Michael Curry is the Director of Product Marketing & Strategy for IBM Information Infrastructure. With over twelve years of experience in the software and systems integration industries, his career has focused on implementing large-scale systems within Fortune 500 companies, primarily in the Finance industry. Michael joined IBM through the Ascential acqusition. Prior to Ascential, Michael worked as VP of Products at Java application development software startup Altio, and has held management positions at PFN, Level(3) Communications and Seer Technologies. He is a prominent public speaker in Java and XML technologies, and a frequent contributor to industry articles and publications.

Gary Barnett is a partner and CTO with the IT research company Bathwick in the U.K. The Bathwick Group Ltd., founded in 1997, provides research services, marketing tools, and market consultancy to a range of IT, government, communications, and media clients as well as offering research and consulting services to end-user organisations within the domains of business and IT strategy.

For the last ten years he has worked as an analyst and consultant, providing advice to end-user organisations on technology selection and IT strategy. He has also advised technology vendors and services companies ranging from the leading IT companies to start-ups on topics such as product strategy, competitive analysis and business planning. Gary’s current research interests include – SOA, Data Management, Globalisation, Green IT, Innovation, Business-focussed IT Strategy, the Role of the CIO, Legacy Modernization and Infrastructure.

Prior to joining Bathwick, Gary was Research Director at Ovum. While at Ovum he launched a number of Ovum’s research programmes on the topics of innovation, open source, intellectual property, middleware, infrastructure and the CIO agenda. Before becoming an analyst Gary worked as a software engineer in the UK and France, developing and designing mainframe and large-scale client-server applications. Gary is frequently quoted in the worldwide trade press and is a well-known speaker at conferences, on topics as varied as 'The future of the CIO' and Outsourcing.