• John Goodson is the executive leader of DataDirect Technologies. He is responsible for daily operations, business development, product direction and long-term corporate strategy.

John brings significant technical and business leadership to a company that's been a consistent innovator of multi-platform data access middleware. Joining DataDirect in 1992 as an engineer, he has since held positions of increasing responsibility in research and development, technical support and marketing. John is a well known and respected industry luminary and data connectivity expert. For more than 10 years, he has worked closely with Sun and Microsoft on the development and evolution of database connectivity standards including J2EE, JDBC, .NET, ODBC and ADO. John has been involved with ANSI H2, the standards committee responsible for the SQL standard and SQL Access Group, which has been responsible for defining call level interfaces for relational databases. He is now actively involved in Java standards committees, including the JDBC Expert Group and Java Rowsets. This active leadership has helped his team develop the most technically advanced database connectivity technologies. John holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Virginia Tech.

 • Ken North is a consultant, software developer, author, speaker, industry analyst, and company founder. His software technology expertise has spanned the mainframe, minicomputer, microcomputer and Internet eras. Ken teaches Expert Series seminars and is the publisher of SQLSummit.com, WebServicesSummit.com and GridSummit.com. Ken was Contributing Editor for Internet Computing, Web Techniques and Dr. Dobb's Journal. He wrote the "Database Developer" column for Web Techniques and Dr. Dobb's Sourcebook and was XML and Web Services Editor for Dr. Dobbs Journal.

Ken has consulted, spoken at conferences and taught seminars in North America, South America, Asia and Europe. He's served as conference chair for LinkedData Planet, NextWare, and the XML DevCon conferences in Europe and North America. He has programmed conference content for Penton Media, Jupitermedia, SIGS, 101 Communications, Giga Information Group and Camelot Communications.

Prior to founding Resource Group, Inc. in 1981, Mr. North held management and software engineering positions with TRW and Computer Sciences Corporation. He founded Ken North Computing (www.kncomputing.com) in 1997.

Ken wrote Database Magic with Ken North (Prentice Hall) and Windows Multi-DBMS Programming (John Wiley & Sons). He developed APIBench, the SQL API benchmarking suite and contributed to Dr. Dobb's Database Development: Tools and Techniques (R&D Books). He was a technical reviewer of JDBC Database Access with Java (Addison-Wesley) and JDBC API Tutorial and Reference: Second Edition (Addison-Wesley). Ken's articles have appeared in dozens of publications including Dr. Dobb's Journal, Software Times, Database Trends and Applications, Intelligent Enterprise, SQL Server, DB2, Business Integration Journal, XML, XML-Journal, Web Techniques, The Data Administration Newsletter, SearchDatabase, Java Pro, Software Development, DBMS, Byte, PC Week, Windows NT, Network Computing, Windows NT Systems, Windows Tech Journal.