Speakers

William F. Adiletta
President
TekFinancial Solutions

William F. Adiletta is the president of TekFinancial Solutions, a division of Tekmark Global Solutions LLC. TekFinancial Solutions offers specialized consulting to the financial services community including Enterprise Integration, Electronic Trading Systems Development, Wealth Management, SOX Compliance, Managed IT Services, Network Security, and FIX Integration,
building on Tekmark Global Solutions strengths.

Mr. Adiletta has over 25 years of experience leading some of the most significant innovations in the Financial and Telecommunications industries; and is a recognized expert in global trading systems and large-scale software development.

Prior to his current role at TekFinancial, Mr. Adiletta was the CIO of Global Crossing responsible for consolidating the technology infrastructure of its global acquisitions and centralizing worldwide information systems and controls. Upon Global Crossing’s acquisitions of IX Net and IPC Mr. Adiletta was CTO for both organizations.

Prior to his positions with Global Crossing, Mr. Adiletta was president of the Capital Markets division of OptiMark Technologies, Inc., a leading innovator of trade order matching facilities for global securities markets and exchanges. He originally joined OptiMark as the CTO and developed three complete exchange systems at the Pacific Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and the Osaka Stock Exchange.

Previously, Mr. Adiletta was President and COO of Market Vision, a leader in Electronic Trading Systems for Equity, Fixed Income, and Foreign Exchange as well as real-time middleware.

Bill Adiletta earned a bachelor’s degree. in physics from the University of Connecticut, and a master’s in physics from DePaul University in Chicago.

Sinan Baskan
Senior Director, Worldwide Solutions, Financial Solutions Group
Sybase

Sinan Baskan is Senior Director of Worlwide Solutions in the Financial Solutions Group  at Sybase, Inc. He is responsible for developing integrated solutions for Capital Markets and Banking and Business and Channel development for Sybase. His team has developed and delivered solutions for e-Trading, Risk Analytics and Regulatory  Reporting and Compliance markets. Prior to his current position Sinan was VP of Risk Technology for the Americas at HSBC Corporate and Investment Bank. He has held positions in engineering and product management at Sybase (1993- 2005) and rejoined Sybase  in 2007. He started his career at Philips Research Laboratories and IBM Research Division.

Sinan holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Lehigh University and Columbia University and an MBA from Columbia University Graduate School of Business.

Mike Bignell
President and CCO
Omega ATS

Mike Bignell is President and CCO of Omega ATS. He previously held the roll of SVP of Operations and Chief Compliance Officer for Fidelity Clearing Canada (FCC).Prior to FCC, Bignell served as EVP, Chief Compliance Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Director at Standard Securities Capital Corporation where he was responsible for the recruitment and supervision of all registered and non-registered staff members and the creation, development, implementation and internal enforcement of all operational and regulatory procedures. Other previous work engagements include NBCN Correspondent Network, Dean Witter Reynolds and CT Securities Services. His expertise includes self clearing, introducing and carrying brokerage firms. He has worked at the senior management level for more than a decade.

Roger Burkhardt
CEO
Ingres

Roger Burkhardt serves as president and chief executive officer of Ingres. In this role he is responsible for all facets of the company’s worldwide business. He also serves on the company’s Board of Directors. As president and CEO, Roger is responsible for corporate strategy, development, engineering, and global field operations including marketing, sales and support, alliance and channels, and customer programs.

Prior to Ingres, Roger was the chief technology officer and executive vice president of the New York Stock Exchange, where he led a global technology team of 2,000 colleagues through the most important business and technology transformation in the Exchange’s history: the shift to electronic trading. Under his leadership, the NYSE embraced open source solutions, maintained world-class reliability standards, and increased transaction volumes seven-fold.

Prior to the NYSE, Roger was president of listed equities for OptiMark Technologies, a developer of electronic trading technology that was adopted by more than 80 percent of the top 200 trading firms in the United States. He was also with IBM for 15 years where he held several leadership positions in engineering, sales, and business development. Most recently, he served as director of capital markets, IBM Banking, Finance and Securities, where he ran a $250 million business unit serving the needs of the Wall Street banking community.

Roger currently serves on the Board of Directors of MarketAxess (MKTX), which operates one of the leading platforms for the electronic trading of corporate bonds and other fixed-income securities. He holds an MBA. in finance from New York University and both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Physics from Oxford University. A former member of the IBM Advisory Board, Roger is recognized by Wall Street and technology innovators worldwide for his customer advocacy work and thought leadership.

Brennan Carley
Senior Vice President, Product Management
Spread Networks

Brennan Carley is Senior Vice President of Spread Networks, with responsibility for Product Management and Marketing.

Brennan has extensive strategic and operational experience at leading financial technology and telecommunications firms, including Radianz which he founded, Instinet, Reuters, NYFIX, IBM, Yipes, and Marketcetera. Brennan has advised companies and served as an executive with both operating and strategic responsibility. He has worked closely with many leading venture capital and private equity firms, as an executive in portfolio companies, as an independent board member of portfolio companies, and in an independent advisory capacity.

Brennan is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of New York University, with a degree in Economics.

Nick Ciarleglio
Systems Engineer
Arista Networks

Nick Ciarleglio is currently a System Engineer at Arista Networks. Nick arrived at Arista Networks in 2008 as the company’s first System Engineer. In his current role, Nick is responsible for network architecture consulting in the financial services vertical, and has specifically focused on end to end low-latency architectures. He also provides field feedback and "real world" expertise to the Arista development team. Prior to his arrival at Arista, Nick was a Senior Technical Consultant for Hewlett Packard.

Richard Croucher
Founder and Chief Architect
Informatix Solutions

Richard mostly concentrates on low latency, particularly TCP bypass, for Trading systems. Recent clients include a well know Exchange, an Investment Bank and some arbitrage traders. He was formerly Chief Architect of Sun Microsystems Professional Services group in EMEA and a Principle Architect in Microsoft’s Windows Live.

Ken Czekaj
Financial Principal Sales Engineer
NetScout

Ken Czekaj came to NetScout in 1998 in the role of a Systems Engineer. In his current role, Ken is responsible for analyzing the electronic trading customer’s unique business challenges, and applying relevant solutions to meet these needs. In a consultative manner, he guides technical direction in sales campaigns and provides relevant input to drive future strategy and product direction. Ken is a graduate of Bowling Green State University with a BSBA degree in Management Information Systems.

Andrew Delaney
President, Editor-in-Chief
A-Team Group

Andrew Delaney is A-Team’s president & editor-in-chief, based in London and New York. He has been involved in information gathering and dissemination around financial markets IT since 1987. He joined A-Team in 2002 to spearhead the company’s publishing activities and is responsible for A-Team’s offerings in the pre-trade information and electronic transactions areas.

Before joining A-Team, Andrew spent three years launching a financial information distribution platform aimed at the off-trading-floor marketplace. Prior to that he spent 11 years at Waters Information Services in a variety of senior roles including editor-in-chief, senior vice president of global sales, and general manager of North American operations. He also spent time with Banking Technology magazine in London and The Wall Street Journal in Brussels.

Stephane Dubois
Chairman, CEO and Founder
Xignite

Stephane Dubois founded Xignite to pioneer the creation of pure-play packaged financial web services products. He was among the first entrepreneurs to productize this emerging technology. Today, Stephane is driving Xignite to become one of the leading players in the "Web Service Economy".

Prior to Xignite, Stephane was vice president of product marketing at Advent Software, the leading provider of software solutions to the investment management industry. During his tenure the company went public, doubled its market share to 45%, and grew from $20M to $100M in revenue. Stephane was responsible for building a highly skilled product marketing organization overseeing product and market strategy, market validation, and positioning for all product lines. His team also developed the industry’s first institutional account aggregation service for investors and their advisors.

Prior to Advent, Stephane held senior management positions in the product marketing organizations of Walker Interactive Systems and Oracle Corporation. During the client/server computing wave, he led teams that developed and marketed financial applications in areas such as accounting and purchasing over multiple product releases touching hundreds of corporate customers.

Stephane holds a Master of Science in Management degree from M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and both M.S. and B.S. degrees in international management from the MBA Institute in Paris.

Peter Duffy
CTO
Sumerian

Peter, who joined Sumerian in 2002, is responsible for managing the technical aspects of Sumerian’s analytical solutions, identifying innovations and new analysis techniques which may evolve into future Sumerian service offerings. He is also responsible for developing our collaborative links with academic institutions.

Prior to joining Sumerian, Peter was a Technical Leader with Cisco Systems in California, where he worked with large service provider clients and Cisco partners to define network and service management solutions. Peter has over 20 years’ experience in the industry, spanning research, product development, service management and business analysis.

Mike Dunne
CTO
ACTIV Financial Systems

Michael Dunne is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of ACTIV Financial Systems, Inc. He has over 15 years’ software development experience inside real-time market data companies including 8 years’ at ICV Ltd / Primark / Thomson Financial making major contributions to the design and development of the TOPIC3 and GlobalTOPIC products. At ACTIV, Mike has architected and led the development of the state-of-the-art ActivFeed suite of products, the first datafeed designed to support consolidated, direct and hosted delivery models. This feed is now offering unprecedented throughput and latency characteristics with the introduction of the ActivFeed MPU - the ActivFeed platform ported to an FPGA-based co-processor. He holds a BSc (Hons) in Mathematics and Computer Science from The University of Manchester.

Jason England
Associate Partner – eTrading / Market Data
Citihub

Jason is a senior market data practitioner with 15 years experience with vendors including Thomson Reuters, Thomson Financial, Primark, ICV and S&P Comstock.  He has broad experience of Thomson, Reuters and NYSE/Technologies solutions and content sets.  He has a track record designing successful market data infrastructures as well as program management.

Jason has a wide range of experience both in senior staff management roles and organizational / technical change programs.

Stephen Ferrando
Partner, Bendigo Partners
CEO, dbConcert

Steve Ferrando has nearly thirty years of experience in Financial Services Information Technology. For the past eight years, Steve has run the software solutions firm that he founded, dbConcert, Inc. In his capacity as CEO of dbConcert, Steve has worked with a wide variety of financial services institutions, from the smallest hedge fund to the largest investment banks. He has been instrumental in helping the firm’s clients improve operational efficiencies, streamline workflows and minimize the possibility of errors while at the same time reducing overall technology expense. Specific projects include the development and deployment of multiple front office trading systems, middle and back office integration, the creation of a fully automated reconciliation platform and data warehouse/business intelligence implementations.

Steve has detailed knowledge of all aspects of the international brokerage, hedge fund, and asset management businesses. Prior to dbConcert, Steve was in charge of international and institutional technology at E*TRADE.  In this role he not only had full technology responsibilities for launching and operating E*TRADE Global, he also had business responsibilities for this full electronic, retail cross-border trading platform. Before joining E*TRADE, Stephen was CIO of TIR Securities for seven years.

Andrew Haines
CIO
Gain Capital

Mr. Haines oversees all aspects of GAIN Capital’s information technology, including trading and business application development, infrastructure operations, and business continuity planning. He is responsible for aligning IT strategy with the strategic business objectives of the company, as well as overseeing day-to-day technology operations.

From March 2005 until September 2007, Mr. Haines was vice president, application development at GAIN Capital. He brings to GAIN more than 20 years of experience delivering business and trading solutions for major corporations in the financial services and brokerage industries, including Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney. Prior to joining GAIN, Mr. Haines was chief information officer and vice president of technology at online retailer Bluefly.

Mr. Haines holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Delaware and a Masters in Technology Management from the Stevens Institute of Technology.

Alex Heneveld
Co-Founder & Chief  Technology  Officer
Cloudsoft

Alex brings twenty years experience designing software solutions in the enterprise, start-up, and academic sectors. Most recently Alex was with Enigmatec Corporation where he led the development of what is now the Monterey® Middleware Platform™. Previous to that, he founded PocketWatch Systems, commercialising results from his doctoral research.

Alex holds a PhD (Informatics) and an MSc (Cognitive Science) from the University of Edinburgh and an AB (Mathematics) from Princeton University.

Alex was both a USA Today Academic All-Star and a Marshall Scholar.

Jay Houghton
Director of Algo Services Engineering
Lime Brokerage

Jay oversees the design, development and testing of Lime Brokerage’s algorithmic services offering as well as the development of Lime Brokerage’s real-time monitoring, computation and servicing infrastructure.

Prior to joining Lime, Jay was Director of Engineering for Magnasource, where he oversaw the design and development of telecommunications software and infrastructure for network management systems. Jay has held leadership and development positions for Lucent, Sun Microsystems, Siemens, United Technologies Corp. and Digital Equipment Corporation.

Jay received B.S.E degrees in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Ben Hyde
Vice President, Software Development
NovaSparks

Ben Hyde is Vice President of Software Development at NovaSparks. Ben is a long time software industry veteran who’s prior have roles and employers include: teaching Computer Science at CMU, designing multiprocessors at BBN, building compilers, architecting Lotus 123 for the  Macintosh, real time expert systems at Gensym. He is particularly proud to have played a part in founding the Apache Software Foundation where he has served both as a board member and as VP for the HTTP server project.

Saro Jahani
Chief Information Officer
National Stock Exchange

Saro Jahani joined NSX as Senior Vice President of Information Technology on November 1, 2007. On March 1 2008, he was appointed Chief Information Officer (CIO). Saro is responsible for all IT functions at NSX, including systems development and the operation of the Exchange’s IT real-time production systems and all related tasks.

Saro Jahani has over 2O+ years of professional carrier in Information technology and a depth of technology experience in the securities industry, most recently as Global Head of Infrastructure, IT Operations and Facilities at Townsend Analytics, a leading provider of market data and direct access trading software and a subsidiary of Lehman Brothers. In this position, he was responsible for the strategic and global operation of Townsend’s data center facilities, data center operations and operational quality of a high volume and distributed production environment.

Before that, Mr. Jahani served as Executive Vice President of IT Operations at SunGard Trading Systems. There he was responsible for Information Systems/Information Technology and production operation, including the continuous development and planning of SunGard’s production network, network security, telecommunication, ASP and data centers. Prior to that, he served as CIO at SunGard Data Systems in Stockholm, Sweden.

His work experience also includes IT positions at CAP Gemini, Swedish Telecom and Crosfield Electronics. Saro Jahani has a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering with concentration on Computer Operations from University of Uppsala, Sweden. In addition, Saro Jahani brings 20 years of International experience.

Paul Jameson
Global Senior Director, Financial Services
Cisco Systems

Paul currently serves as senior director of Cisco’s global marketing and solution development for financial services; covering financial markets, retail banking and insurance. Paul is a veteran business leader and information technology professional with more than 26 years of success in executive management, marketing, sales, and solution development, involving software, services, outsourcing, and consulting.

Throughout his career Paul has held positions as CEO and founder of e-Bank, President of Fiserv’s business intelligence software business, Vice President of the Banking practice for Cap Gemini Ernst and Young NA, and Senior Vice President at Getronics. He began his career at Mellon Bank where he held both product management and consulting positions within their retail banking and outsourcing divisions.

A native of Flint, Michigan, Paul holds a bachelor’s degree in business management and finance from Franklin and Marshall College.

Darren M. Jer
Co-Founder and COO
MarketFactory

Darren manages marketing, sales and operations for MarketFactory, a company focused on technology microstructure for programmatic traders. Prior to MarketFactory, he was Head of New Business Sales in the Americas for ICAP Electronic Broking where he established their algorithmic trading and market data business for buy side clients. Before ICAP / EBS, Darren was a sales executive in IBM’s Banking, Finance and Securities practice, responsible for key Wall Street accounts. Darren began his career in financial technology as a consultant for Price Waterhouse.  He is a graduate of Duke University.

Scott Kennedy
Global Business Manager for Direct Feeds, Enterprise
Thomson Reuters

Scott Kennedy is Global Business Manager for Direct Feeds within the Enterprise business unit at Thomson Reuters. Having joined the firm in 2006 Mr. Kennedy holds global responsibility for Thomson Reuters Data Feed Direct - an ultra-low latency feed handler that delivers data directly from an exchange to a customer’s site.

Mr. Kennedy has over 24 years of experience in the financial industry with more than six years within the equity markets. He joined Thomson Reuters from virt-x Exchange Ltd, where he served as Senior Manager of Strategic Business Development and Head of Trading Connectivity.  As Head of Trading Connectivity for TradePoint, Mr. Kennedy was part of a project team that launched the two first pan-European blue chip cross-border exchanges that became virt-x.

Previously, Mr. Kennedy worked at Bankers Trust Company Ltd in London and Australia where he coordinated the IT infrastructure upgrade for the Euro currency worldwide, and significantly enhanced the firm’s in-house market data distribution platform. He began his career as a systems developer for PONT Data in England and Australia.

Gary LaFever
Chief Corporate Development Officer
FTEN

Gary is responsible for evaluating and executing FTEN’s key strategic initiatives to secure FTEN’s long-term growth, success, and sustainability including regulatory reform and intellectual property strategies. Prior to joining FTEN in 2001, Gary served as Chief Executive Officer of Antirion, Chief Executive Officer of Internet2Anywhere, Chief Operating Officer of WomenCONNECT.com, Chief Legal Officer of Nat Systems International, Partner with Hogan & Hartson, and Management Information Consultant at Accenture Global Management Consulting.

Peter Lankford
Founder and Director
STAC

Peter Lankford is founder and director of STAC® , the Securities Technology Analysis Center (www.STACresearch.com). STAC facilitates the STAC Benchmark Council™, a group of leading trading organizations and vendors that specifies standard ways to measure the performance of trading solutions. End-user members can use published STAC Benchmarks™ to assess new technologies and can also relate these reports to their existing systems by using standardized STAC Test Harnesses™ in the privacy of their own labs.

Prior to STAC, Peter was Senior Vice President of Information Management Solutions at Reuters, where he led the $240M market data systems business. Peter’s team led Reuters into the business of low-latency direct exchange feeds and catalyzed the widespread adoption of Linux on Wall Street by making the Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) the first major product for the securities industry on that platform. Prior to Reuters, Peter held management positions at Citibank, First Chicago Corp., and operating-system maker IGC. Peter has an MBA, Masters in International Relations, and Bachelors in Chemistry from the University of Chicago.

Greg Malatestinic
Co-Chair Algorithmic Trading Working Group
FIX Protocol Organization

Greg Malatestinic is a software architect with 15 years experience in the financial markets as a developer of order routing networks and execution/order management systems. As a senior software engineer at Jordan & Jordan, he draws upon his experience to assist clients in translating their business needs into product specifications, assists in the design and development of new products and services, and performs technical assessments of electronic trading and market data infrastructures.

Prior to joining J&J, Greg spent several years at Reuters, where he focused on electronic trading and connectivity, serving as a senior architect and as liaison between business owners and development staff. Prior to Reuters, Greg was a software developer at Bridge Information Systems in their transactions group where he designed and built an institutional order management system and a FIX routing hub that became the foundation of their broker-dealer network.

Greg is co-chair of the FPL Algorithmic Trading Working Group and has been a leader in the creation of FIXatdl, an extensible markup language used to define graphical and electronic interfaces of advanced order types. He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics from McGill University and a M.S. in Computer Science from University of Delaware.

Dave Malik
Director, Solutions Architecture – Advanced Services
Cisco Systems

Dave Malik is a Director of Solutions Architecture in Cisco’s Advanced Services organization responsible for data center architecture strategies for Financial Services firms.  He is involved in delivering solutions to support market data and trading applications. Lately his focus has been developing cloud computing and virtualization strategies with exchanges, service providers and institutions. Dave is also active in industry forums and is an author of several publications.  He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and a Master of Science in Information Systems.

Daniel May
Director and Co-Founder
SpryWare

Daniel May is the director and co-founder of SpryWare, a leading provider of Ultra Low Latency Feed Handler Technology. The company is specialized in high capacity and small hardware footprint market data solutions. Mr. May is a software innovator and developer at heart and heads up Spryware’s overall management and technology design on a day-to-day basis.

Before starting SpryWare Daniel May founded May Consulting, Inc. in 1990 which developed MicroHedge, a leading option analytic and risk management software system for professional option market makers. May Consulting was acquired by SunGard Data Systems in 1998, with Mr. May continuing to act as Chief Technology Officer until 2000.

Daniel May is a co-author of the FAST™ Protocol. Mr. May earned a B.S. with Honors in Business Administration and Computer Science from University of Florida.

Shawn McAllister
CTO
Solace Systems

Mr. McAllister is responsible for deepening Solace’s understanding of requirements and use cases across industries and organizations, evangelizing our unique approach and solutions, and working closely with our customers to identify ways of improving our technology and value proposition.

Prior to joining Solace, Mr. McAllister led software, hardware, and test engineering teams at Newbridge Networks (later Alcatel Canada), where he was responsible for the development of features on ATM and Ethernet switches as well as the 7750 Multiservice IP Router.  Mr McAllister was a regular attendee and contributor to the ATM Forum and co-inventor of several patents in the telecommunications space. Mr. McAllister holds a Bachelor of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo, with majors in both Computer Science and Combinatorics/Optimization.

Linden Mercer
Senior Research Engineer
U.S. Navy Applied Research Laboratory/Penn State University

Linden is currently a senior research engineer for the Navy’s Applied Research Laboratory/Penn State University (ARL/PSU). Since he retired from the U.S. Air Force and joined the ARL, he has been supporting the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC. He is engaged in creating and applying new information technologies for the Department of Defense (DoD) and intelligence community. One primary thrust is the development of capabilities for extending high performance computing and storage securely across global networks.

Recently he worked to help architect the Large Data infrastructure leveraging a number of high performance computing technologies including InfiniBand wide area networking technologies originated at NRL. The Large Data effort was awarded 2009 Joint Capability Technology Demonstration of the year.

Todd Montgomery
VP of Architecture, Messaging Business Unit
29West-Infomatica

Todd L. Montgomery is Vice President of Architecture for the Messaging Business Unit of 29West, now part of Informatica. As the chief architect of Informatica’s Messaging Business Unit, Todd is responsible for the design and implementation of the Ultra Messaging product family which has over 150 production deployments within the financial services sector. In the past, Todd has held architecture positions at TIBCO and Talarian as well as lecture positions at West Virginia University, contributed to the IETF, and performed research for NASA in various software fields. With a deep background in messaging systems, reliable multicast, network security, congestion control, and software assurance, Todd brings a unique perspective tempered by 20 years of practical development experience.

Al Moore
Director of Business Development
Fixnetix

Alasdair has more than 20 years’ experience in the financial services industry. For the last 10 years, Alasdair was a director of Tullett Liberty Securities & Tullett Liberty Equities. During this period he was instrumental in building the largest network of stock exchange memberships of any independent stockbroker in Europe. Alasdair also built the first team of quants offering algorithmic execution services at an independent stockbroker in the UK.

John Morar
Research Scientist
InfoSphere Streams Applications
IBM Research

Dr. John Morar manages an IBM InfoSphere Streams group focused on the application of Stream Computing to electronic and algorithmic trading, trade surveillance and related financial market needs. Their objectives are scalable low-latency implementations that efficiently provide both flexibility and high-performance without undue software complexity.

John started with IBM Watson Research in 1982 after receiving his PhD in physics from the University of Maryland. During that time he’s had extensive experience in a broad range of disciplines from the physics of semiconductor materials, computer virus research and Services Oriented Architectures to infrastructures that support advanced economic systems. He has written 70 articles in reviewed scientific journals and holds patents in the areas of device processing, computer virus detection, Web services, and economic systems.

Phil Morris
CTO
Platform Computing

Phil Morris recently joined Platform Computing as CTO from Sun Microsystems where he spent the last 17 years. He was a Technical Director and Chief Technologist since September 2001 and gained a tremendous amount of business and financial knowledge in addition to his solid base of technology and management skills. He was an acknowledged leader within the company, and won the President’s Award for his contributions. He has experience in dealing with customers at every level of management and in every geography both in the HPC world as well as the enterprise data centre.

Phil’s current technical knowledge encompasses facilities architecture and analysis, cooling and airflow, HPC/grid, Cloud Computing and virtualization, data centre efficiency and overall cost savings and reduction of the carbon footprint. Prior to that he was the Chief Technologist for Systems for 3.5 years, with an overall goal of achieving $3B in product revenues for Sun across six different teams. Additionally Phil was the CT for Storage for several years, helping Sun move from $100M/year up to $500M/year in revenues.

He also has a strong basis in BC/DR, ITIL, operational efficiencies, ERP (SAP, Oracle Apps, etc), application and IT modernization and performance management, and also is a “green belt” in the Six Sigma process methodology.

Stewart Orrell
Senior Manager, Financial Services
Equinix

Stewart Orrell, Senior Manager of Equinix Financial Services, is responsible for developing the global market strategy as it relates to the Technology Service Providers that populate the Equinix Financial ecosystem. Stewart works regularly with clients to ensure they have access to best-of-breed technology providers in support of their electronic trading strategies. He regularly acts as an advisor to Technology Service Providers, ensuring their ability to provide these services in the most effective manner. Stewart has 13 years experience in the Financial Industry, including 10 years at Goldman Sachs’ London and New York offices, where he primarily focused on the architecture of network and market data systems, as well as business process implementation across multiple key technology platforms.

Scott Parsons
Chief Scientist and Architect
Exegy

Mr. Parsons is responsible for the company’s product development and architecture, embedding financial market intelligence into Exegy appliances and software.

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

Mike Persico
Managing Director
Anova Technologies

Mr. Persico, a veteran of the financial and professional service fields, is the founder and current Chairman of SMG Holdings, LLC. SMG Holdings, LLC is the parent of four firms dedicated to supporting the investment and trading industry. Operationally, Persico heads Anova Technologies, an optical network engineering firm. Anova’s OptiWave platform, anchored by an innovative fractional fiber product and robust managed services, provides firms with the very latest in customizable optical transport technology. Anova’s goal is to create a next generation network that achieves perpetual ultra low latency, scalability and resiliency. 

Mr. Persico’s first firm, Tekom, Inc., was an innovator and trailblazer in the world of electronic trading. Formed in 1997 to service the German exchange Eurex, it grew to be the leading provider of information technology for the financial industry.
With clients in every strata of the vertical, Tekom developed many of the technology standards used for screen-based trading today and constructed over 100 trading arcades & networks. Tekom merged with Ambiron in 2004.

David Pho
Director of Engineering
Lightower Fiber Networks

Bio to come.

Alan K. Powers
Lead HPC Architect
Computer Sciences Corp.

After graduating from Eastern Washington University with a B.S. in Computer Science (1985), Alan worked at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL) and studied for his Masters in Computer Science at the University of Idaho. In 1987 he played a key role in setting up INEL¹s first Cray supercomputer and later it’s first Internet connection (NSFnet/Westnet). Alan has been working with the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) division at NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) since 1992 and has been very involved with the evolution of the facility’s supercomputing center. As the HPC Technical Director one of his major accomplishments was leading a team through the installation of Project Columbia (20 single system image nodes with 512 CPUs each for a total of 10,240 Intel Itanium 2 CPUs) in 2004. The current HPC system at NAS, Pleiades, ranks 6th on the top 500 (June 2010) and is the world¹s largest IB Linux cluster with over 45 miles of IB cabling, consisting of double data rate, quad data rate and hybrid cables. As of May 2010 he is the Lead HPC Architect for CSC supporting NOAA in their HPC infrastructure build out with their next big system deployment in West Virginia.

Mark Powers
Global Head of Sales and Marketing
Lime Brokerage

Mark joined Lime Brokerage from Citigroup where he was a managing member of Citigroup’s Global Electronic Execution team. During his tenure at Citi, Mark was Head of the Relationship Management Group, and held a variety of sales management and senior production roles focusing on the sale of their trading platform to the institutional hedge fund and investment management community.

Prior to joining Citi, Mark worked at Instinet as a senior member of the institutional electronic execution team, co-managing the electronic trading desk after joining from the sales team at Lynch, Jones, and Ryan. Mark began his career in sales at Deutsche Bank Securities in New York.

Mark holds both a JD and an MBA from Villanova University, and a BA from the University of Delaware.

Brian Quigley
Director of Sales North America
ADVA Optical Networking

Brian Quigley is currently the Director of Sales for North America at ADVA Optical Networking. His focus is low-latency optical transport for the financial markets. Brian has over fifteen years of experience with optical networking, including President and CEO at CTI and Vice President at Sunesys. He was also a charter member of the Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband coalition, has presented to both the FCC and the NTIA regarding next generation broadband regulations and is a frequent presenter at international conferences.

Raymond Russell
CTO and Co-Founder
Corvil

Raymond is one of Corvil’s founders and co-inventor of its core technology. Since joining Corvil in 2000 as Chief Technology Officer, Raymond has played an instrumental role in building a strong product suite around the core Corvil technology. As CTO, Raymond is focused on driving continued advancement and fulfillment of Corvil’s innovations with a focus on applications and infrastructure in capital markets.

Tom Saleh
Founder & CEO
FlexiSphere

Tom has been a leading entrepreneur in the computer industry for more than three decades, during which time he has founded five successful high-technology companies, and influenced the success of several more. His first company, Applied Logic, an early provider of VPN Services, was acquired by Raytheon in 1980. He next founded XNET Corp., creating the first fully automated financial futures and commodities exchange which was acquired by the International Futures and Commodities Exchange in 1983.

Dr. David Southwell
CTO
Obsidian Strategics

David Southwell is CTO and co-founder of Obsidian Strategics Inc., which has specialized in high-performance optical networking products leveraging the InfiniBand protocol since inception in January 2005. Previously, he co-founded high-performance storage startup YottaYotta Inc. (bought by EMC in 2008), serving as Director of Hardware Development for five years. Prior work includes lecturing Advanced Computer Architecture at the University of Alberta. Dr. Southwell earned scholarships for seven consecutive years from the British Telecom Research Laboratory at Martlesham Heath, during which time he earned a Masters and Doctorate in Electronic Systems Engineering at the University of York, UK.

James Theodoras
VP Technology
ADVA Optical Networking

Jim Theodoras is currently Vice President of Technology, Office of the CTO at ADVA Optical Networking working on multi-protocol optical transport products for enterprises and service providers. He is currently focused on low-latency transport of Ethernet, InfiniBand, and Fibre Channel traffic, and specifically solving challenges unique to Financial Markets. Jim has over 20 years experience in the fields of both optical transport and Ethernet switching, including technical positions at Cisco Systems and Alcatel Networks.

Jim was optical liaison editor for IEEE Communication Magazine from 2006-2010. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Ethernet Alliance, as well as chairing its Carrier Ethernet subcommittee. Jim has 14 patents in the fields of telecommunication, is a frequent contributor to industry publications, presenter at international conferences, and an active contributor to the Blogosphere.

Richard Tibbetts
CTO
StreamBase Systems

As a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at StreamBase, Richard provides technical leadership for the company and leads architecture design for StreamBase’s Event Processing Platform. Richard is also responsible for furthering new StreamBase capabilities such as StreamBase’s ‘white-box’ application frameworks, for example, the Smart Order Routing Framework.

As CTO, Richard directs the next-generation of StreamSQL, the event programming language developed by Richard and the StreamBase team, which applies the benefits of SQL for stored data to real-time transitory data.

Richard is an active blogger and writer, and frequently represents StreamBase at leading technology events such as SIGMOD, VLDB, and DEBS. Richard is also the StreamBase representative at EPTS, a Complex Event Processing industry group of which StreamBase is a founding member. In addition, Richard proactively works with multiple vendors, including Oracle, to further advance the cause of CEP and CEP standards.

Richard earned both his BS in Computer Science and Engineering, and Masters of Engineering Degrees at MIT. He completed his graduate research under the direction of Dr. Mike Stonebraker, StreamBase’s founder.

Bruce Tolley
Vice President, Solutions Marketing
Solarflare Communications

Dr. Bruce Tolley is vice president of solutions marketing at Solarflare Communications. Tolley is responsible for solutions and outbound marketing including technical, event and partner marketing activities at Solarflare. Previously, he served as Solarflare’s vice president of marketing, and earlier director of product management. Prior to joining Solarflare, Tolley was a senior product line manager at Cisco Systems where he managed the Ethernet transceiver business that included product life cycle management and the launch of Metro Ethernet, 10 Gigabit, and 1000BASE-T switch solutions. Prior to Cisco, he served in various marketing management roles at 3Com Corporation. Formerly Study Group Chair of the IEEE 802.3aq 10GBASE-LRM standards project, Tolley is a frequent contributor to the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standards projects and served as an officer of the 10 Gigabit Ethernet Alliance and the Gigabit Ethernet Alliance. He holds a bachelor’s degree from University of California Santa Cruz, Masters of Arts from Stanford University, Masters of Business Administration from Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley, and a doctorate from Stanford University.

Darren Toulson
Head of Research
LiquidMetrix

Darren is co-founder and director of Intelligent Financial Systems (IFS), a software and market data firm headquartered in London. Darren is responsible for LiquidMetrix’ research and development focussing on European fragmented equity markets and the challenges and opportunities this poses to trading firms and brokers. LiquidMetrix is the market data and pre-and post trade analysis division of Intelligent Financial System Limited. Darren has a PhD in Mathematics and Physics from Kings College London and prior to co-founding IFS worked on research projects in time series analysis and signal processing.

Nancy Andrews Turbé
Capital Markets Industry NA Lead - Risk Practice
Accenture

Nancy Turbé is an Executive in Accenture Financial Services. Nancy’s 20 years of experience in the Capital Markets industry include her service to Accenture’s financial services clients, leadership roles in Investment Banking Technology, as well as work for key technology vendors. Nancy’s portfolio of work is the source of her deep knowledge of Capital Markets functions and technology from Front Office to Back office, and across asset classes.

At Sun Microsystems, Nancy worked with Wall Street clients in Systems Engineering and Professional Services roles. Nancy also played a key role in introducing Illustra (now part of IBM), an object relational technology, to Investment Banks. At Bear Stearns, Nancy managed Program Trading Technology, and then Prime Brokerage Risk Technology. Nancy currently leads Capital Markets engagements for Accenture, focusing on Risk and Data Management Architecture and Technology.

Ryan Waite
General Manager, Technical Computing
Microsoft

Ryan Waite is the Product Unit Manager for High Performance Computing at Microsoft. Ryan leads the software engineering team responsible for Windows HPC Server. Ryan has been at Microsoft for 18 years, working in test, development, and program management roles on a variety of server product including Exchange Server, Small Business Server, Windows Server, and for a change of pace, Windows Mobile for Smartphones. Ryan’s passions involve simplifying complex tools for use by the general computing community: Small Business Server allowed small businesses to harness the same types of server technologies previously used solely by large corporations, and HPC Server is bringing cluster based supercomputing to scientists, researchers, and engineers that would have previously found setting up, programming, and using a cluster a daunting task.

Allen Whipple
Principal
Quartet FS

Allen Whipple has 20 years of extensive experience in building and implementing Capital Markets technology. As a co-founder of Summit Systems, Allen developed the initial version of the software, while managing the application development, business development and financial engineering teams and then held the position of Managing Director for North America. Allen has degrees in Computer Engineering and Economics from Rutgers University.

Tracy Wilson
Program Manager
Avetec

Tracy is Program Manager for Avetec’s Data Intensive Computing Environment (DICE) Program. He is responsible for planning, implementing and providing strategic direction for the DICE program. He also oversees the integration, growth and sustainment of the environment, and provides technical leadership for the DICE team. He is the Chair of the DICE Technical Advisory Panel, which represents HPC and data professionals from government, industry and academia. Tracy comes to the DICE team as a Systems Integrator and Network Specialist for Computer Sciences Corporation. He holds his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio and several certifications in networking and storage related areas.

Henry Young
Founder and Director
TS-Associates

Henry Young is a founding director of Trading Systems Associates plc (TS-Associates), a firm that specialises in monitoring and analysis of networks and real time financial middleware products. TS-Associates’ “TipOff” middleware analysis appliance leverages both FPGA and ASIC based hardware acceleration techniques in order to achieve real time capture, decode and analysis of 1GE and 10GE data flows. With a built in high resolution hardware based time stamping capability, TipOff is leading the charge into high resolution passive latency monitoring of direct exchange feed and transaction infrastructures.

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

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