell. Prior to joining Novell, Mr. Kohari was Founder and CEO of Mission Critical Linux. He has 20 years of experience designing, implementing and supporting operating systems. Mr. Kohari's professional experience also includes Tru64 UNIX development/support at Digital Equipment corporation, and real-time kernel development at Concurrent Computer Corporation.

Bill Laing
Corporate Vice President, Windows Server and Solutions Division
Microsoft Corporation

Bill Laing is corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Windows Server and Solutions Division; he has been with Microsoft since 1999. As leader of the Windows Server and Solutions Division he is responsible for project managing, delivering, and documenting the various versions of Windows Server including Home Server, Small Business Server, Mid-Size Business Server, and High Performance Computing Server. In addition he is responsible for Virtualization and Terminal Services product delivery, customer engagement programs, and relationships with strategic partners such as OEMs. He reports to the Senior Vice President of the Server and Tools Business, Bob Muglia.

Before he joined Microsoft Bill worked for Compaq (Digital) for 17 years where he was a Corporate Consulting Engineer. During his career at Digital Bill worked on OpenVMS Systems performance analysis, VAXcluster design and development, Operating Systems kernel development, Transaction Processing, file systems, software strategy, and systems research. He was Technical Director of Engineering in Europe and CTO of AltaVista Internet Software.

Bill has held research and teaching posts in Operating Systems at the University of Edinburgh where he worked on the EMAS operating system. He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science and an M.Phil. in Computer Science both from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Peter Lankford
Founder and Director
STAC

Peter Lankford is Director of the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC). STAC conducts private and public hands-on research into the latest technology stacks for capital markets firms and their vendors. Public STAC Reports, available for free at www.STACresearch.com, document the capability of specific software and hardware to handle key trading workloads such as real-time market data, analytics, and order execution. STAC provides optimization expertise, benchmarking standards, advanced tools, and simulated trading environments in STAC Labs. Prior to STAC, Peter was Senior Vice President of Information Management Solutions at Reuters, where he led the $240M market data systems business for 3 years. Peter’s team led Reuters into the business of low-latency direct exchange feeds and catalyzed the widespread adoption of Linux on Wall Street by making RMDS the first major product for the securities industry on that platform. During his 8 years with Reuters, Peter also oversaw strategic marketing for realtime datafeeds and TIBCO-based enterprise integration solutions. Prior to Reuters, Peter held management positions at Citibank, First Chicago, and operating-system maker IGC.

Oleg Lukyanov
FSI Solutions Architect
Voltaire

Oleg Lukyanov is Voltaire's FSI Solutions Architect responsible for hardware and software market data and grid acceleration products that Voltaire is building and delivering to its growing Financial Services customer base. As part of this role, Oleg routinely interacts with Voltaire's Hedge Fund, Investment Bank and Exchange customers in order gather requirements and continue building innovative products that satisfy market requirements and deliver value to Voltaire customers.

Prior to Voltaire, Oleg was employed by Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase and Bear Stearns, where he served in various infrastructure delivery and infrastructure engineering positions.

Oleg holds a B.S. in Information Systems with a minor in Finance from Yeshiva University.

Dave Malik
Solutions Architect
Cisco Systems

Dave Malik is a Solutions Architect in Cisco’s Advanced Services organization responsible for data center design and architecture for Financial Services firms. For the past several years, he has been involved in developing solutions to support market data and trading floor applications. Dave is actively involved in industry forums and is an author of several publications. He is currently involved in creating next-gen trading architectures. Dave has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and a Master of Science in Information Systems.

Shawn McAllister
VP, Architecture
Solace Systems

Mr. McAllister is responsible for all aspects of Solace Systems' product design and architecture as well as analysis of customer technical requirements. Mr. McAllister has been a visible leader in Ottawa, Canada's thriving telecom technology sector for more than15 years. Prior to Solace, he led engineering teams in the development of ATM switches, metro Ethernet switches, and IP routers at Newbridge Networks and Alcatel.

Dan McCormick
Co-Founder & CEO
Atrato

Dan, a seasoned entrepreneur, brings nearly 20 years of management experience with a proven track record in the computer storage and IT market. Prior to co-founding Atrato, he spent nearly six years bringing storage startup XIOtech from pre-product launch through acquisition by Seagate Technology. Dan’s career also includes key positions with GE Capital IT Solutions and national PC integrator, PC Express.

Simon McIntosh-Smith
VP of Applications
ClearSpeed Technology

Simon McIntosh-Smith has been designing microprocessors and parallel applications for over 15 years. He started his career at Inmos and ST Microelectronics, before moving to PixelFusion in 1999, and becoming a founding member of ClearSpeed in 2001. As vice president of applications, Simon leads the customer-facing development of ClearSpeed's application accelerators for pervasive high-performance, high-density computing. He graduated as Valedictorian with a first class degree in Computer Science, for which he was awarded Cardiff University's Cray Research prize in 1991.

Ken Michelini
Associate Partner
Citihub

Ken is an accomplished, business minded technologist with 20+ years experience in financial services. He has extensive experience in designing, integrating and managing enterprise-level market data systems for both client side institutions and market data vendors.

John Oddie
CTO
Celoxica

John has over 25 years’ experience of working in the financial services sector with particular focus on market trading, Celoxica’s key target market. Until 2007, John ran the exchange business for Atos Euronext Market Solutions (AEMS), the largest business unit of the firm, which provides technology and services for global exchanges, clearing houses and capital markets. Prior to this, he was the executive vice president of Instinet’s Global Equities business and has also held senior technology roles at Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Merrill Lynch.

Folu Okunseinde
Solutions Architect, Financial Services Solutions Group
IBM

Folu Okunseinde is a Solutions Leader for IBM's Financial Services Solutions Group. He is responsible for architecting high performing systems for financial markets clients from the full breadth of IBM hardware, software and services. He specializes in low latency market data and trade processing platforms for exchanges and capital markets firms. Folu has served as lead developer for IBM's low latency messaging and market data distribution products. He helps lead the integration of emerging IBM technologies for the financial markets industry and contributes to the technical strategy of IBM's offerings in this area. Prior to his current role, Folu focused on high performance computing and distributed computing systems. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Scott Parsons
Chief Architect and Chief Scientist
Exegy

Mr. Parsons is the Chief Architect and Chief Scientist of Exegy. He has responsibility for Exegy's product design and architecture, and brings to that role over 20 years of experience in designing and implementing technologically advanced products for the Financial Services industry.

Prior to joining Exegy, Mr. Parsons served as Senior Vice President and Global Head of Platform Development for Reuters, where he was responsible for the development of Reuters' premier market data system platform and their next generation media platform. Before Reuters, Mr. Parsons held senior engineering management positions, including Chief Scientist at Bridge Information Systems, where he was responsible for overall systems architecture and new product development.

Ian Pearl
Lead - Low Latency Trading and Market Data
Sun Microsystems

Ian Pearl has been involved with trading and market data systems for over 20 years. He has worked for trading technology suppliers including Misys and CSK Micrognosis as well as for a number of banks including Allied Irish, and has been responsible for deployment projects for trading rooms in many others. He has founded and grown a financial software house focused on trading applications on the Reuters RMDS platform, and was the developer of the RTT toolkit which was the original Reuters' API for building real-time trading applications using Visual Basic and Excel. Ian was also one of the founding directors of EasyScreen, the trading system built for the LIFFE Connect market when London's LIFFE futures market moved from floor to screen-based trading. He has been working for Sun Microsystems for 3 years and currently has global responsibility for Low Latency Trading and Market Data systems in the Global Financial Systems Industry team.

Richard A. Piña
Executive Architect Technical Advisor
Merrill Lynch

Bio to come.

Kevin Pleiter
Director, Global Financial Services Sector
IBM Corporation

Over the past 15 years Kevin has work in and successfully delivered business and technology solutions to investment management and capital market firms in the US, Europe and Asia Pacific. Presently, Kevin is Director, Financial Services Sector, responsible for incubating leading edge Trading and Risk solutions in collaboration with early adopter customers and IBM Systems, Software and Research groups. Before joining IBM in London, Kevin held in a number of Fund Management and Trading roles with institutions including Delaware Investment Advisors, Salomon Brothers Asset Management and Deutsche Bank AG. In addition Kevin has also held a senior management position with a leading financial services software and consulting house in Europe and Canada.

Kumar Rajendra
Vice President Information Technology
Aon Re Canada

Kumar Rajendra has worked in the IT industry for 25 years. He is currently the Vice President of IT for Aon Re Canada. In addition, Kumar is the Vice President of the Toronto Users Group for Power systems, member of the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS) and Institute of Data Processing and Management (MIDPM) UK. Kumar received his Bachelor of Science degree from University of Colombo, Sri Lanka majoring in Physics and Mathematics. Kumar is happily married to Shanthi for 23 years and has two great boys Rajiv (McMaster University) and Sanjiv (Sheridan College) and enjoys remote controlled flying machines, outdoors and travel.

Mike Strickland
HPC, Strategic and Technical Marketing
Applications Business Unit
Altera Corporation

Mike Strickland has more than twenty years of computer, networking and storage experience with companies such as HP, Silverback Systems, Texas Instruments, and Altera. His current responsibilities with Altera include driving the strategic and technical marketing efforts for the computer, storage, test and medical market segments, as well as leading the FPGA High Performance Computing vision. Previously Strickland has led the development and launch of numerous products including networking, storage management, TCP/IP Offload and iSCSI. He holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Brown University and a M.S. degree in management from the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.

J. Barry Thompson
Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Tervela

An entrepreneur and innovator, Barry Thompson brings more than 18 years experience to Tervela Inc, a company he co-founded in 2004 in which he serves as Chief Technology Officer and board member. A self-taught technologist, he began his career as a consultant, designing solutions ranging from embedded robotics and imaging to traditional enterprise systems. His clients included MCI, American Mobile Satellite, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other government and private organizations. In 1995 he moved to Wall Street, leading the adoption of new transformative technologies in the financial services industry while working for firms such as AIG, NatWest and UBS where he was Head of North American Architecture. In 2002, Thompson began to pursue his passion for emerging technologies through incubating research projects in materials manufacturing and carbon nanotube growth, virtual reality and gaming infrastructure. Thompson also joined the X-Prize Foundation where he currently serves on the board of trustees and the executive committee. He is a 2001 graduate of the International Space University SSP.

Dan Tuchler
Vice President of Strategy and Product Management
BLADE Network Technologies

Dan Tuchler has over 25 years experience in technical and marketing roles in the networking industry. Most recently, he led product management at Mellanox Technologies, the leading supplier of InfiniBand products and an important player in the fast-growing High Performance Computing (HPC) market. Prior to Mellanox, Dan led product management at Force10 Networks, a leading vendor of large scale, resilient 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching products.

Dan’s product experience spans a range of networking product technologies including emerging Ethernet standards, InfiniBand, security, load balancing, content aware networking, and high-availability products at companies such as Alteon WebSystems, Wang Labs, and Proteon Networks. At Alteon, he managed several generations of product lines, from the initial launch of the Web Switch through the company’s IPO and acquisition by Nortel. In addition Dan has consulted to numerous Silicon Valley start-ups, developing business plans and product strategies.

Dan started his career as a hardware designer developing networking products. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland and an MBA from Boston University.

Geno Valente
VP, Sales and Marketing
XtremeData

Geno Valente is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for XtremeData, Inc. He has business, strategy, and sales responsibility for their line of FPGA based computing accelerators and appliances. Prior to being at XtremeData, Geno spent 11 years at Altera Corporation, a world leader in FPGA, Structured ASIC, and Logic solutions. Most recently at Altera, Geno lead their sales efforts in HPC and Financial Analytics for North America. Geno has a Bachelors Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Balaji Veeraraghavan, Ph.D.
Senior Consulting IT Specialist
IBM

Balaji has 20+ years of high-performance computing background specializing in algorithm development, porting, optimization, and parallelization. He joined IBM in 2003 as a Senior Technical Consultant in the Sales and Distribution organization. Currently, he serves as the technical lead for deploying Cell processor based architecture in the Financial Service Sector.

Balaji has a Ph.D. (1986), from University of Pittsburgh and an M.Sc. (1980) from Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, India. Previous employments include Application Engineer at Hewlett-Packard and Team Leader for Computational Chemistry and Biology at National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Jens von der Heide
Senior Vice President
Lehman Brothers

Bio to come.

Nigel Woodward
Worldwide Director, Financial Services
Intel

Nigel began his career in financial services in 1979 in the International Division of Midland Bank working in correspondent banking, corporate and trade finance. In the mid 1980’s he moved from banking to the IT industry aligning technology innovation with the market’s business drivers. Nigel has worked in a number of the major technology corporations which have shaped the industry – including GE, DEC, Reuters, Informix, SUN Microsystems where he led Capital Markets and now Intel Corporation where he leads the strategic direction of Intel in the FSI market place which includes specific focus on the management of the complex ecosystem that makes up solutions provision for financial markets.

Henry Young
Founder and Director
TS-Associates

Henry Young is a founding director of Trading Systems Associates plc (TS-Associates), a firm that specialises in monitoring and analysis of real time financial middleware products. TS-Associates’ “TipOff” middleware analysis appliance leverages both FPGA and ASIC based hardware acceleration techniques in order to achieve real time capture, decode and analysis of 1GE and 10GE data flows. With a built in high resolution hardware based time stamping capability, TipOff is leading the charge into high resolution passive latency monitoring of direct exchange feed infrastructures. The launch of TipOff - Wombat Data Fabric (WDF) Edition at HPoWS in September 2008 confirms TS-A’s position as the leading innovator in its field.

Prior to founding TS-Associates in 1999, Henry was a roving industry consultant splitting his time between London and New York with engagements for a variety of banks and exchanges. Henry led the team at MSB Consultants that, in the mid 90s, developed the RT Emulator – a product that delivered Reuters Terminal functionality integrated with six of the then available market data platforms.

Henry holds an MSc in Computing from Imperial College and a BSc in Physics & Electronics from Edinburgh University.