Linux Asia Stars

One of the best reasons to attend Linux Asia 2004 is the exceptional gathering of distinguished presenters, leaders, and experts. Our speaker list is growing daily. Please check back regularly to see who we have lined up for you.

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	Robert Adkins President Technetra (US) Mr Robert Adkins is co-founder and President of Technetra, a Silicon Valley software company which implements and deploys large-scale software projects specializing in Open Source solutions. Mr. Adkins has over 20 years of experience in the Information Technology industry having led products and services groups at Apple Computer, IBM Corp., BBN Communications, Litton/PRC. He has a MS in Computer Science from the Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Adkins has published in many technology magazines and journals including Linux Journal, Linux For You, the ACM and Government Computer News.
	Dr Apparao Chief Consultant, R&D Cognizant Apparao heads the R&D group of Cognizant and he is responsible for building competency in leading edge technologies. He is actively involved in building technology skills, executing projects, providing consultancy, and creating awareness in emerging technologies. Currently he is involved in building the SOS solution center and Open Source Software Competency Center. Apparao has over 20 years experience in the Information Technology industry, both in technology building and project execution functions. He has executed technology-based projects for leading IT companies such as IBM, HP, Digital, Novell, and SAS. Apparao holds a doctorate from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He did his post-doctoral and formal computer science studies in the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, US.
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	Amit Babaria Director of Sales Cignex (US) Amit heads the Sales and Business Development team at CIGNEX. Amit has more than 8 years of Sales / Business Development / Market Research experience. Before co-founding CIGNEX, he had worked in the Sales organization of a Professional Services firm in the Silicon Valley. He tripled his Sales revenue for all years he worked with them. He was awarded the first 'Star of the Year' award in the history of the company for his accomplishments. He started his career as one of the youngest minds to manage a largest ever National Readership Survey in the world. Amit has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from V.J.T.I., Bombay and an MBA in Marketing from J.B.I.M.S., Bombay. Amit is also featured in the 2003-4 edition of National Who's Who in Executives and Professionals.
	Dr Sarat Chandra Babu Centre Head CDAC, Hyderabad Dr Sarat Chandra Babu is presently centre head for CDAC, Hyderabad. He previously worked at Department of IT, Government of India, Delhi, Indian Telephone Industries Limited, Bangalore, and REC, Warangal. His areas of interest include e-learning, e-security, embedded systems,VLSI design, computer networks, network security, computer architecture, electronic circuit fault diagnosis, and neural networks. He helped establish the CDAC centre at Hyderabad with R&D and Training and running it as Cost Centre. Dr Babu holds an M.Tech from REC, Warangal and a B.Tech from College of engineering, Kakinada.
	Brian Behlendorf Founder, CollabNet Apache Guru (US) Brian Behlendorf founded CollabNet, with O'Reilly & Associates, in July 1999. The company provides tools and services based on open source methods. Before launching CollabNet, Behlendorf was co-founder and CTO of Organic Online, a Web design and engineering consultancy located in San Francisco. During his five years at Organic, Behlendorf helped create Internet strategies for dozens of Fortune 500 companies. During that time, he co-founded and contributed heavily to the Apache Web Server Project, co-founded and supported the VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) effort, and assisted several IETF working groups, particularly the HTTP standardization effort. Before starting Organic, Behlendorf was the first Chief Engineer at Wired Magazine and later HotWired, one of the first large-scale publishing Web sites. Behlendorf is President of the Apache Software Foundation. He also serves as a Technical Advisor to Critical Path (CPTH) and Topica.
	Pankaj Bhatt Principal Consultant Tata Consultancy Services Pankaj is a Principal Consultant with the Architecture and Technology Consulting practice of TCS, which undertakes enterprise IT architecture consulting and design assignments for various customers of TCS - primarily global corporations in Banking, Securities, Insurance, Transportation and Healthcare industries. Pankaj has been working with Tata Consultancy Services since 1987. He has also worked in the areas of quality management - process specification, quality prediction, and total quality management - to name a few. He has significant experience in definition, deployment and assessment of quality management systems. From 1984 to 1987 he worked with the software R&D division of HCL Ltd. He was responsible for the design and development of subsystems and various system utilities for the multiprogramming operating system of HCL for its single board computer architecture. During his tenure with HCL, he was also responsible for the customization of operating systems for use in the banking industry and design and development of a Network Operating System. Pankaj Bhatt received his Bachelor of Engineering (with honours) in Computer Science in 1984. Pankaj is a Certified Quality Analyst (CQA) from Quality Assurance Institute of USA and a Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) for Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), USA. He is a Fellow of Institution of Electronics and Telecommunications Engineers (IETE), India, and a member of Association for Computing Machinery USA.
	Amit Bhoraskar Head, Alliances Red Hat India Amit, computer engineer with a MBA in marketing and finance has over 9 years of experience in IT industry, in domestic and overseas markets. He has extensive experience in product management, channel management and consulting for various IT products and technologies. Amit as the Head - Alliances has been spearheading and managing the product distribution and partner initiatives at Red Hat India for the last 2 years. During this tenure he has managed to build and grow a strong network of channel partners, ISV partners, OEM partners for Red Hat across the country. Prior to joining Red Hat India, he had a long association with Aptech Limited, where he began his IT career in the sales function and grew up the corporate ladder managing various roles and responsibilities as Branch Manager, National Sales Manager - Oracle business to becoming the Country Head for Australia, which was his last assignment.
	Niyam Bhushan Technology Columnist Niyam is a writer, editor, art director, consultant, trainer, in digital imagery, graphic design, creativity, photoshop, typography, publishing, pre-press, web, gnuLinux, computers, and more. He has been using computers since 1982. www.niyam.com
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	Kaushik Chandra Chief Technology Officer, Global Technology Solutions PricewaterhouseCoopers
	Danese Cooper Chief Open Source Evangelist Sun Microsystems (US) Danese Cooper is Sun's Chief Open Source Evangelist and a leading advocate for the Free and Open Source Software movement. For 5 years she has been involved in the management of all of Sun's award-winning open source projects, including the landmark OpenOffice.org project (which has enabled the Linux Desktop revolution and many of the recent announcements by world governments that are switching from single-vendor lock-in systems). She is also a board member of the Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org). She speaks and consults extensively throughout the world on Free and Open Source software issues.
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	Sachin Dabir Head of Enterprise Sales Red Hat India Sachin brings with him 12 years of experience in IT industry in sales, marketing and consulting handling domestic and international clients. Sachin has good understanding of business applications for Banking, Manufacturing and Healthcare industries. Sachin is responsible for selling Red Hat's support, services, solutions and consultancy services. Sachin manages the Technology Partner, ISV and SI network of Red Hat India. Considering the Linux momentum in India, Sachin's focus is on increasing Linux usage in Government, Education and PSU sectors.
	Dr Ajay Data CEO Data Infosys Dr Ajay is a graduate of the Rajasthan University, an MBA in Computer Sciences from Newport University US and has a PhD from Netherlands in Electronic Data Processing. He is also perusing a PhD in IP version 6 from University of Leeds, UK. He combines traditional business acumen with high technology needs of the ever changing IT industry with commendable ease.
	Ravi Desiraju CEO Encore Technologies Ravi Desiraju has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management at Bangalore, India. Ravi has more than 16 years experience in the IT industry, spanning areas of business development, management, solution architecture, project management, direct selling and product management. He has been based at Singapore since 1992, during which he has set up new lines of business, built customer bases, as well as partner networks in many Asian countries in all his assignments. He has exposure to requirements and industry characteristics in a number of industry segments such as Government, High Technology Manufacturing, Insurance, Financial Services and E-business Service Providers. He specializes in configuring collaborative solutions and industry partnerships to deliver innovative solutions to his customers. He has been in several roles in his various assignments as a Solution Architect/ Lead Consultant / Project Manager / Business Manager/ Account Manager to successfully deliver projects and company business objectives. He has been instrumental in the formation of Encore Technologies (S) Pte Ltd, the Singapore based out fit responsible for commercializing the Simputer a Linux based handheld computer, originally co-developed by Encore Software Ltd and the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India. Ravi has formulated a vision for Mobile Computing & Embedded solutions that is leveraging the Simputer project beyond its original roots of developing a simple computer for the masses. By focusing on various industry vertical application solutions and adapting a mass customization approach, the Simputer is able to be the simple and affordable computer that make computing accessible and viable for many more applications.
	Pavan Duggal Advocate Supreme Court of India Pavan Duggal is a practising Advocate, Supreme Court of India, having specialized in the newly emerging field of Cyberlaw and E-Commerce law in the last few years. An internationally renowned expert and authority on Cyberlaw, Pavan has also the credit of having done pioneering work in the field of Convergence Law. He is also doing a lot of work in the area of Intellectual Property Rights, Information Security law. Information Technology law, law relating to Domain names and law concerning Business Process outsourcing.
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	Mary Ann Fisher Linux Program Executive, Public Sector IBM (US) Mary Ann Fisher currently serves as IBM's world-wide program director for Linux in the Public Sector. In this position, Mary Ann is responsible for setting and enabling IBM's Open Source and Linux business strategies for the Government, Healthcare, Life Sciences and Higher Education Industries. She consults with Clients, builds partnerships with business partners and develops IBM's investment strategy and facilitates communications on Linux with organizations around the world. Mary Ann has extensive experience working with governments and organizations all over the world, including: USA, China, Germany, Australia, India, the Nordic Countries, Brazil, and Canada. Previous to her involvement in the Open Source marketplace, Mary Ann spent 10 years managing various business units in IBM's US Federal organization, including Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, and Department of Education. Mary Ann holds a Masters in Business Administration from Loyola University and serves on the Board of her local Hospice organization.
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	Sudhir Gandotra CEO IndServe Infotech Mr. Gandotra is CEO of IndServe Infotech - the force behind Kalculate. Kalculate is the first financial and accounting package based on Linux, in India and Asia-Pacific region.
	Rishab Aiyer Ghosh Program Leader MERIT/Infonomics (Netherlands) Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is Founding International and Managing Editor of First Monday, the most widely read peer-reviewed on-line journal of the Internet. He is Programme Leader at MERIT/Infonomics at the University of Maastricht, Netherlands. He speaks frequently at conferences on the socio-economics of the Internet and free/open source software. Recent presentations include at the UNCTAD Regional Conference, Rio de Janeiro, the Business Council for the UN conference at CeBIT New York and IDLELO: The First African Conference on the Digital Commons in Cape Town. In 2002 he coordinated the European Union -funded FLOSS project, the most comprehensive study of free/libre/open source users and developers. He is actively involved in initiatives related to government policy on open source, and is involved in research projects on related topics funded by, among others, the EU, the Dutch government and the US National Science Foundation. Until 2000 he was based in New Delhi, where he was publisher and editor of the Indian Techonomist. He was involved in the Indian government's IT policy debate, and contributed policy papers upon the invitation of the Telecom Ministry on the government's plans for opening Internet services to private participants.
	O.P. Goel Technology Director National Informatics Centre (NIC) O.P. Goel is a post graduate in economics and statistics. Currently, he is employed with National Informatics Centre (in Ministry of Communication & Information Technology, Govt. of India) as Technical Director and Head of Financial Services Informatics Division. His responsibilities include advisement to the Banking, Insurance and capital Market Divisions of Ministry of Finance (Govt. of India) in IT related activities and to provide them IT Services through NIC Units set up for this purpose. He has been Head of Labour Information Systems Division for nearly 15 Years assisting Ministry of Labour in Labour Sector Computerisation. The significant areas of focus have been Employment Exchange Computerisation, Employee's Provident Fund Organisation and Employees' State Insurance computerisation.
	L. Gopalakrishnan Director, Platform Technologies Group Oracle India L. Gopalakrishnan is Director-Platform Technologies Group at Oracles India Development Center, Bangalore A B.Tech in Electronics from Madras Institute of Technology, Chennai, Gopal has been with Oracle India for six years. He has 16 years of software development experience, with over five years in Linux related development. As Director for Platform Technologies Group, Gopal is responsible for all aspects of the Indian operations of this division. This includes the three key areas of Platform Engineering, Systems Engineering and Services Engineering. Oracles outsourcing business, making Oracle products available on all enterprise platforms and looking at Oracle-Linux combination are among the primary areas of operations for his division. Before joining Oracle India, Gopal worked with Systime Computer Systems (India) Private Ltd for nine years. At Systime, he held various positions -- starting as a programmer, growing to a systems analyst and then to a project manager. At Systime his responsibilities included handling projects for clients both in India and abroad. He was in charge of developing the offshore development model for the company and handled project management, implementation and support. Gopal has also worked with International Software India Limited as a software engineer for one year where he was responsible for project execution.
	Dr P. Gopalakrishnan Director IBM Research Lab India Dr. P Gopalakrishnan is Director of the IBM India Research Laboratory, one of the company's eight labs. Dr. Gopalakrishnan comes with over 16 years of experience in technology and research, and now leads a team of researchers in developing innovative technologies for IBM products and addressing the unique issues faced by customers in the region. He also leads the worldwide research strategy for pervasive (ubiquitous) computing. Prior to this position, Dr. Gopalakrishnan was the senior manager of the pervasive infrastructures department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York, where he managed the development of advanced technologies in infrastructure middleware, device components, and prototype solutions for pervasive computing. Dr. Gopalakrishnan joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in 1986 after earning a doctorate in computer science from the University of Maryland. He has made significant contributions to the field of speech recognition and conversational interfaces while being part of a long-running project at IBM Research. Over the course of his research career, he has worked in several disciplines, including parallel processing, speech recognition, conversational systems, and mobile computing.
	Satyakam Goswami Technical Lead, Linux Group Solidcore Systems Satyakam is a graduate in Bachelor of Science ,with over 11 years of IT experience. He is a Brainbench Linux Certified System Administrator, He worked last at the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) as a Senior Research Engineer, where he was instrumental in setting up of CERT center at IIIT and localization of GNU/Linux in various Indian Languages. He is a founder member of the Linux users group of Hyderabad. Satyakam,as he likes to be called, is an avid sportsman loves Tennis. He is married to Divya and has a year old son Samarth.
	V.R. Govindarajan CTO Aztec Software V.R. Govindarajan (Govi) co-founded Aztec along with S. Parthasarathy. He has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry in the United States and in India and is highly experienced in the field of database systems design and development. While on an assignment with the IBM Almaden Research Center, he helped to develop a transparent, tight integration of a DBMS with external object servers, a widely acclaimed, patent-pending technology that enables the building of enterprise Internet applications with access to legacy data. Prior to that he was with Tata-IBM in Bangalore, India. Govi started his career with, and became a key member of a distributed database product development group at Digital Equipment Corporation (USA). Govi holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Science and a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
	Satinder Grover Senior Director, E-Business Oracle India Satinder Grover is Senior Director - E-Business team at Oracle India Private Ltd. He has been working with Oracle India for the last seven years. Based at Oracle India's Head office in Gurgaon, Satinder's responsibility include understanding and helping Oracle's customers achieve their business objectives, by using Oracle E-Business suite as well as E-Business infrastructure products and as a consequence help Oracle India achieve its revenue objectives. Satinder's earlier assignment at Oracle India was General Manager-Applications and he was responsible for introduction of Oracle's CRM application suite, a part of the Oracle E-Business Suite in the Indian market place. Oracle has been very successful with the CRM application product and commands the highest market share in India in the early adopter segments like telecom. Prior to joining Oracle India, Satinder was working with Tata Unisys Ltd (now Tata Infotech) as business manager-public sector. His responsibilities included business generation and project delivery for the public sector line of business. Satinder has a B.E. (Hons) from BITS, Pilani and an MBA from Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), New Delhi.
	P.K. Gupta Director Strategic Development Legato P. K. Gupta has about 19 years of experience in IT Industry. Did B. E. in Computer Science in 1985 from MNREC, PGDM from AIMA and currently doing Executive Doctorate from AMU. Currently working as Director Strategic Development for Intercontinental Operations, Legato Systems. In this role, responsible for working with end users, sales/marketing teams and partners to understand their pains, technology and marketing trends and help corporate strategy group to develop future Legato product strategy from Asia Pacific. Joined Legato Systems India in May 1997 as Head of R & D Operations. Worked in River Run Software Group, for more than 7 years. In River Run, was mainly responsible for management of various projects related to LAN Management, Network Management, Storage Management and Mobile Computing. In between managed various on-site projects for IBM and Motorola in US for 5 years in the area of LAN and Network Management and their applications; and systems management. Worked in Uptron Control Systems, Software R&D division for 5 years since 1985 on real-time systems. Have been visiting professor in India from last 8 years in various MBA institutions such as Amity Business School, AIMA, IMT and JIMS. Also write technical and management articles in various magazines; and have been international speaker on storage management. Avid reader of technical and management books.
	Sanjeev Gupta eSys (Singapore) Sanjeev Gupta has been a System Administrator since the mid-80s, and cut his teeth on SVR4. He is currently heading the Technology Group of eSys Distribution, a S$1.4billion group headquartered in Singapore. He uses Linux because "it just works", not because it is Free or Libre.
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	Pankaj Jain Group Leader, iCOSS Integra Micro Systems Pankaj is currently leader of iCOSS (Integra's Open Source Solutions) group at Integra Micro Systems. He has over 18 years of experience in the IT industry and is an OSS enthusiast.
	Punit Jain VP, Sales & Marketing Newgen Punit's experience at Newgen encompasses areas such as Managing the Sales & Marketing network across the globe and building alliances for business development. Punit also has overall responsibility for pre-sales, customer support and product implementation. He leads a team of more than 70 professionals in these areas. Punit joined Newgen in 2001 as a VP Marketing . Punit was subsequently handed over the additional charge of Sales and was redesignated as VP - Sales & Marketing. Punit has 16 years of experience. He started his career as Telecom Design Engineer at CDOT Bangalore in 1985. Punit is a graduate in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay and PGDM from IIM Bangalore.
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	Rajeev Kamath Project Executive, Linux Corporate Group IBM (US) Mr. Rajeev V. Kamath is a Program Director and Project Executive with the IBM Corporate Linux Group. His responsibilities include development, communication and implementation of IBM Linux programs. Over the past three years he has also been involved with Linux as a Project Executive, working with multinational customers developing Linux strategy, long term plans, managing proofs of concepts, and developing and implementing Linux migration plans. He has worked with IBM for 19 years and has held positions such as Program Director, Project Executive, Senior Project Manager, IT Specialist and Client Representative. During this period he has marketed and managed all aspects of IT projects. He has successfully managed large, complex, turnkey projects involving custom Application Development, Systems Integration (SI) and Application Package implementations. These projects have involved developing solutions for eBusiness, eCommerce, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Distribution systems, CAD/CAM systems and Plant Floor automation systems. He was also responsible for the development of solution marketing strategies, plans and management of customer relationships. His customers have included multinational corporations in the Automotive, Textiles, Plastics, Pharmaceuticals, Chemicals, Consumer Goods and, Machining and Fabrication industries. He has also managed projects in the government sector in particular for the US EPA & the US Federal Emergency Management Agency. He is an IBM Certified Project Executive & IT Specialist. He also holds the PMP certification from Project Management Institute (PMI) and CPIM from APICS. He also holds Masters degrees in Industrial Engineering and Production Engineering.
	Sirtaj Singh Kang Founding Member KDE Desktop Project One of the founding members of the KDE desktop project, Sirtaj is currently the project representative in Asia and has been travelling the country raising awareness about free software and KDE. He is confident in the ability of free software to close digital chasms, and that the Linux platform is ready to make the jump from servers to corporate and consumer desktops. Sirtaj studied and worked in Australia for almost a decade, working as a programmer and architect for AXA Australia and the Hubbub Group. He has recently founded a company developing software design and development tools for complex cross-business applications.
	Prakash Khemani Architect NetScaler Prakesh Khemani is currently, Architect, NetScaler Private Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of NetScaler, based in Bangalore, India. He has been responsible for developing Caching and other Application Acceleration functionality at NetScaler. Prior to joining NetScaler, he was Architect for iPlanet, (now SunOne) Application Server at Sun Microsystems in Bangalore where he led a large scale revamp of the product at their Bangalore development centre He was also a part of the WildFire project at Sun's High End Server Engineering group in Boston. He has also developed support and optimizations for NUMA hardware in the Solaris kernel. A patent pending for this work. Prakash has received his MS in Computer Science from Ohio State University after taking his B.Tech, Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur
	Ashish Khushu General Manager, Strategic Business Development Sun Microsystems India As General Manager,Ashish drives Strategic Business Initiatives for Sun and is also a part of the Open Source and Standards Advocacy Group at Sun. Over the last 5 years in Sun Microsystems India, Ashish has led key initiatives in driving the adoption of Sun Technologies and Business growth with focus on Systems Integrators & ISV's, Government, Education & Research. Prior to Sun, Ashish spent over 8 years with Tata Elxsi with a wide and varied experience across multiple application areas such as HPC, Product Design, Drug Discovery to Virtual Reality.
	Sivarama Krishnan Principal Consultant, Global Risk Management Solutions PricewaterhouseCoopers India Siva is a Principal Consultant with the Global Risk Management Solutions group of PricewaterhouseCoopers in India. He advises various state governments and central government departments in their egovernance initiatives. Over the last 9 years, he has handled number of IT consulting assignments with the Governments and central government departments in India and international offices of PwC. During his assignments he has helped clients' address a wide range of complex technology, system implementation and project management issues. Siva has hands-on experience in designing Networks, implementation of egovernance applications and setting up IS a management & security framework for large companies, now extending to state governments and central departments. Siva was involved in a pioneering effort of developing IT architecture, IS security policy and a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) report to the state of Andhra Pradesh. He is currently assigning various states in implementation of Single window citizen services, computerization land records and property registration, and issuance of citizen identification cards. Siva participates actively in public forums on the issue of Technology, Security and eGovernance. Siva joined the erstwhile Price Waterhouse in India in 1994 after completing his Chartered Accountancy and since then he has been involved in Information Technology related consulting in PwC. Siva has a multiple certification/ qualification including Chartered Accountancy, Cost Accountancy and Certified Information System Auditor (CISA).
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	Anand Rao Ladi Director, Technologies MindTree Anand is a Technical Director at MindTree, heading the Computing Systems group. He is responsible for the delivery and business development of projects from the semiconductor, severs and software industries. He heads a team of about 200 engineers. During his tenure at MindTree, he has incubated two of the most successful business practices. Anand has worked extensively on many flavors of Unix, including Linux. The breadth of experience includes a wide range from server-class operating systems to embedded operating systems. Some of the domains he has worked on are: Servers, Storage, Automotive Electronics and Communications. Anand has authored papers and delivered case study lectures at International forums.
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	Vaidhy Mayilrangam Principal Architect Aztec Software Vaidhy G. Mayilrangam has about eight years of experience in the IT industry, primarily as a software architect specializing in cross-platform architecture and design using OO methodology. He has experience in designing and developing software for a variety of platforms, from mainframes to handhelds. He has been a user of Linux since 1994 and an active contributor since 1998. Currently, he is working as an Architect at Aztec Software in Bangalore, where he is leading their Identity Management and Open-Source initiatives. He is also responsible for developing Linux competency in Aztec. Vaidhy earned a Bachelor of Engineering in the field of Computer Science and Engineering in 1996 from Bharathidasan University, Trichy.
	Dr M.G.K. Menon Chairman & Director Board of Governors Indian Institute of Technology Professor M.G.K.Menon took over as Chairman, BOG. The President of Indian in his capacity as visitor of the Institute, has nominated Prof. M.G.K.Menon, former Minister for Science & Technology, Government of India, as the Chairman, Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, for a period of three years. Professor M.G.K.Menon has had a distinguished career as a scientist and policy maker and has held a number of prominent appointments including Secretary, Department of Science and Technology; Secretary, Department of Electronics; Member, Planning Commission and Scientific Adviser to the Prime Minister. He has also been a member of Parliament, in the Rajya Sabha. He is the recipient of prestigious awards such as Padma Bushan and Padma Vibhushan in recognition of his distinguished service to the Nation. He has also been honoured with the Abdus Salaam award. Professor Menon was also the Chairman Board of Governors of IIT Bombay from 1997 - 2003.
	Sandeep Menon Linux Business Manager, ASEAN/SA IBM India
	Robin Miller Editor in Chief Open Source Development Network (US) Robin 'Roblimo' Miller is editor in chief for OSDN, one of the world's leading online tech news publishers. He has written extensively about computers and the Internet for Slashdot, Linux.com, NewsForge, Time New Media, Online Journalism Review, Web Hosting Magazine, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, and many other Web sites, newspapers, and magazines. He is one of the creators of modern interactive journalism, invented a self-serve online ad sales system that eliminates virtually all sales costs, has served as an Internet business consultant to several Fortune 500 companies and many Internet entrepreneurs. Miller is the author of "The Online Rules of Successful Companies" (Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2002), and is currently working on a book tentatively titled "Point and Click Linux." Before becoming a full-time writer and editor, Miller operated a small limousine service in the Baltimore/Washington area and wrote freelance part-time. "I never intended to make writing and editing a full-time profession," he says. "It was purely accidental. There are many more talented editors and writers out of work who could easily replace me." Perhaps this is true, but we feel he is being too modest. Few journalists have covered Linux and Open Source as long or as deeply as Miller, and none have done more research on how software entrepreneurs can use Open Source and Free Software to build profitable businesses. When speaking, Miller believes in complete interactivity. If you want to interrupt and ask him to focus more on a particular topic, he says, "Go right ahead. Dialogues are always better than monologues." He has spoken to both small groups around conference tables and in large halls to as many as 2000 people, both directly in English and, through translators, to speakers of at least half a dozen other languages.
	Dr Mckay Motshabi General Manager, R&D State IT Agency (South Africa) Dr Motshabi is General Manager of Research & Development in the e-Services Division of the State Information Technology Agency (SITA). His unit's primary focus is to collect and disseminate research information on best practices in the ICT environment and to conduct technological assessments to enable the proper alignment of Information and Communications Technology deployment with strategic business imperatives of the national, provincial and local government departments in the RSA. Dr. Motshabi was previously Manager of Data Engineering Services at Ernst & Young (Information Systems Assurance and Advisory Services) where he introduced and was subject matter expert of IT end-user satisfaction surveys. He has ten years experience in the field of data processing, data manipulation, and statistical analysis using conventional statistical packages. Prior to that he was a principal consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Washington, D.C. which he joined after a spell as a statistical consultant at the Gallup Organization, also in Washington, D.C. Dr. Motshabi holds a Ph.D. degree in Educational Psychology with a focus on research design, measurement and statistical analysis. His interests lie in the areas of Data Mining, Decision Support Services, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and eGovernment.
	Janakiram M.S.V. Developer Evangelist Microsoft Janakiram MSV is a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft India. He started his career with FoxPro development and subsequently moved to Visual Basic and the .NET platforms. He has been a trainer, project leader and consultant. He joined Microsoft India as a Technical Specialist where he worked with the corporate and enterprise customers. In his current capacity, he works closely with the academic communities in India, evangelizing and sharing the vision on next generation technologies from Microsoft. He is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) and Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD) Charter Member on the .NET platform. Janakiram is passionate about XML Web Services and Mobile Computing. In his free time, he enjoys making wide range of technologies interoperate with each other.
	Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay Member Ankur Bangla Project Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay is a member of the Ankur Bangla Project (www.bengalinux.org) and a Free Software enthusiast. Professionally trained in management practices, he attempts to bring sanity and focus into Ankur through Usability Guidelines and standards compliance along with project tracking. He also reviews the translation effort. Sankarshan writes on the technological and human aspects of F/L OSS and is thus keenly interested in socially relevant L10n deployments in the field of ICT4D especially Low Cost Computing and the extension - Localised Low Cost Computing. He is a fellow administrator for FLOSSToday - a mailing list dedicated to dissemination of F/L OSS information and GNOME-India - the regional list of the GNOME-Marketing team. He can be reached at sankarshan at bengalinux dot org
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	Sanghyun Park CEO & President Hancom Linux (Korea) Prior to joining Hancom Linux as founder in December 1999, Mr. Park had worked at Haansoft and its affiliated companies for more than 7 years. Haansoft is Korea's biggest PC based application software company. While working at Haansoft, Mr. Park was able to maintain the market share for Haansoft's market-leading word processor at over 70%. Mr. Park started his career in 1985 as an international marketing professional for Samsung Corporation's electronic goods and devices group. In 1990, while still at Samsung, he initiated the spin-off of the Samtek software distributor. He has been involved in various software companies' startup and several of them became promising software vendors in Korea. Mr. Park has a B.A. degree in business administration from Ajou University in Korea and passed through the Executive MBA course of the graduate school at Pittsburg University in the United States.
	Dr Jamshed Patel Senior Director, Linux Program Office Oracle (US) Jamshed Patel is Senior Director of the Linux Program Office at Oracle Corporation. He leads a cross-division and cross-company team responsible for delivering an enterprise enabled Linux distribution supporting all Oracle products. As part of this role, Dr. Patel is responsible for driving the value-added engineering, product management, partnering and marketing of Oracle products and technologies in the Linux market. In 1998, he led the team that developed and released Oracle's first database product on Linux. Dr. Patel also leads the team in charge of performance characterization of database and application workloads across multiple server and storage architectures on the Linux platform. Dr. Patel holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University and M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Vanderbilt University.
	Harish Pillay Chief Technology Architect Red Hat Asia
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	Dr S. Ramakrishnan Executive Director CDAC S. Ramakrishnan is currently Executive Director, C-DAC, Pune, Senior Director and Head of Software Development Division in R&D in IT Group of Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Government of India. In his current capacity, he promotes IT industry, IT applications and associated R&D for domestic and export markets. He also heads two projects, e-readiness assessment and India Country Gateway funded by World Bank. Prior to his current appointment as Executive Director, C-DAC also handled the additional responsibility of Group coordinator of Convergence, Communications and Broad Band Technologies. He is also member of Steering Committee of C-DOT. Ramakrishnan was Founder Project Director of ERNET, the National Academic and Research Network, a collaborative effort of five IITs, IISc, former NCST and DIT (former DOE). ERNET brought Internetworking into the country during 1986-96 and pioneered many milestones in the field of computer networking. Over 800 institutions and 100,000 users were connected by 1996 before the initiative led to a society, ERNET India in 1998. It was rated as one of the most successful UNDP projects in the world. Prior to his current assignments, he has had various assignments as Director of National Centre for Software Technology, Founder Director of Media Lab Asia and Head, Education, Research & Technology. During 1998-2000, he was National Y2K Coordinator. He handled a variety of development, coordination and promotional portfolios in telecommunications during 1976-1985 in the Department of Electronics. He was earlier a Design Engineer in Avionics Design Bureau, Hyderabad, for three years. He did his B. Tech and M. Tech in Electronics from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras wherein he was merit scholar and Siemens Prize winner. Later he did PGDBA from MDI. He has traveled widely and has presented a number of papers. He is Vice President and Governor of International Council for Computer Communications (ICCC) registered in Washington D.C., USA. He has been a member of IETE, IEEE and Internet Society.
	P. Regunathan Principal Secretary, Information Technology Delhi Government
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	M. Sasikumar KBCS & ETU Divisons CDAC Dr Sasikumar is a senior research scientist and technical in-charge at the Navi Mumbai centre of CDAC Mumbai. He has been involved in a number of research projects at the centre for over 15 years, in various capacities. He is a regular faculty in CDAC Mumbai (formerly NCST)'s educational programmes. He has authored two books and a number of papers/articles. His group on educational technology has worked on a number of open source technologies in the area of e-learning. He is currently the main resource person for open source and localisation activities in CDAC.
	Dr Sunil Saxena Senior Principal Engineer, Software Solutions Group Enterprise Product Group Intel (US) Sunil Saxena is Senior Principal Engineer in Software Solutions Group, Enterprise Product Group for Intel Corporation. The Software and Solutions group is responsible for enabling the Intel Architecture products through Operating System Enabling, ISV enabling, solutions enabling, core system software enabling, and providing leading-edge products such as compilers, libraries, and tools that allow customers to get the full performance benefit of Intel architectures. Dr. Saxena received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Waterloo and received his B. Tech in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1975. He started working for Intel in 1995 and contributed to SVR4-MP, first multi-processor UNIX for the PC. He has been instrumental in creating and enhancing the value of Intel's silicon and platforms through innovations in software technology. Dr. Saxena made extensive contributions in the success of multiple generations Intel processors (x86, i860, and Itanium) and has spearheaded Linux and UNIX kernel development for the past 23 years. He has been directing engineering efforts at Intel for the past ten years. He consults with Linux distributors, industry and community for enhancement of Linux for Itanium and IA-32 processors architectures and platforms.
	Dr A.K. Sengupta Managing Director FITT Dr. A. K. Sengupta has been the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of the Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT), the autonomous industry interface organisation of IIT Delhi since 1993. Prior to 1993, he was In-Charge of the Corporate Planning Cell of Steel Authority of India (SAIL) in their New Delhi Corporate office. He got his first degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Bengal Engineering College of University of Calcutta. Later, he completed his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in the U.K. at the Universities of Manchester and Salford respectively. He has nearly 35 years of work experience primarily in Research & Development, Management of Technology and Management of Interface. He spent more than 15 years in the R&D Centre of Steel Authority of India (SAIL) in Ranchi and was involved in R&D in Product Development, Steel Making and Tribology. In between he spent three years in the Universities of Nottingham and Cambridge in U.K., engaged in research in the area of High Velocity Deformation and Application of Industrial Robotics. He was also the leader of the multidisciplinary team in SAIL that prepared 15-year Corporate Plan for the Company in 1992. Dr. Sengupta participated in substantive training courses on Consultancy Management from the Administrative Staff College of India in Hyderabad, and the Northeastern University in Boston. He was part of the elite Internal Consultancy Group in the SAIL Corporate Office during 1989-1993.
	Dr Ajay Shah Consultant Ministry of Finance (Govt. of India) www.mayin.org/ajayshah
	Jitendra Shah VJTI Mr. Shah is currently senior lecturer at VJTI Mumbai. His is focused in the usage of information technology for enhancing the standard, freedom and access to education. He is also founder and organiser of the IndicTrans team for localisation of GNU/Linux in Indian languages, coordinating the Marathi translation for GNOME.
	Munwar Shariff CTO Cignex (US) Munwar leads the development of products and provides the technology direction at CIGNEX. Munwar has worked as the chief architect and manager of engineering teams for several years in the areas of Open Source Technologies and J2EE architecture. For the past 12 years, he has been leading projects in the areas of System software, Client-server applications, Internet applications and Mobile commerce applications for customers in USA, Japan, Germany and India. He has architected solutions for clients like Epson, Broadvision, Circuit City, Wal-mart, Mitsubishi and Compaq to name a few. Munwar earned his M.S. in Digital Electronics and Advanced Communications from REC Surathkal, India.
	Alolita Sharma CEO Technetra (US) Ms Alolita Sharma is co-founder and CEO of Technetra, a Silicon Valley software company which implements and deploys large-scale software projects specializing in Open Source solutions. Ms. Sharma has over 14 years of experience in the Information Technology industry having engineered and led services groups at IBM Corp., MCIWorldcom, Intelsat Corp., SWIFT. She is currently pursuing the Ph.D program in Computer Science at the George Washington University, Washington DC from where she received a MS in Computer Science. Ms Sharma has published in many technology magazines and journals including Linux Journal, Linux Gazette, and is a monthly columnist for India's only Open Source magazine - Linux For You. She is a champion of Linux and Open Source software in India.
	G.M. Shenoy Senior Vice President National Stock Exchange Mr. G M Shenoy is a Mechanical engineering graduate, from the College of Engineering, Pune University, Maharashtra, India. He also holds a MBA in Financial Management from Mumbai University. In addition, he has post-graduate qualifications in Software Technology from the National Centre for Software Technology in Mumbai and is also a certified IS Auditor (CISA). He joined Mazagon Dock Limited, a premier Indian shipbuilding organization in the Design Department where initially he worked on engineering projects. He switched to software during the latter part of his tenure and was Officer-in-charge of the CAD center when he left in January 1990. He had a brief stint at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, where he was responsible for the initial work for the institute to be a regional repository for National Sample Survey Data. He then joined SICOM, a term lending development banking institution in December 1990. Here he played a major role in the Financial Accounts computerization and was also involved in the development of the Enterprise Loan Accounting system. He joined the National Stock Exchange in October 1993, as Manager (Systems) and was a part of the initial team for setting up the exchange. At NSE, he was handling the development and operational activity of the Systems Department. He was responsible for design and implementation of the Risk Management Systems of the Exchange, Back-office systems and various other systems like Accounts, Billing, Listing etc. He is currently the Sr. Vice-President at NSE.IT, the IT arm of the National Stock Exchange and his current role is as the CIO of NSE.
	Dr Gautam Shroff Head, Enterprise and Architecture Tata Consultancy Services Head, Architecture and Technology Consulting Practice, TCS. The group provides technical consulting to TCS enterprise customers in architecture, performance engineering, networking and storage technologies, as well as support to ongoing TCS projects, product development, and R&D. Dr. Shroff has been directly responsible for the groups activities in enterprise technical consulting in the areas of component-based architecture definition, strategy review and definition, application integration, platform selection and data architectures. Dr. Shroff has worked on applied research in the areas of software architecture and distributed objects, and has published several papers on the subject. He joined the R&D division of TCS in 1998 and handled the design and deployment of the technical architecture for Quartz a high-performance banking product employing a 3-tier architecture. Prior to joining TCS, Dr. Shroff was a member of the faculty at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA, after which he joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India. At IIT, he worked in the areas of computational mathematics, parallel computations and distributed systems. During this time, he was also a consultant to TCS and contributed to research activities at TCSs R&D center. Dr. Shroff graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India, in 1985 and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY, USA, in 1990.
	Dr Inder Singh CEO, LynuxWorks Chairman, Embedded Linux Consortium (US) Dr. Inder M. Singh is the CEO and Chairman of LynuxWorks. He founded Excelan, an early leader in local area networks in 1982 and served as its chairman, CEO and president until 1985. Excelan later merged with Novell. Dr. Singh was a co-founder of Kalpana, which pioneered Ethernet switching technology, and was one of Cisco's early acquisitions. Dr. Singh is a director of PacketStream and PocketPass, and has served on the boards of Mylex, Kalpana, Omnitel, Integrated Media Systems, Univation, Vivix, and Eon Systems. Dr. Singh is Board Chairman and ELC President for the Embedded Linux Consortium. In addition to his experience with high technology start up companies, Dr. Singh has prior management and technical experience with Zilog, where he headed the Networking and Advanced Systems Development Group. At Zilog, he was the architect of the Z8000 UNIX-based product line. Dr. Singh has also held positions at Amdahl, where he was a Senior Computer Architect, Gartner Research, the Yale Computer Center, and Ontel. He holds Ph.D. and M.Phil. degrees in computer science from Yale University, and an MSEE from Polytechnic Institute of New York.
	Rakesh Singh General Manager NetScaler Asia Rakesh Singh is general manager of NetScaler Private Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of NetScaler based in Bangalore, India. Prior to holding this position, Rakesh was director of product management and marketing for NetScaler, Inc., a leading provider of high performance traffic management solutions. In this position he was responsible for directing and marketing the company's NetScaler Internet traffic management product line. He has over 12 years of engineering and product management and marketing experience with application servers, clustering and high-availability systems, databases, operating systems and system development. Prior to joining NetScaler, Rakesh headed product management for the application server product line at iPlanet, a Sun-Netscape alliance. In this position he led a group of 11 product managers to define future application server product releases and strategy, and deliver products worldwide. Prior to that, he was product line manager for clustering and high-availability enterprise software solutions at Sun's Solaris Software division. He has also worked as a technical consultant for Digital Equipment Corporation and Sybase. Rakesh holds a masters degree in business administration from the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business, a Masters degree in computer engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and a Bachelors degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University, India.
	M.K. Srikant Executive Director Integra Micro Systems Mr. Srikant is currently the executive director of Integra Micro Systems. Mr. Srikant has over 18 years of experience in the industry. He is one of the founding members of the Bangalore Linux Users Group and is an OSS enthusiast.
	Manish Srivastava SETLabs Infosys Manish Kumar Srivastava is a Technical Specialist with SETLabs at Infosys Technologies Limited. His experience includes application development and migration on UNIX and Linux. His current interests are Linux adoption strategies and implementation in the enterprise.
	Dr Louis Suárez-Potts Community Manager OpenOffice.org (US) Louis Suárez-Potts is the Community Manager of OpenOffice.org since its inception and chair of the OpenOffice.org Communty Council, as well as the senior manager for community development at CollabNet, Louis Suárez-Potts holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently working on an in-depth examination of the difference corporate-sponsored open source projects have made to the logic and practice of open source.
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	Javed Tapia Director Red Hat India Young and dynamic, Javed is a Master in Business Administration from the Duke University, USA. He is an entrepreneur who has promoted Red Hat India with a passion to succeed. He has around 15 years of industry experience and over 8 years of experience in the area of Information Technology with strong professional skills in Corporate Finance and Management. He partnered with Red Hat Ireland to set up Red Hat India Pvt. Ltd. in the country in 2001. He has been at the forefront of bringing the latest Open Source technology of Red Hat, the world leader in Open Source technologies, to India. His leadership can be gauged from the fact that in a short span of time, the company has forged strategic alliances with various key industry leaders in the country. He has been a visionary and under his able guidance, Red Hat India has grown multi-fold in terms of number of employees, revenue and size.
	Suseela Titus General Manager Keltron
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	Anil Valluri Director, Systems Engineering Sun Microsystems Anil Valluri has nearly 16 years of Sales, Marketing and Technology Management experience in the IT industry. He started his career with DCM Data Products at Hyderabad and after 5 years in frontline sales and sales management he moved to DCM Delhi in Product Management to look after their Unix mini-computer range. He joined Digital at Bangalore in 1993 in Product Management for Alpha/UNIX and went onto to head the AlphaServer business in India for Digital. In this position he was leading a team of Business Managers, Product Managers and Product Specialists across the country and was instrumental in leading 64-bit computing technology in India. After the merger with Compaq, Anil was heading a combined business portfolio of AlphaServers, Tandem Fault-Tolerant systems and Storage. Anil moved to Sun Microsystems India in April 99 as their Director - Systems Engineering responsible for all technology consulting, leading a team of IT Architects, Consultants and specialists in Internet, Data Center, Networking, Java and other technologies. He has been involved in some of the largest enterprise computing decisions in the country with customers belonging to diverse segments. Anil is passionate about technology and is especially interested in microprocessors, system architectures, high availability and storage. He is regular speaker on technology in many events and seminars and is a key evangelist for Sun in India. Anil is married to Neelima, who is an environmental biologist and has a daughter Nishitha aged 12 years and a 1-year-old son Aryan. His hobbies include building audio systems, digital photography, digital cinematography, playing cricket, watching movies on the home theater and surfing the net.
	S. Vasudev Director, Software Engineering Novell Over two decades of software development. Leading teams developing cross platform services, open source components and developer technologies, and the Mono effort in Bangalore. Responsible for providing file system and other services over Linux as Novells Nterprise Linux Services. Also hold responsibility for MySQL, PHP, Perl components to make the NetWare AMPP story (a.k.a LAMP). A slew of RAD components - ActiveX and JavaBeans for Novell services with interoperability with native UCS components. Lead the efforts on the Security components of Novell eDirectory and on messaging components of Novell's Collaboration services. Have lead teams to develop products for MS-DOS and Windows in area of project management, office productivity and financial applications. B. Tech (Electrical Engineering), IIT Kharagpur.
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