Sam Ramji

Sonoa Systems

Sam Ramji is Vice President of Strategy at Sonoa, a provider of analytics, management and cloud governance solutions for APIs and cloud services. Sonoa is focused on accelerating the arrival of the open cloud economy.

Prior to Sonoa, Ramji was the senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft and led open source strategy across the company. In this role he led the company to contribute to a range of strategic open source technologies including PHP and Linux, driving sustainable business growth through customer demand for interoperability. Ramji had previously served at Microsoft as director of emerging business for the Silicon Valley Campus, where he managed relationships with venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Other experience includes leading technical product strategy at BEA Systems, leading engineering teams building large-scale applications on Open Source software at Ofoto.com, as well as hands-on development of client, client-server and distributed applications on Unix, Windows and Macintosh at prior companies.

Sam holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Cognitive Science from the University of California at San Diego, and is a member of the Institute for Generative Leadership.

Stephanie Davies Boesch

Microsoft

Stephanie Boesch has an extensive systems engineering background. Since graduating from the University of Virginia, she has worked on operating systems ranging from AT&T Unix and OS/2 to Windows Server and Client. Stephanie has 15 years of experience at Microsoft. She recently joined the Developer Division as Director of Program Management, shipping VS2008 SP1 & .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. Integration with open source is a key concern in her current role, taking responsibility for project management of .NET Framework and developer tools/platform interoperability strategy.

Jim Jagielski

VMWare

Jim Jagielski is Chief Open Source Officer, Principal Software Engineer and Lead for tc Server at SpringSource. As Chief Open Source Officer, Jim brings his decade plus of experience in working with open source communities to ensure that SpringSource is successfully contributing, leveraging and remains committed to the communities that matter most to our customers.

Jim is best known for his deep, long-term involvement in open source and with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Within the ASF, which he co-founded, Jim is an active, key developer in numerous projects, including Apache Tomcat, Apache APR, and Apache HTTPd, in which he is the longest active committer within that project. He also serves on the board of directors of the ASF, a position he has held since its inception, and currently serves as Chairman.

Jim's team at SpringSource is focused on the Apache-based portfolio of products, used in association with the Spring Framework as well as independently. He and his team maintain continued deep development of these codebases, provide consulting and training around them, and serve as escalated technical support. As Chief Open Source Officer, Jim  provides guidance and expertise over non-Spring related open source technologies, including Apache software, to compliment current offerings. He has a special affinity for scripting languages in addition to Java and C, and has the unique capability of handling technical problems from high-level architectural to low-level development point of view, and all aspects in between.

Over his career, Jim has served as CTO for Zend Technologies and Covalent Technologies. He founded jaguNET Access Services, a web solutions company and he also was a manager and engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He has spoken and presented at numerous conferences and seminars, and is a sought after resource by reporters and analysts regarding Apache and open source in general. He is also a noted author, having written numerous articles, including a monthly section in several magazines. Previously, he was also editor of the Apache section on Slashdot.

Tony Hey

Corporate Vice President, External Research – Microsoft

Tony Hey is responsible for the worldwide external research and technical computing strategy across Microsoft Corporation. He leads the company's efforts to build long-term public-private partnerships with global scientific and engineering communities, spanning broad reach and in-depth engagements with academic and research institutions, related government agencies and industry partners. His responsibilities also include working with internal Microsoft groups to build future technologies and products that will transform computing for scientific and engineering research. Hey also oversees Microsoft Research's efforts to enhance the quality of higher education around the world.

Before joining Microsoft, Hey served as director of the U.K.'s e-Science Initiative, managing the government's efforts to provide scientists and researchers with access to key computing technologies. Before leading this initiative, Hey worked as Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science; and, Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Southampton, where he helped build the department into one of the most respected computer science research institutions in England.

His research interests focus on parallel programming for parallel systems built from mainstream commodity components. With Jack Dongarra, Rolf Hempel and David Walker, he wrote the first draft of a specification for a new message-passing standard called MPI. This initiated the process that led to the successful MPI standard of today.

Hey is a fellow of the U.K.'s Royal Academy of Engineering. He also has served on several national committees in the U.K., including committees of the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry and the Office of Science and Technology. He was a member of the British Computer Society, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the Institute of Physics.

Tony Hey also has a passionate interest in communicating the excitement of science to young people. He has written 'popular' books on quantum mechanics and on relativity.

Hey is a graduate of Oxford University, with both an undergraduate degree in physics and a doctorate in theoretical physics.

Paula Hunter

Executive Director

Paula Hunter brings a compelling combination of industry insight, executive-level business savvy and experience working with not-for-profits to the position of Executive Director. Previously Hunter served as Director of Operations for SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, a non-profit professional association working to increase awareness and promote the value of Search Engine Marketing worldwide. Prior to SEMPO, Hunter was director of worldwide marketing and business development for the Open Source Development Labs, where she was instrumental in driving membership growth of industry advocacy group and lead initiatives to increase industry awareness and engage large enterprise IT organizations with OSDL programs. Previously, Hunter was general manager of UnitedLinux, a joint venture formed to create a unified Linux offering. She began her career at Digital Equipment Corporation, where she managed marketing programs for DEC's UNIX Workstation and PC product lines. Hunter received a BS in Computer Information Systems from Bentley University.

Stephen Walli

Stephen has worked in the IT industry since 1980 as both customer and vendor. He was most recently a consultant on software business development and open source strategy. His customers included Microsoft, the Eclipse Foundation, the Linux Foundation. He's an adviser to Ohloh (acquired by SourceForge), Bitrock, Continuent, and eBox. He organized the agenda, speakers and sponsors for the inaugural Beijing Open Source Software Forum as part of the 2007 Software Innovation Summit in Beijing. Stephen was VP Open Source Development Strategy at Optaros, a business manager at Microsoft on open source, and VP R+D and founder at Softway Systems, a venture-backed company that developed a UNIX portability environment for NT before being acquired by Microsoft. He was a long time participant and officer at the IEEE and ISO POSIX standards groups, representing both USENIX and EurOpen (E.U.U.G.) and a regular speaker and writer on open systems standards since 1991.