Ken Bisconti (IBM Corporation) As Vice President of Messaging and Collaboration Products for IBM Software, Ken Bisconti has business responsibility for IBM's Lotus Notes and Domino, Lotus Quickr, Workplace Forms and Workplace Collaborative Learning product families.  He oversees the business strategy, tactical execution, market management and product management of these market leading software products. Since joining Lotus in January 1994, Ken has served in a variety of positions, including vice president of Lotus product management, vice president of Lotus channels and alliances, and vice president of Lotus product marketing. Prior to that he served as senior director of communications product marketing. Ken has also held roles in competitive strategy and channel sales. Prior to Lotus, Ken was an IT architect with the IBM Consulting Group where he designed groupware implementation plans and developed collaborative applications for large enterprises. Ken holds a bachelor's degree in quantitative economics and decision sciences from the University of California at San Diego.

Ed Brill (IBM Corporation) Ed Brill is Business Unit Executive, Worldwide Lotus Notes/Domino Sales, IBM Software Group.  In this position, Brill and his team are responsible for the continued worldwide success of Lotus Notes and Domino, market-leading collaborative software products.  Brill works with the IBM sales organization, IBM business partners, and customers to provide insight into the Lotus strategy, product direction, and market successes.  Brill leverages this in-market experience to provide counsel and direction to the Notes/Domino product and marketing organizations, ensuring constant improvement and responsiveness. During Brill's time in this role, the Lotus Notes/Domino business posted revenue growth for twelve consecutive quarters, and gained hundreds of new customers. In his nearly fourteen-year career at IBM Lotus, Ed Brill has held a variety of sales, marketing, and product-related leadership roles.  Prior to his current position, Ed managed Lotus competitive strategy, guiding Lotus software offerings to market-leading positions and anticipating future market trends.  Ed was also the lead offerings manager for Lotus enterprise messaging solutions and managed product marketing for Lotus Notes and Lotus iNotes. In addition, Ed led the team responsible for market introduction of the award-winning Lotus iNotes Web Access.  Ed has also held key leadership roles in Lotus strategic marketing and product management organizations, contributing to the development and release of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino R5. Ed's technical background also includes four years as a Chicago-based Lotus systems engineer, where he contributed to building some of the largest and most successful Lotus Notes and Domino customers worldwide. A frequent speaker at IBM and industry events worldwide, Ed is well known for direct contributions to the many Lotus software-focused virtual communities, including the IBM developerWorks:Lotus and Lotus partner communities. Committed to understanding the global marketplace, Ed has visited Lotus software customers in over 30 countries.  Ed also authors a weblog on collaboration at www.edbrill.com , which is ranked in the top 20,000 weblogs by Technorati.

Kevin Cavanaugh (IBM Corporation) Kevin Cavanaugh is Lotus's Vice President for Messaging and Collaboration. He is responsible for the Notes and Domino components of IBM's collaboration portfolio. For the past 6 years as Vice President of Development Cavanaugh has had engineering responsibility for the company's Notes and Domino products and for the client technologies that are used by those products. He has also managed the company's Advanced Collaboration product development teams and the International Product Development organization with development centers in Dublin, Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, Taipei and Singapore &Previously, Cavanaugh served as the director of Xyvision, Inc.'s marketing division and developed and executed a strategy which moved the company from a turnkey business into an open software company. Prior to his work at Xyvision, Cavanaugh held the position of Division Manager at Applicon Japan where he defined pricing strategies and set up the hardware and software organization. Cavanaugh's experience in the Far East also includes management positions as a consulting engineer and manager for Distributor Operations where he developed and supported new distributors in Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. He is currently on the board of the Boston CyberArts Festival and was previously on the board of the Unicode Consortium. Cavanaugh graduated from Yale University with a bachelor's degree in arts and received a master's degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA.

Jason Dumont (IBM Corporation) Jason Dumont is Senior Product Manager responsible for Domino, Domino Web Access (DWA), the Common PIM Portlet & The Note/Domino & Workplace Integration Strategy for the Lotus Software brand within the IBM Software Group. In his previous role he was the Director of Client Strategy & the iNotes (DWA) Client for Lotus Development. Previous roles included serving as the Senior Manager of the ISV Development Team, where he was responsible for the ISV strategy and the direction of Notes and Domino as a platform for third-party developers, as well as the Senior Market Development Offering Manager. Jason has been with Lotus/IBM since 1991, He has a great deal of experience with the Notes and Domino application development environment and has been responsible for the creation of the R4 and R5 versions of the Notes and Domino Application Development Best Practices Guide and Inside Notes, documentation about Notes/Domino architecture. A frequent speaker at business and technical conferences around the world, Jason holds BS degrees in English and Philosophy from the University of Connecticut. He also spent the better portion of the late 80s and early 90s  playing drums in a number of professional touring rock bands.

Dr. Ambuj Goyal (IBM Corporation) Dr. Ambuj Goyal was named General Manager, Lotus Software, in January 2003. He served in his previous position as General Manager, Solutions and Strategy, IBM Software Group, from February, 2001, to January, 2003. In that position, he was responsible for setting business strategy for IBM's Software Group, the WebSphere Business Integration product set, and delivering industry-specific middleware solutions. Prior to serving as General Manager of Solutions and Strategy, Dr. Goyal served as Chief Technology Officer, Application & Integration Middleware Division, which includes the WebSphere and MQ product families. Dr. Goyal joined IBM Corporation in 1982 as a research staff member at the T.J. Watson Research Center. He was named Vice President, Services and Software, and Director, Computer Sciences in 1996. In this dual role, he was responsible for setting IBM's long-term research direction in computer sciences, as well as ensuring that the best emerging technologies contribute to IBM's services offerings and software products. He had approximately 1500 researchers reporting to him in seven labs worldwide. Dr. Goyal's main research interests are in high performance systems, databases and distributed systems. His early work in scalable databases led to IBM's Universal Database (DB2) family. He was also responsible for setting the early direction in web application servers which led to the WebSphere product family. He also led the research efforts to create the RS/6000 SP supercomputer and the Deep Blue World Chess Champion computer.

Carl Kraenzel (IBM Corporation) Carl Kraenzel is an IBM Senior Technical Staff Member and IBM Master Inventor currently working as lead ISV technical strategist on the IBM Workplace Client Technologies. Carl created the Lotus "NextGen" technology vision of 2001, then led the subsequent technical revolution of transforming Lotus' development efforts into a componentized, Web services-enabled product portfolio. During his time at IBM, he has been instrumental in the launch of several cutting-edge products, programs and technologies -- such as Lotus QuickPlace, Domino Off-Line Services, Lotus iNotes for Microsoft Outlook, Lotus iNotes Web Access and Lotus Knowledge Discovery System. Carl joined the company in 1994 when his second New Hampshire-based company, Edge Research, was acquired by Lotus. That acquisition laid the foundation for componentization of Lotus Domino, as well as for extending access to ERP and relational database systems. He holds a Bachelor of Science in physics from MIT, specializing in superconductive circuit technology. Since his time at MIT, Carl has engineered with a broad array of platforms, languages, methodologies, protocols, requirements/design techniques and large-scale systems modeling. He has also been equally active in business development, planning and management and brings the unique blend of these disciplines to his work at IBM.

Sue McKinney (IBM Corporation) Sue McKinney is a seasoned veteran of IBM and a graduate from Ohio State University with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. Ms. McKinney’s early IBM experiences starting in PC development of text and language sensitive editors, to development management positions creating 4GL compilers, software &distribution products and OS/2 server development. In the late Nineties, Ms. McKinney was Executive Assistant to Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger helping drive corporate e-business initiatives across IBM and externally. As executive, Sue has held positions in marketing and lead activities to define marketing plans to address new market opportunities in emerging server hardware businesses. In June of 2002, Ms. McKinney joined Lotus as a Director for Advanced Collaboration development bringing IBM’s Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing products to market. More recently, Ms. McKinney lead the definition and delivery of Lotus Workplace, the next generation of collaborative capabilities for IBM.

Prof. Dr. Ludwig Nastansky (Universität Paderborn) Prof. Dr. Ludwig Nastansky ist Lehrstuhlinhaber für Wirtschaftsinformatik und Direktor des Groupware Competence Centers (GCC) an der Universität Paderborn. Derzeitige Arbeitsgebiete seiner Lehr-, Forschungs-, Entwicklungs-, Projekt- und Beratungstätigkeit im Bereich des computergestützten betrieblichen Informations- und Wissensmanagements liegen bei e-Business Anwendungen, mit Schwerpunkten bei kollaborativen Systemen. Der Autor von zahlreichen wissenschaftlichen Publikationen und Entwicklungsprojekten von Software-Frameworks ist Gründungsmitglied der DNUG. Prof. Nastansky hat die erste Lotus Notes-orientierte Unternehmung in Europa, die Pavosoft Informationssysteme GmbH, 1990 in Paderborn gegründet. 1994 erfolgte die Gründung der Pavone AG, in der er Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrates ist. Er ist ständiger Gastprofessor am Chinesisch-Deutschen Hochschulkolleg der Tongji-Universität in Shanghai.

Prof. Dr. Peter Nieschmidt (Fachhochschule München) Prof. Dr. Peter Nieschmidt folgte 1976 dem Ruf als Professor für Politologie an die Fachhochschule München. Seit dieser Zeit hält er Vorträge und Management-Seminare in verschiedensten Unternehmen. Vorangegangen waren eine Referententätigkeit für personalpolitische Grundsatzfragen in der Siemens AG und leitende Positionen am sozialwissenschaftlichen Institut der Bundeswehr sowie an der Hochschule der Bundeswehr in München.

Mike Rhodin (IBM Software Group) Mike Rhodin was named General Manager, Workplace, Portal and Collaboration (WPLC) Software, in August 2005. He leads a team responsible for developing IBM's collaborative technology and solutions, which integrate people, data and business process to create the "human side" of IBM's On Demand Strategy. Previously he served as Vice President of Development and Technical Support for WPLC, working to transform the front-end computing. Mike has a passion for simplifying the way people work, improving organizational performance, and helping IBM customers maximize their return on IT investment. Before joining Lotus in 2003, Mike led IBM's development efforts for Pervasive Computing from November 1999. This included development of the WebSphere Everyplace family of offerings, WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Voice offerings in addition to new embedded software componentry. Mike also served as Director, IBM Server Solutions within Software Group. He joined IBM in 1984 upon his graduation from the University of Michigan. He held a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. He resides with his family in Carlisle, Massachusetts.

Ron Sebastian (IBM Corporation) Ron Sebastian been with IBM for 29 years and is currently the Technical Assistant to Mike Rhodin, General Manager, Lotus Software Division. In this position, Ron performs technical product and technology evaluations, represents the division in critical customer situations, and delivers external and internal technology presentations. Over the years, Ron has worked with customers to define and implement their e-business architecture and applications around the world. Ron has extensive experience in implementing client / server solutions in both North America and Asia. In Singapore, as the IBM Software Sales Team Leader for the Southern Asia Pacific Region, he was responsible for advising IBM customers in the area of client / server computing and assisting in the development of technical strategies to address their business requirements. He was involved in several IBM Consulting projects throughout the Asia Pacific region. Prior to this, Ron was a Senior Technical Instructor for IBM Education Services where he developed and delivered course material in a broad area of IBM Software products including OS/2, LAN Server, Application Development and AIX. Ron started his career with IBM as a Communications Specialist in the Data Processing (DP) Division supporting the banking industry. Ron is a graduate of Mohawk College of Applied Arts and Technology with an honors diploma in Control Systems Technology with a specialty in micro electronics.  He currently resides in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada.