Conference Committee

Dr. William L. Bain founded ScaleOut Software in 2003 to develop in-memory data grid and in-memory computing products. As CEO, he has led the creation of numerous innovations for integrating data-parallel computing with in-memory data storage. Bill holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Rice University. Over a 38-year career focused on parallel computing, he has contributed to advancements at Bell Labs Research, Intel, and Microsoft, and holds several patents in computer architecture and distributed computing. Bill founded and ran three start-up companies prior to ScaleOut Software. The most recent, Valence Research, which developed and distributed Web load-balancing software, was acquired by Microsoft Corporation and is a key feature within the Windows Server operating system. As an investor and member of the screening committee for the Seattle-based Alliance of Angels, Bill is actively involved in entrepreneurship and the angel community.

Rob has worked in IT for 16 years and in Financial Services for the last 8 years, on applications ranging from container shipping through medical insurance to stock trading and highly scalable, high performance trade reporting systems. He acts as the In-Memory Data Grid SME for Barclays and co-chairs the Caching and NoSQL Communities of Practice. Rob helps organize and run the Docklands branch of the London Java Community, a 5000+ strong collective of Java enthusiasts from all sectors of development.

David is an IT enthusiast with more than 15 years of experience developing distributed applications mainly in Java. His broad international experience covers Telecom, retail and mainly financial institutions. The last 10 years, he has been engineering solutions for the highly demanding banking environment. David has been pioneering the work on Ignite/Gridgain since its introduction in ING Belgium more than 2 years ago and acts as one of the main point of contact in ING Belgium for Gridgain related matters.

Director of CG Consultancy, Chris Goodall formerly held senior technology positions for companies such as IBM, UBS Investment Bank and Citigroup and has over 17 years’ technology experience from development through to management. CG Consultancy specialises in tech turnaround for fast growth businesses, due diligence reviews for investors as well providing and managing consultant teams for project implementation. He is also Co-Founder of software development firm www.fiveonetwo.com CG Consultancy has developed an industry leading solution, using in-memory technology for JacTravel – an established £350m t/o provider of hotel accommodations. CG Consultancy have supplied a full Agile software development team in addition to Chris being interim CIO for the large scale integration project following a company acquisition by JacTravel in 2015.

Nikita Ivanov is founder of Apache Ignite project and CTO of GridGain Systems, started in 2007. Nikita has led GridGain to develop advanced and distributed in-memory data processing technologies – the top Java in-memory data fabric starting every 10 seconds around the world today. Nikita has over 20 years of experience in software application development, building HPC and middleware platforms, contributing to the efforts of other startups and notable companies including Adaptec, Visa and BEA Systems. He is an active member of Java middleware community, contributor to the Java specification. He’s also a frequent international speaker with over two dozen of talks on various developer conferences globally.

Sam Lawrence has 16 years of experience within the remote gaming industry and is the CTO and co-founder of FSB Technology (UK) Ltd. FSB provide turnkey solutions for over a dozen sports betting operators across Europe, Africa and Asia, including managing betting markets across 23 sports and 75,000+ live events annually. Prior to founding FSB, Sam was the first employee and CTO at AIM-listed casino games supplier GAN Plc., where he was responsible for architecture and development of their regulated games content and gaming platform. Sam holds a degree in Mathematics and Music from the University of Leeds.

Tim Wood has been working with in-memory technologies at ING Bank since 2012, first as a Quantitative Analyst and Developer within Market Risk Trading and later Financial Markets. Now part of ING's IT organisation he heads the High Performance Computing and Model Integration team and plays a key role in shaping ING's IT strategy in the area of pricing and risk for the Financial Markets and Risk domains.