Speakers

Robert Adkins

Co-Founder, Technetra

Robert Adkins is co-founder of Technetra, a Silicon Valley based technology consulting company which implements software projects specializing in Open Source solutions. Mr. Adkins has over 20 years of experience in the Information Technology industry having managed 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.

Anand Adkoli

CEO, Liqwid Krystal

Anand Adkoli is the co-founder and CEO of Liqwid Krystal (www.liqwidkrystal.com), a Bangalore-based company providing online learning solutions across ICT skills. Prior to his role as an entrepreneur, Anand was at Oracle. He held senior technical positions during of the course of his eight-year career at Oracle. He is the author of over 40 technical papers, and has authored six books from Osborne/McGraw-Hill. Anand also contributes his time as a featured speaker and thought leader across several platforms of learning.

David Axmark

Co-Founder, MySQL AB

David Axmark is one of the founders of MySQL AB and has been working with MySQL since before it had a name. His involvement with MySQL began with the idea to make an open source SQL RDBMS to replace an old terminal-based tool named UNIREG.

Sekar B C

Project Manager, HCL Technologies

Sekar has over 9 years of experience in the IT industry. His areas of expertise include network security, network management and Linux. Sekar is a popular author in Linux For You magazine on topics such as OpenSSH, HTTPS, Ethereal. He has presented at various Linux forums including LB/2003, GNUnify 2004 and QAI International Testing Conference 2004.

Sudev Barar

Vice President, Nuchem Ltd.

Sudev is a non-techie who has adopted Linux personally and in his business realising the potential of FOSS. He has moved his organisation completely to Linux and proving high leveraging of money spent on IT infrastructure. High Return on Investment (ROI) and low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) has been achieved by adopting Terminal Services. Re-cycling old hardware to deliver fast desktop performance while creating easy to use platform has been his aim. He is an active member of Delhi Linux Users Group.

Brian Behlendorf

Founder, CollabNet, Director, Mozilla Foundation

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. Brian is currently a Director of the Mozilla Foundation and a retired Director and President of the Apache Software Foundation.

Zaheda Bhorat

Manager, Open Source Programs, Google

Zaheda Bhorat has been an Open Source advocate while managing the OpenOffice.org and NetBeand project and community while working for Sun Microsystems Inc. She took OpenOffice.org from inception to a 1.0 and 1.2 release. With her experience of building communities of contributors, she created one of the first open source marketing projects with a global team of passionate volunteers to promote both open source and launch the office suite. She has advocated open source software language translations and supported the many native language projects for OpenOffice.org. Zaheda holds a BSc in Computer Science and has experience in building successful online communities for companies such as Apple Computer prior to her open source endeavours. Zaheda was born in India, raised in the UK, and works at Google, managing global open source programs such as the Summer of code.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani

CEO, Naukri

Sanjeev Bikhchandani is Naukri's CEO and co-founder. He founded naukri.com as a floorless employment exchange in 1997 and has grown the company to handle employment needs for more than 25,000 companies in India. Prior to Naukri, he was at Lintas India Ltd. and SmithKline Beecham India. He holds a Bachelors of Arts in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi and a PGDM degree from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Sanjeev has been former Editor of Avenues - the careers supplement of The Pioneer and has also co-authored two books on job hunting and careers.

Christopher Blizzard

Manager, Desktop Group, Red Hat

Christopher Blizzard has been a long-time contributor to open source software. He has contributed to GNOME and Mozilla since their inception in the late 1990s and has worked at Red Hat since 1998. He's currently a board member of the Mozilla Corporation, an organization founded to promote and develop the Firefox web browser, and manages the desktop group at Red Hat.

Ellen Carberry

Vice President, Red Hat Asia Pacific

Ellen Carberry has more than 20 years' experience in sales and business development, including prominent roles at IBM in the US and worldwide. She has also served as a Vice President of Business Development at both AT&T New Media Services and Mainspring, where she designed and grew partnership and sales strategies.

Her most recent professional position was with IBM Gobal Services in China as Director of the Financial Services Sector. There she developed industry offerings, partnerships, and sales for IBM's on-demand outsourcing services, transforming IBM from a product company to a business solutions company.

Carberry holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in English and Economics from Georgetown University.

Colin Charles

Community Engineer, MySQL AB

Colin Charles is a consultant, author, and student who's involved in the OpenOffice.org and Fedora projects. He now works for MySQL AB as a Community Engineer. He has an affinity for Fedora/ppc. Besides tinkering with computers and other electronic gadgets, he has interests in bowling, cycling, chilling out and watching movies.

Amit Chaturvedi

Technical Architect, Infosys Technologies

Amit works for Infosys Technologies Ltd, a leading consulting & IT services provider based in Bangalore, India. He has been with Infosys for more then eight years and currently works as a Technical Architect in the J2EE Center of Excellence group here. He has been involved in defining architecture for large enterprises, developing prescriptive architectures and reusable application frameworks at Infosys.

Ashwin Chaugule

Senior Software Engineer, Codito Technologies

Ashwin has more than 2 years of experience in the IT industry. He works at Codito Technologies in Pune on the port of the 2.6 kernel on a new architecture of ARC processors. His areas of experience include wireless device drivers in linux includes various drivers such as hostAP, linux-wlan-ng, ndiswrapper, and the new softMAC based Connexant drivers, based on the Prism chipsets. He holds a bachelors degree in computer engineering from Pune University.

Danese Cooper

Open Source Diva, Intel

Danese Cooper has a 15-year history in the software industry and has long been an advocate for transparent development methodologies. Cooper worked for six years at Sun Microsystems, Inc. on the inception and growth of the various open source projects sponsored by Sun (including OpenOffice.org, java.net and blogs.sun.com). She was Sun's chief open source evangelist and founded Sun's Open Source Programs Office. She has unique experience implementing open source projects from within a large proprietary company. She joined the OSI Board in December 2001 and currently serves as Secretary & Treasurer. In March 2005, Cooper joined Intel to advise on open source projects, investment and support. She speaks internationally on open source and licensing issues.

Eric D'Angelo

Manager, Solutions Marketing Group, Dell Asia Pacific and Japan

Eric D’Angelo is the Manager for Solutions Marketing Group at Dell Asia, and is responsible for overseeing activities undertaken by this group in Asia Pacific and Japan. Eric manages a team of product marketing managers focused on driving the Dell platform value proposition - ensuring enterprise customers have access to a comprehensive range of software offerings relevant to their needs. He is also responsible for driving Dell’s enterprise business growth via solutions marketing, and overseeing the health of Dell’s relationships with key enterprise solutions alliance partners.

Eric has spent over 18 years in the IT industry, beginning his career as a systems engineer with CADD Systems in Australia. Eric takes joy in educating others about the benefits of new technologies, complementing his experience as a Solutions Consultant with Q Technology prior to joining Dell in 2000. Since coming onboard with Dell, Eric has played a pivotal role in advancing Dell’s business in ANZ, and Asia Pacific in the areas of enterprise sales, marketing, and technology consulting. Eric holds a diploma in Civil Engineering from Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in Perth, Western Australia.

Sachin Dabir

Head Enterprise Sales, Red Hat India

Sachin brings over 14 years of experience in sales and marketing in IT industry. He has been with Red Hat for over 4 years now, and is responsible for sales across the sectors including Government, Banking, Telecom and PSUs. He has been leading Red Hat India's sales force to establish sustainable sales operations through products and services business.

Prior to joining Red Hat, Sachin worked with Kale Consultants Limited, one of India's leading developers of software products for Airline and Banking industries. He was in the banking division, responsible for identifying growth potential through new projects, conceptualization and pre - sales support to regional sales teams. As a Group Manager in Projects division at Kale, Sachin was responsible for business development and exploring international markets.

Sachin has also had the opportunity to work with Fujitsu ICIM Ltd where he joined as an Account Manager and grew to become Regional Sales Manager. Sachin was responsible for selling Sun and Intel based solutions to large customers in Western India.

He holds a Degree in Electronics Engineering and a Diploma in Marketing Management.

Kushal Das

Coordinator, Linux Users Group, Durgapur

Kushal Das is the co-ordinator of Linux User group of Durgapur. He is also a volunteer from Ankur Bangla project. He currently works to scope various FOSS implementations in HCL Capital Market Services.

Sayamindu Dasgupta

Program Manager - R&D, L2C2 Technologies

Sayamindu is an active member of the Indian FOSS community. He is one of the founder members of the Bengali Localisation Project, Ankur Bangla, and at present, he is co project lead of the Bengali Native-Language project of OpenOffice.org. He has served in the Elections and Membership Committee of the GNOME Foundation, and has been a Sarai/CSDS FLOSS Fellow. Currently, he is a member of the working group of FSF India. He is also a part of the webmaster team of FSF India, and iLUG-Cal. In real life, he is a student of Computer Science & Engineering at ITME.

Greg DeKoenigsberg

Community Relations Manager, Red Hat

Greg DeKoenigsberg joined Red Hat in 2001 as an engineering manager for Red Hat Network. He has been working full-time with the Fedora community since 2004. In that time he has organized several FUDCons, led the Fedora Extras project, and established the Fedora Ambassadors and Fedora Live CD projects. He is currently the community relations manager for Red Hat.

Mary Ann Fisher

Program Executive, IBM

Mary Ann Fisher currently serves as a program executive for IBM's Global Government Industry. She is responsible for IBM's Open Source and Linux business initiatives with governments around the world. In this role, she sets and oversees IBM's open source and Linux business strategies for its Government programs. Key areas of focus include consultation with clients around the world, IBM investment in Open source and Linux for Government, partnership development with business partners and ISVs, and Global communications and marketing. Mary Ann also leads IBM government initiatives in the areas of unstructured text analytics and enterprise content management.

Karunakar Guntupalli

Project Manager, IndLinux.org

Karunakar is a project coordinator for the Indian Linux Project - IndLinux (www.indlinux.org). He has a wealth of experience in i18n & l10n areas of Linux, and Indian language issues. Currently, he is based in Delhi working on IndLinux which is supported by SARAI.

Venkatesh Hariharan

Head, Open Source Affairs, Red Hat India

Venkatesh Hariharan is Head of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat. In this role, he works with industry, academia and government to grow the open source community in India.

Hariharan is a former Executive Editor of Express Computer and the first Indian to be selected for the prestigious Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During his stint at Express Computer, he imparted a dynamic news orientation to the magazine. He has interviewed some of the leading figures in the world of technology including Microsoft's Bill Gates, John Gage of Sun Microsystems, Stan Shih of the Acer Group and many others. He has written for leading Indian and international publications including MIT Technology Review, Upside, Slashdot, Economic Times, Times of India and many others.

In 1999, Hariharan co-founded of IndLinux.org, one of the leading localization groups in India. IndLinux.org has localized the GNOME and KDE interface of Linux to Hindi. Hariharan believes that the localization of Linux and open source software is a powerful tool to empower India's citizens with the power of information technology. He has advocated the adoption of Linux in India for political, cultural and economic reasons through his writing and his speeches. His long term interest is in the area of technology and public policy.

Dr. Ivan Herman

Head of Offices, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Dr. Ivan Herman graduated as mathematician at the Eötvös Lóránd University of Budapest, Hungary, in 1979. After a brief scholarship at the Université Paris VI he joined the Hungarian research institute in computer science (SZTAKI) where he worked for 6 years. He left Hungary in 1986 and, after a few years in industry, he joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Sciences (CWI) in Amsterdam where he has held a tenure position since 1988. He received a PhD degree in Computer Science in 1990 at the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands. He joined the W3C team as Head of Offices in January 2001 while maintaining his position at CWI. He is also member of the Semantiic Web Coordination Group at W3C. As part of his work at W3C, he regularly gives presentations on W3C technologies, as well as tutorials for example on SVG or the Semantic Web. He is also member of IW3C2, the committee responsible for the World Wide Web Conference series.

James Howison

Syracuse University

James Howison is a doctoral student at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies in New York, on walkabout from Australia. He has been researching free and open source software development for the past four years, as part of the http://floss.syr.edu project, funded by the US National Science Foundation. He has explored social networks, coordination and his dissertation research explores best practices for collaborating with sometimes unreliable partners, including distributed volunteers.

In 1998 he received his honors undergraduate degree in economics and politics from the University of Sydney. In 2001 he undertook graduate study in Software Engineering at the University of New South Wales before transferring to the Syracuse University School of Information Studies Ph.D. program in 2002. He was recently published in IEEE Internet Computing and has presented at the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), the annual conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) and the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). He is a sometime contributor to Bibdesk, an open source bibliographic manager for OS X, but certainly wouldn’t claim to be central.

Dr. Alka Irani

Senior Research Scientist, NCST, C-DAC Mumbai

Dr. Alka Irani is a senior research scientist at C-DAC Mumbai, formerly NCST. She is the chief investigator for Indix 2 and Janabhaaratii projects at C-DAC. Her areas of specialisation include education and language technology especially translation, transliteration, input, encoding, standardisation. She has worked on Rupantar, Singlish, and Vedic Sanskrit encoding projects. She holds a Ph.D in Computer Science from Birla Institue of Technology (BITS), Pilani and a Masters in Statistics from Bombay University. She is the chairman for the ISCARIO trust and a life member of Bharati Sanskrit Vidya Niketanam.

Shankar Iyer

Head - Global Learning Services, Red Hat India

Shankar brings to Red Hat India over 15 years of experience in the IT training and education industry. He is responsible for the entire stack of Red Hat training & certification in India through training partners and addressing the various training needs of corporates, schools and colleges.

Shankar spearheads the adoption of Red Hat products and services in all the IT spheres of the enterprise, ensuring availability of skilled manpower for the industry to ease the adoption of Red Hat products and services.

Prior to Red Hat, Shankar has worked with leading IT education companies like NIIT, Aptech and Globsyn Technologies, where he was instrumental in expanding the reach of these companies. Shankar has been responsible for development of training, designing and implementation of franchise business, course delivery, curriculum development and building support models.

Educated in Mumbai, Shankar graduated in Physics from Mumbai University and holds a diploma in Computer Science.

Arjun Jain

Pi Corporation

Arjun has been using Linux for over four years now as a student and is now doing the same as a software professional. As a student, he had undertaken numerous projects like Distributed Web Server, PVM patch for Pov Ray, etc. Arjun is currently working at Pi Corporation (picorp.com), where he is working on Web 2.0 technologies which include resource management, data replication and peer-to-peer networking.

Rajeev Kamath

IBM WW Program Director and Project Executive, IBM

Mr. Rajeev V. Kamath is a Program Director and Project Executive with the IBM Linux & OD Infrastructure Solutions Group. His responsibilities include development, communication and implementation of IBM Linux and On Demand Infrastructure Solutions programs. Over the past five 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 over 20 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.

Vamsee Kanakala

Chief Dreamer, Viamentis Technologies

Vamsee Krishna Kanakala is a die-hard open source software enthusiast, working mostly in web development. He started working for an open source start-up right out of college, and has now started his own start-up company in Chennai offering open source web development software services. He is a self-learner, and is a big fan of the Ruby on Rails web development framework.

Chander Kant

President & Co-founder, Zmanda

Chander Kant is the President and a co-founder of Zmanda, Inc. Chander provides a unique combination of leadership in open source and storage software. Chander has been involved with technology and the business side of open source software in many different projects and was named one of the "Top 20 Linux Luminaries" by Linux World Magazine in 2004. Prior to founding Zmanda, Chander ran LinuxCertified, Inc., an open source based services company. Earlier in his career, Chander was focusing on storage software as Director of Business Development at VERITAS software and as a product line manager for storage software at SGI. Chander holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BS in Computer Science from IIT, Kanpur.

Klaus Knopper

Creator, Knoppix

Klaus Knopper is the creator of Knoppix, a well-known live CD Linux distribution. He graduated in electrical engineering from the Kaiserslautern University of Technology, co-founded the European LinuxTag conference and expo, and has been an information technology consultant since 1998.

Dr. Vijay Kumar

MIT, Knowledge Commission of India

Dr. Vijay Kumar is currently the Assistant Provost and Director of Academic Computing at MIT. Through these roles he influences the Institute's strategic focus on educational technology and promotes the effective integration of information technology in MIT education. Vijay provides strategic leadership for units engaged in delivering infrastructure and services to support educational technology activities at MIT: Academic Computing in Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) as well as Academic Media Production Services.(AMPS) Vijay is the Principal Investigator of O.K.I (Open Knowledge Initiative), an MIT-led collaborative project to develop an open architecture for enterprise educational applications. He is a member of the Council on Educational Technology (MITCET) and a member of the steering committee of iCampus, an MIT-Microsoft aAlliance initiative. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of MIT OpenCourseware (OCW). Vijay serves as the Provost's representative on the Institute's Faculty Policy Committee.

Vijay is a member of the Applications Strategy Council for Internet2 and the Advisory Board for GELC (Global Educational Learning Community). His extensive engagement with professional organizations has included serving on the governing boards of the Seminars on Academic Computing (past Chair), the New England Regional Computing Program, NERCOMP (past Chair) and the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN); membership on the advisory groups of Apple Computer, CISCO, NIIT, India and the Smart Node (Cornell Supercomputing Facility, Senior Associate in the American Association for Higher Education's Teaching Learning and Technology Group), as well as serving on various EDUCAUSE committees.

Vijay serves as a consultant/advisor to several higher educational institutions, international agencies and initiatives. He frequently makes presentations on topics related to the planning, management and application of IT to education. Vijay's doctorate in Education (Future Studies, focusing on educational computing and planning for technological innovations in education) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst is preceded by a MS in Industrial Management and a B. Tech. in Chemical Engineering, both from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras.

Satish Kumar

Development Manager, Oracle India

Satish is currently involved in the Design and Development of ADF Design Time and ADF Swing. Prior to the current role, he was working as a Lead developer on ADF at Oracle Heaquarters. As a developer he focussed on developing ADF Bindings, BI Graph Integration and developing JSP Tag Libraries.

Dr. Swaran Lata

Additional Director, Dept of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and IT, India

Dr. Swaran Lata is responsible for the implementation of the Ministry's research programme on Indian Languages (TDIL - tdil.mit.gov.in). The pioneering work done under the TDIL programme has encouraged collaboration across industry, academia and R&D institutions. Resource Centres set up in various Indian states has helped localise various E-Governance applications. The Indix project has also significantly contributed to language development technologies that can be taken forward by the open source community. Dr. Swaran Lata holds a M.Tech in Computer Technologies from IIT Delhi, a P.G. Diploma in Production Management and is a gold medallist, B.Tech in Electronics & Communications from Thapar Institute.

Manav Manchanda

Project Lead, HCL Technologies

Manav has over 6 years of experience in the IT industry. His areas of expertise includes Linux platform migration and system software development. Manav is based out of Noida near Delhi.

Satish Mohan

Head of Engineering, Red Hat India

Satish Mohan has been associated with various open source initiatives for quite some time. He currently works for Red Hat as the Head of Engineering, India. His focus is on enabling more and more desktop peripherals and localisation, which can increase Linux desktop usage.

He is a member of Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) Desktop Linux Initiative Team that supports open source development worldwide by lending their expertise to a wide range of desktop projects, providing analysis and recommendations throughout the development cycle.

Satish is also a mentor for usability, desktop and localisation areas on Fedora project.

Taranisen Mohanta

Software Specialist, HP India

Taranisen currently works at Hewlett-Packard in Bangalore as a software specialist on Storage Area Network solutions. He has a M.Tech from IIT Delhi. Before HP, he worked for Alcatel's switching and routing division.

Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay

Engineering, Red Hat India

Sankarshan has been doing FLOSS for quite a while now. He meddles about as Marketing Contact (India) for OpenOffice.org as well as GNOME (Marketing) and is a Mentor (User Experience and Usability) in the Fedora Project. He is also involved in Firefox and Thunderbird localisation for bn_IN. He works at Red Hat.

Lakshmi Narayanan Narasimhan

Lead Engineer, HCL Technologies

Lakshmi Narayanan has more than 3 years of experience in the IT industry with areas of specialisation in network security and Linux. He graduated from Thiagarajar College of Engineering in Madurai and works for HCL Technologies in Chennai.

Ankit Patel

Language Maintainer, Red Hat

Ankit Patel is Language Maintainer, Gujarati at Red Hat. He is working with several localization projects including Fedora, GNOME, Xfce, Openoffice.org, and Mozilla and co-ordinating the project IndianOSS.org. He is also contributing in application developement of Fedora & Gnome. Before joining Red Hat, he used to work with the the open source Gujarati l10n team (Utkarsh.org).

Dr. Deepak Phatak

Chair Professor, Kanwal Rekhi School of IT, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay

Dr. Deepak Phatak is Nilekani Chair Professor of the School of Information Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. Dr. Phatak's vision is to see a resurgent India catching up with the world using Information Technology as the spring board. He hopes to make Linux and Open Source work for millions of Indians.

Paras Pradhan

Lead Developer, Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, Nepal

Paras is a computer engineering graduate from Kathmandu University, Nepal. Paras is the lead developer of NepaLinux, a localized distribution in Nepali. He has been working with Linux since 1996 first as an enthusiast and then later on as his profession.

Dibya Prakash

Technical Consultant, Reevik Technologies

Dibya is as technical consultant with Reevik Technologies. He started working on Open Source Technologies around a year back and is presently into developing, consulting and advocating OSS. Dibya is working on languages like Ruby, I/O and Lua. He finds Ruby on Rails (ROR) to be a wonderful web famework.

Ramana Radhakrishnan

Project Leader, Codito Technologies

Ramana Radhakrishnan is a project leader at Codito Technologies and leads the GNU tools group in Codito. He works on the open source GNU toolchain and maintains and optimizes the GNU toolchain for chip manufacturers. He is also a visiting faculty at the Computer Science Department in the University of Pune teaching systems programming courses on compilers and operating systems.

Dr. S Ramakrishnan

Director General, Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC)

S. Ramakrishnan is currently Director General, 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.

Dr. Appa Rao

Chief Consultant, R&D, Cognizant Technology Solutions

Appa Rao 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.

Appa Rao 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.

Appa Rao 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.

Ramakrishna Reddy

QA Engineer, Red Hat India

Ramakrishna Reddy, is currently an QA Engineer with Red Hat - India. He was an Independent Consultant, consulting in the Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation, Indic Text processing. He is a Free Software, Agile, eXtreme progamming evangelist and is involved with the IndLinux project. His interests lie in Open Source Scripting languages, Web Application development, functional Programming and Databases.

Srinivasa Gandhi Sampath

Principal Solutions Architect, Oracle

Srinivasa has over 11 years of experience in various aspect of enterprise middleware, including Business/Application integration, content management and Portals. He is a member of the Integration team in Oracle, and currently focuses on Business Process Management, Business Activity Monitoring and Web Services Management.

Alolita Sharma

Co-Founder & CEO, Technetra

Alolita Sharma is co-founder and CEO of Technetra, a Silicon Valley technology consulting company which implements software projects specializing in open source software solutions. Ms. Sharma has over 15 years of experience in the Information Technology industry having engineered and led services groups at IBM Corp., MCIWorldcom, Intelsat Corp., SWIFT. She completed her coursework for a Ph.D in Computer Science at the George Washington University, Washington DC from where she received a Masters of Science 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.

Vibhore Sharma

Head, Technology, Naukri

Vibhore Sharma is a Linux die-hard and avid LAMP fan and has more than 6 years of experience in the IT industry. He is responsible for Naukri's IT operations and scaling it to handle the company's phenomenal growth.

Mark Shuttleworth

Cosmonaut and Founder, Ubuntu

Mark studied finance and information technology at the University of Cape Town, and went on to found Thawte, a company specialising in digital certificates and internet privacy. He sold Thawte to US company VeriSign in 1999, and founded HBD Venture Capital and The Shuttleworth Foundation. In April 2002 Mark flew in space for the first time, as a cosmonaut member of the crew of Soyuz mission TM34 to the International Space Station. Mark has participated as a Debian developer since the early 1990s and in 2004 he returned to the GNU/Linux world by funding the development of Ubuntu, a user-friendly version of Linux. In 2005 he founded the Ubuntu Foundation and made an initial investment of USD10 million. The Foundation is used to pay Ubuntu contributors. Mark was born and raised in South Africa, and is currently living in London.

Patanjali Somayaji

CEO, Codito Technologies

Patanjali is the CEO of Codito Technologies, a Pune based company in the embedded systems area, working on embedded solutions in Linux, RtLinux, uCLinux, eCos and embedded FreeBSD. He has extensive experience of leading projects successfully in the area of Linux kernel porting, device drivers, eCos, networking, and 802.11b. Patanjali led the technical team implementing Codito's programmability solution for single-chip multiprocessors (CMPs). He serves the free software movement on the GNOME project, and is also one of the coordinators of the Pune Linux User's Group.

Raghunathan Srinivasan

State Informatics Officer, NIC Kerala

VS Raghunathan is a technical director of National Informatics Centre (Department of Information Technology, Government of India), currently working as State Informatics Officer, Kerala. With more than 18 years of professional experience, he has held several critical assignments and contributed to the success, including the design and implementation of export processing zones information systems, foreign trade and various e-governance initiatives. His forte is FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), data warehousing, G2C Services and GIS for the masses. Technical papers were presented by him in various technical forums in INDIA in these areas. He has pioneered open source GIS for Tamil Nadu Census using Map Server from University of Minnesota and bagged posture awards in the national GIS conventions. His mission is "Empowering every government employee through ICT and deliver the true, transparent and effective government to citizen (G2C) Services" which has made him to carry out major initiatives in the districts of Kerala. He is a Board Member in various state level ICT initiatives of government, public sector and undertakings in Kerala. He has gone to Timor Leste as part of the Indian delegation in the Capacity Building programme for Timor Leste, Government of India. He has presented various technical papers in the area of GIS, Data Warehousing and e-governance.

Louis Suárez-Potts

Community Relations Manager, OpenOffice.org

Louis Suárez-Potts is the Community Development 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.

Rahul Sundaram

Fedora Ambassador, Red Hat

Rahul describes himself as a self elected Fedora project "noisemaker" cautiously sponsored by Red Hat. He is the Fedora Journal online magazine initiator and editor in chief. He is a Fedora Ambassadors steering committee member and Fedora Ambassador for India. He is editor for Fedora weekly reports. He is projects volunteer for Fedora Websites, Documentation and Bug Triaging projects volunteer and miscellaneous grunt work for the Fedora Project. He is also a Linux Documentation Project Volunteer.

Pradeep Tagare

Investments Manager, Intel Capital

Pradeep works at Intel Capital, focusing on investments in the open source software space and has invested in JBoss, Zend, SpikeSource, and BlackDuck. Prior to Intel Capital, Pradeep has worked at successful Silicon Valley companies including founding his own. Pradeep holds a MSEE from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a BEEE from the University of Bombay, India.

Javed Tapia

President, Red Hat Indian Subcontinent

Javed Tapia is the President, Red Hat India Pvt Ltd, a subsidiary of Red Hat Inc, USA. Red Hat, with a market share of 65 percent worldwide, is a leader in development, deployment and management of Linux and open source solutions for Internet infrastructure - ranging from embedded devices to secure Web servers.

Javed has been leading Red Hat's India operations since it's inception in December 2000. In five short years, Red Hat has become a part of the mainstream of the Indian IT industry with large deployments in the government, education and industry segments. As president of Red Hat Indian Subcontinent, his responsibilities now include Red Hat's operations in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and the Middle East.

Javed has over 15 years of experience in building and growing a varied range of companies. he is the founder of Clover Technologies, an end-to-end IT solutions company that provided enterprise level Unix and Oracle solutions and support to corporates. Javed took an early lead in understanding the Linux market when he founded a group under Clover Technologies to focus on Linux early in 1999.

He is a post graduate in Business Administration from Duke University, USA, with a strong background in corporate finance and management. He brings to Red Hat India his immense hands-on experience in marketing Linux and open source software in the Indian subcontinent.

A graduate from Sydenham College, Mumbai, Javed is also the founder of Duke University’s Fuqua Alumni Club in India. He also serves on the interview panel for prospective applicants to Fuqua School of Business.

Dr. Balasubramanian Thangaraju

Technical Lead, Wipro

Dr B. Thangaraju works as a technical lead in the talent transformation division at Wipro Ltd in Bangalore. He specialises in the areas of Linux internals, Linux kernel, Linux device drivers, embedded and real-time Linux. He is an active open source contributor and he has published more than 25 papers in various reputed Linux publications. He has presented at many open source forum. He holds a Ph.D in Physics and worked as a research associate for five years at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).

Nalini Vasudevan

Developer, Yahoo India

Nalini currently works for Yahoo. She write code using PHP and MySQL and has become a full-time user of FOSS. She has been using Linux for the past four years during which she has written text editors and speech recognition systems using Qt libraries and GNU Tools. Nalini is a major Linux enthusiast and an active member of the Linux Users Group of RVCE (RVLUG).

Dr. Anthony Wasserman

Executive Director, Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI), Carnegie Mellon University West

Tony Wasserman is a Professor of Software Engineering Practice at Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast Campus, and Executive Director of the Center for Open Source Investigation (COSI). He is the current chairman of the Steering Committee for the Business Readiness Rating project. Previously, Tony was Vice President of Bluestone Software (acquired by HP), where he led the development of an open source toolkit for access to J2EE applications from mobile devices. During the dot-com boom, he was VP of Engineering for a dot-com startup. As Founder and CEO of Interactive Development Environments, Inc. (IDE), Wasserman built IDE and made it a recognized leader in computer-aided software engineering. Prior to starting IDE, Tony was a University of California professor. Wasserman is an internationally recognized leader in the software community, and has been selected as both a Fellow of ACM and a Fellow of the IEEE. He has published more than 60 technical papers and edited eight books. Dr. Wasserman earned a Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and an BA in Mathematics and Physics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Bebo White

Stanford University

Prof. Bebo White is a Departmental Associate (retired) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), the national high energy physics laboratory at Stanford University. In addition, Prof. White holds faculty appointments at Hong Kong University, the University of San Francisco, and Contra Costa College. He is a frequent speaker at conferences, academic institutions, and for commercial organizations around the world. Prof. White has been a member of the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) since 1996 and in that time has served as General Co-Chair of two of the conferences and Tutorial and Workshops Co-Chair for four of the conferences. White is often found on the program committees of the international conferences on Web Technology. He is one of the managing editors of "The Journal of Web Engineering" and "The Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching."

Jim Zemlin

Executive Director, Free Standards Group

Jim Zemlin is Executive Director of the Free Standards Group. Zemlin previously served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, the leader in products and services for the Apache web server. Prior to that, he was a member of the founding management team of Corio, a leading enterprise application service provider that had a successful initial public offering in July 2000. Widely quoted in the press on open source and commercial software trends, Zemlin has also been a speaker at industry and financial conferences.