Conference Speakers for 2003 

Gilles Acogny
Marketing & Global Accounts Director
Misys International Banking Systems

Mr. Acogny joined Misys-IBS in June 2001 as marketing director. Shortly thereafter, he assumed the role as the global sales and marketing director, where he oversees the sales and marketing initiatives for the global market. Prior to joining Misys-IBS, Acogny held a variety of senior positions in general management, marketing and sales for the Xerox Corporation in Europe, North America and Africa. Acogny started his career as a university associate professor, and currently spends equal time in New York City and London.

Lewis Cirne
Founder and CTO
Wily Technology

Lewis Cirne founded Wily Technology in early 1998 and invented the company's core, patented Java Agent technology. He served as the company's President and CEO until October of 2001.

As Wily's chief technology officer, Lewis takes a leading role in the future technological development of the company and its products, with the goal of extending the services offered by Wily to customers deploying high-performance e-business solutions.

Additionally, Cirne is responsible for sharing with customers and partners the company's vision of bringing enterprise class performance management to the Java platform. Prior to founding Wily, Lewis held senior technical positions at Apple Computer and Hummingbird Communications. He holds several additional patents and a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College.

Andrew Delaney
Director
A-Team Consulting

Andrew has been involved with the financial information and technology business for almost 20 years. He began his career on the Monitor Desk at Dow Jones & Co.’s The Wall Street Journal, with responsibility for collecting and checking the pages of statistics published in each edition. He later became an editor, and was involved in the newspaper’s coverage of the Black Monday crash of 1987.

Andrew returned to his native Britain in 1988 to edit a specialist publication within the Banking Technology group, now part of Informa PLC. Online Finance focused on electronic information services for the financial services sector. After two years, Andrew moved to New York to take on a similar editorial role at Waters Information Services, now part of the Risk Waters Group.

At Waters, Andrew held a number of editorial and management positions, including senior vice president, global head of sales, general manager for North America and editor-in-chief. He launched Waters magazine and was responsible for its research/reference group – including the MDI and RTFI publications – and for its stable of newsletters aimed at information technologists within the financial markets area. These included Inside Market Data, Trading Technology Week and FX Week. Andrew was also involved with Waters’ training courses, specializing in market data and trading room platforms.

After the sale of Waters to Risk Publications – Andrew was part of the management team that led the sale – Andrew left to join Investhink Ltd. as chief content officer. In that role, Andrew has been responsible for securing redistribution relationships with more than 100 sources of financial information for distribution via Investhink’s market data platform.

Soon after joining Investhink, Andrew took on the additional role of chief executive in order lead the company’s second round of financing. Having secured the round, Andrew played an instrumental role in recruiting the existing CEO and chairman, the latter of which had been a director on the main board of Reuters Group.

In late 2002, Andrew became a director of London-based market data and technology consultancy A-Team Consulting.

Till Guldimann
Vice Chairman, SunGard
Saratoga, California

Mr. Guldimann is vice chairman of SunGard focusing on the company’s long term strategy. He was previously vice chairman of Infinity Financial Technology, which SunGard acquired in 1998. Mr. Guldimann joined Infinity in 1995, after a 21 year career with J.P. Morgan where he last headed the Global Research Group and developed the bank’s market risk management systems. He is also the originator of J.P. Morgan’s  RiskMetrics initiative launched in 1994, which established a worldwide standard for market risk measurement. Mr. Guldimann, a Swiss national, earned an MBA from the Harvard Business School in 1974 and a Dipl. El. Ing. (MSEE) from the ETH in Zurich 1971.

SunGard (NYSE:SDS) is a global leader in integrated IT solutions for financial services.  SunGard is also the pioneer and leading provider of information availability services.  With annual revenues of approximately $2 billion, SunGard serves more than 25,000 clients in over 50 countries, including 47 of the world's 50 largest financial services companies.

Mr. Guldimann was credited as being one of the ten most influential people in the finance industry throughout the 90’s by Waters Magazine in their Millennium issue.

Peter Harris
President
Lighthouse Partners

Peter Harris is founder and president of Lighthouse Partners, a marketing strategy consulting company focused on the intersection of advanced technologies and the financial trading and investment markets.  Prior to forming Lighthouse, Mr. Harris was president and editor-in-chief at Waters Information Services (now Risk Waters Group), a leading business intelligence service for the financial IT markets.

Before entering the publishing world, Mr. Harris specialized in software development.  In the mid 1980s, he was a project manager and software architect, working in the Advanced Systems Group of the London Stock Exchange. At the LSE, Mr. Harris built one of the world’s first digital market data distribution systems, dubbed Radix. He has also held a variety of software management and development roles at Intercom Data Systems (now Royalblue Technologies), Knight-Ridder Unicom and the Financial Times.

Lighthouse Partners is the creator of the Wall Street on Java Technology (www.javaonwallstreet.com) and Wall Street IT-The Next Generation (www.wallstreet-tng.com) events.  It is also the owner of the www.xmlonwallstreet.com online resource.

Mr. Harris is a member of the advisory board of Enigmatec Corp., a London-based developer of advanced infrastructure technology.  He is also an investor in, and advisor to It’s the Content, Inc. and GenomeWeb LLC.

As a hobby, Mr. Harris started Harris Radio – www.harrisradio.com – an Internet radio station, and he also pursues various activities in the music business to promote emerging artists.

Mr. Harris can be contacted at pete@lighthouse-partners.com. More information on Lighthouse is available at www.lighthouse-partners.com.

Dr. Alejandro Hernandez
Director of Engineering
Application Networks

Alejandro Hernandez helped to co-found Application Networks and leads the Silicon Valley development team. Alejandro has been building financial derivatives systems since 1992, after studying Mathematics, Economics and Computer Science at MIT and UC Berkeley, where he received his PhD.

Alejandro's focus has been the object-oriented modeling of the financial derivatives domain, pioneering design patterns that result in extensible and scalable risk management architectures.

Prior to co-founding Application Networks in 1998, Alejandro managed the application development effort of Renaissance Software, a provider of packaged derivatives applications that was later acquired by SunGard Data Systems.

Mike Hosking
Development Director – Midas
Misys International Banking Systems

Mike joined Misys in 1987 and is currently the Development Director for the Midas Business. Mike has held a wide variety of management and senior management positions, ranging from client management through technical management roles. His previous role was as Meridian Product Centre Manager where he created and marketed Misys range of Meridian integration products. Prior to joining Misys, Mike developed Case tools in 'C' running under UNIX.

Duncan Johnston-Watt
Co-Founder and CTO
Enigmatec Corp.

Duncan Johnston-Watt is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Enigmatec Corporation.  Duncan graduated from Oxford University with an MSc in Computation in 1986.  Since then he has acquired extensive experience developing technology for the financial services industry specialising in the development of large-scale distributed systems.  Along the way he also run an independent theatre company.  A highlight from this period was playing Alan Turing with Robin Gandy in the audience.

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 and was responsible for introducing SpiritSoft to the Reuters Greenhouse Fund. In recognition of this work he was nominated for a Computerworld Smithsonian Award in April 2000.

Jeremy Sevareid
Senior Engagement Manager
Random Walk Computing

Jeremy Sevareid has a decade of experience building distributed applications on Wall Street. He has worked with Java for the last six years at Random Walk Computing, Inc., a ninety person systems integration firm servicing the financial sector. He has built systems for Wachovia Securities, Goldman Sachs, IPC, Merrill Lynch, Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette and many others.

Jeremy has worked on: a Web FX Settlement System; an institutional sales trader’s equity blotter; a Java-based touch screen; private banking account setup and Struts-based IPO participant-tracking; a FIX protocol messaging network for equities; a CORBA-based global stock loan trading system; a sockets-based workflow engine; three projects to expose analytics to the Web using applets, HTML and XML; a C/C++ bond trading system and a C/C++ distributed batch scheduler.

Ronald V. "Van" Simmons
Director of Fixed Income Technology
INVESCO Institutional

Van began his association with Invesco in February of 1998, first as a consultant and subsequently in his current position. As Director of Fixed Income Technology, he is responsible for overall development and implementation of the software systems supporting Invesco Institutional's fixed income research efforts.

From 1990 until joining Invesco full-time, Van was President and CEO of VNP Software, Inc. As consultants, VNP developed trading and operations systems for a diverse range of sell-side clients. As a leader of these projects, Van has personally designed and implemented systems to manage FX, FX Options, Swaps and Fixed Income. In addition, VNP developed and sold its own product line and partnered with firms in the development of software development tools for the broader market.

Van was active in all phases of systems design and implementation in all of VNP's major partnerships and products. Van's credentials include a Bachelor of Engineering from Vanderbilt University in 1982 and an MBA from the same institution in 1986.

Patrick J. Smith
Director, Product Management – DeployDirector
Sitraka (now part of Quest Software)

Patrick Smith is the Director of Product Management for Quest Software’s DeployDirector. Patrick oversees the product management team that is responsible for product vision, definition, and market positioning and works extensively with the customers and sales teams to ensure a robust and extensible product offering. Patrick has over ten years of experience in the customer relationship management, information technology and telecommunications fields with extensive experience in client relationship and risk management.

Prior to joining Quest, Patrick served as Vice President of Product Management for YellowBrick Solutions and Director of Technical Solutions for KnowledgeBase Marketing, leading the development of customer loyalty and enterprise customer relationship management (ECRM) applications. Patrick’s area of specialty is the development and deployment of global software applications employing distributed object technology and software reuse. He has worked on highly visible projects in the United States and Canada, and has held positions with a number of software development organizations.

Patrick holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics with a focus on Object-Oriented Software Engineering from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

Anne Thomas Manes
CEO
Bowlight

Anne Thomas Manes is the founder and CEO of Bowlight, a Web services consulting firm. Anne is a widely recognized expert on Web Services technology. She is the author of “Web Services: A Manager’s Guide”. She is a member of the editorial board of Web Services Journal, a leading industry publication. Anne is a participant in Web Services standards development efforts at W3C, OASIS, WS-I, and JCP. She is a frequent speaker and author of numerous articles. She was listed among the 2001 Power 100 IT Leaders by Enterprise Systems Journal, which praised her “uncanny ability to apply technology to create new solutions.”

Before starting Bowlight, she was the Chief Technology Officer at Systinet, the Web Services Infrastructure Company. Prior to joining Systinet, Anne was Director of Market Innovation at Sun Microsystems, where she pioneered Sun's Web services strategy. She also served as a Senior Analyst with Patricia Seybold Group, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the "Distributed Computing Monitor" newsletter. Anne developed her expertise working at a number of the world’s leading hardware and software companies. Anne earned a bachelors degree in Economics at Wellesley College. You can reach Anne via e-mail at atm@bowlight.net.

Jorge Vidal
Vice President, Global Sales and Marketing
Random Walk Computing

Jorge Vidal oversees sales and marketing activities. He also personally leads the company's major sales engagements, bringing a wealth of financial services experience and contacts.

Most recently, Jorge served as Executive Vice President of Global Sales, Marketing and Strategic Alliances for Beast Financial Systems. Previously Jorge was Vice President of Sales for the Reuters Technology Solutions division for the Americas, where he was responsible for managing sales and support staff throughout Canada, the United States, and Latin America.

Prior to joining Reuters, Jorge was Vice President Sales, Deputy Director of Operations for the Americas Region, and also an alternate member to the Executive Board for TIBCO Finance Technology Inc. Based in New York, he was responsible for managing all sales operations, and the development of strategies for the support and delivery of solutions. Business development under Mr. Vidal's leadership included some of the largest deals ever transacted in the history of TIBCO Finance. Before joining TIBCO, Jorge had a 14-year career with IBM. During that time, Jorge held a variety of national and international positions in Sales and Management.

He holds a Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering, Summa Cum Laude from the New York Institute of Technology. He also studied Market Management and Planning at the University of Pennsylvania - Wharton School of Business.

Nigel Woodward
Worldwide Manager, Capital Markets & Securities
Sun Microsystems

Nigel Woodward started his career in 1979 in the international division of Midland Bank, working in a number of areas including correspondent banking, trade and corporate finance.  In the mid 1980s, having developed the introduction of new technology based techniques in correspondent banking, Nigel moved into the IT industry where he has held business development roles for a number of the leading technology vendors, including GE, Reuters, Digital Equipment, Informix and now Sun Microsystems.

Nigel works extensively across the community of technology companies providing solutions to the Financial Sector and looks to make the vital translation link between what the business needs and what the IT market can deliver.