• Rob Steward Vice President of Research and Development

As vice president of research and development for DataDirect Technologies, Rob is responsible for the development, strategy and oversight of the company's data connectivity products including the Shadow mainframe integration suite client software and the industry-leading Connect family of database drivers and data providers: Connect for ODBC, Connect for JDBC and Connect for ADO.NET. Additional product development responsibilities include DataDirect Sequelink, and DataDirect XQuery, as well as the management of DataDirect's Custom Engineering Development group.

Rob has spent more than 14 years developing database access middleware, including .NET data providers, ODBC drivers, JDBC drivers, and OLE DB providers. He has held a number of management and technical positions at DataDirect Technologies and serves on various standard committees. Earlier in his career, he worked as lead software engineer at Marconi Commerce Systems Inc.

Rob holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from North Carolina State University, Raleigh.

• 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.