Speaker List

Session 1

Welcome address and opening remarks

Patrick has degrees in Arts and in Law. He is a Barrister, a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management, a Director of the Society for Knowledge Economics, a Senior Member of the Australian Computer Society, a Member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and of the International Association for Contract and Commercial Management, and an Associate Member of the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (Australia).

Patrick has presented and published papers on a variety of topics in recent years, including strategic management, value creation, performance indicators, and the information economy and knowledge management. Patrick has experience as a senior manager in program management, policy development, service delivery and corporate management - in health care, employment and training, income support and compensation, and information management.

In the Australian Government Information Management Office, Patrick’s role is to oversee the management and strategic development of whole of government ICT infrastructure, to provide quality online services to citizens and business and to promote value for money solutions to government.

Sam Higgins is Research Director for Longhaus, an Australian research publisher and advisory company specialising in technology. With over 15-years of practical experience in the ICT industry his research helps to define both the adoption and impact of emerging technologies for management professionals across Oceania. Sam’s specific areas of focus at Longhaus are enterprise architecture (including service-orientation and information management), the open source market, enterprise applications and development, large scale distributed systems, and ICT management practices within state and federal governments. Sam’s knowledge of service-oriented architecture is widely recognized, and he was a contributing author on the Paul Allen book Service-orientation: Winning Strategies and Best Practices, released in April 2006 by Cambridge University Press.

Prior to Longhaus, Sam was a senior analyst with Forrester Research’s Asia Pacific team, providing both a global and local perspective for Australia and New Zealand technology markets.

Topic: Open Source: From a Movement to a Market

Synopsis: Open source is now a moniker worn proudly by software and non-software businesses alike. What was a movement has transformed into a commercial market providing every software application needed to run a modern enterprise. Explore with Sam the changing face of open source, trends in local adoption of open source and gain insights into the structure and offerings of today’s open source market.

Grant Allen has worked in the IT field for nearly 20 years, most recently as an enterprise architect and Chief Technology Officer for an Australian ISV, before taking on his current role at Google.

Grant's work has covered private enterprise, academia and the government sector in the Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America, consulting on large-scale systems design, development, and performance; datawarehousing; business intelligence; content management and collaboration. He has been a frequent speaker at industry and academic conferences, on topics ranging from data mining to compliance, and technologies such as relational databases, emerging open source trends, the convergence of content technologies, and other technologies in collaboration, integration, and contemporary enterprise IT change.

Grant was the convener for the Open Computing in Government Conference, 2005, held in conjunction with Linux.conf.au, and provided a forum for industry and government to address emerging issues for the open source industry in Australia.

Grant now works for Google as a data architect and leader of several global teams, experiencing first hand how Google leverages open source technologies and approaches problems of Google-scale, and beyond.

Topic: Leveraging Open Source Technologies and Methodologies in Google

Synopsis: Google's approach to open source goes beyond the traditional code contribution of engineers, and running Linux as an operating system. From passionate developers, to the global Summer of Code, Google works to contribute to the culture of open source software and communities.

Frank is Senior Product Manager for Asia Pacific and covers both Infrastructure (Enterprise Linux) and Middleware (JBoss) technologies at Red Hat. He is responsible for product marketing matters and is the live-link into Red Hat's global product managers community. Before joining Red Hat he worked at Novell Asia Pacific in the role of Technical Alliance Manager, responsible for technical relationships with IBM, HP and Dell.

Prior to relocating to Asia Frank co-owned & managed a Java services company in the Netherlands specializing in Open Source and JBoss Middleware technology.

Prior to this Frank worked as a Product Manager for SilverStream Software EMEA, a J2EE middleware software vendor that was acquired by Novell Inc. mid 2002.

Frank has a business degree in computer science & economics and has been involved in many product and technology shaping activities throughout his career predominantly in the field of open standards and open source.

Topic: Innovation through Collaboration

Synopsis: Discover how Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, relies on the principles of open source and the passion of the open community to deliver innovation and customer value. Red Hat is changing IT industry dynamics and revolutionising the way the industry operates and evolves, bringing enterprise-ready software solutions to market. This allows organisations to dramatically increase productivity and drive costs down.

Session 2

Mike Cannon Brookes is co-founder and CEO of Atlassian Software Systems, an innovative, award-winning enterprise software company. Atlassian produces tools that help technical and business teams collaborate, plan projects and build software. Based in Australia, Atlassian currently has over 9,000 enterprise customers around the globe and has been named one of the "Fastest Growing Companies" by both Deloitte and BRW Magazine.

Mike has received international recognition for his work including the Australian IT Professional of the Year in 2004 and being named Australian Entrepreneur Of The Year in 2006. Outside Atlassian, he is an active investor and advisor to a few technology-focused ventures, and participates in a number of open source projects.

His blog is entitled rebelutionary - http://blogs.atlassian.com/rebelutionary

Topic: Building a Business on Open Source – Atlassian

Synopsis: Open Source software is both an opportunity and a threat to technology businesses. In this session, learn how Atlassian has built a global software business from Australia by simultaneously contributing and competing with the Open Source movement.

Roy Rubin is the dynamic president and the strategist at the heart of Varien. A commitment to measurable results and a knack for bringing a ‘human touch’ to technology make this accomplished veteran a sought-after problem solver in a highly competitive industry.

Roy has years of management and technology experience at the highest level. He has acquired vast knowledge in web technologies and Internet strategies, and has special expertise in e-commerce implementation. Something of a renaissance man, Roy's background also includes a course of study in Business Economics in UCLA, three years service as a commander in the military, and diverse experiences at such cutting-edge companies as Rotor, the ahead-of-its-time interactive TV entity, Microsoft, and the software security powerhouse, Aladdin Knowledge Systems.

Topic: Filling in the Open Source Shopping Cart Vacuum

Synopsis: After years of e-Commerce system experience and design, 2007 has seen Magento e-Commerce, a state-of-the-art, Open Source e-Commerce platform released by Varien. Since initial release it has been downloaded over 200,000 times, and still counting!

Roy will speak on the strategy that positioned Varien as one of the most promising Internet companies in the world (nominated by “Under the Radar” Conference).

Shane Owenby, Senior Director - Linux and Open Source for Oracle Asia Pacific, is responsible for developing & executing Oracle’s open source strategy across Asia Pacific. Shane also manages a team of Linux business manager & technical architects responsible for expanding the overall Enterprise Linux market and promoting increased usage of Open Source technologies such as PHP, Apache, and Eclipse.

Prior to this appointment, Mr. Owenby was Regional Manager, South East Asia (ASEAN) for Red Hat Asia Pacific where he successfully grew the business more than 100% year-on-year. Before joining the Red Hat Asia Pacific management team, he was the Asia Pacific sales engineering manager based in Sydney, Australia.

Prior to Red Hat, Shane held the role of International Technical Operations Manager for CollabNet, an open source collaboration software company, and Linux Technical advisor for IBM as a founding member of the IBM Linux Technology Centre.

Topic: Open Source in the Enterprise: Oracle's Perspective

Synopsis: This session will explore Oracle's entry into & history with the Open Source community, Oracle's Open Source strategy, the motivation for Oracle's Open Source contributions, and the ground rules followed when collaborating with the Open Source community. The final section of the talk will showcase a case study on the use of Oracle Unbreakable Linux and Oracle VM in a Global 500 company.

Donald Christie is a founder and director of Catalyst IT Limited, a New Zealand based open source development company. He is President of the NZ Open Source Society.

Donald has been involvedin IT for 20 years as a developer, architect and company owner. He and Catalyst are strong advocates for Free and Open Source Software within the NZ business and government arenas.

Topic: An International Perspective - Making Open Source the Technology of Choice in New Zealand

Synopsis: Catalyst develops and supports open source solutions in the government, business and education sectors.

Key points will be: delivering more for less, making Open Source the technology of choice and ensuring a sustainable future for software solutions.

It will be of interest to consumers who want assurance that open source can “deliver”, and to organisations that have experiences share.

Session 3

Matt Palmer has spent most of his career in IT working on servers and software for Internet-related applications on Linux. Since 2004, he has been working for local services provider Solutions First designing, implementing, and maintaining servers and clusters of most shapes and sizes, including geographically dispersed 20 machine clusters to serve large-scale web applications. His philosophy of systems administration is one of rabid automation -- teaching the computer to maintain itself, so that humans don't have to.

Beyond the purely commercial, Matt is a keen contributor to the Free Software community, giving talks on various topics to user groups and conferences, as well as developing and maintaining software and acting as a maintainer for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.

Topic: Deploying and Managing Servers with Free Software

Synopsis: Creating and managing a computing environment is more than just a matter of installing some machines and configuring things. In this talk, experienced systems administrator Matt Palmer will describe his experiences dealing with the design, installation, and on-going maintenance of computing environments, and how Free Software can be used to monitor and manage the entire system with minimal human intervention. He will provide a technical perspective to the management issues surrounding the effective management of IT systems.