Customer Driven, Vendor Supported Interoperability

Andrew Aitken is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Olliance Group, the leading open source management consultancy. He is a recognized expert on strategies for the commercialization of open source and has been a leader in the open source community for nearly 10 years. Andrew has more than 20 years senior management experience in building and leading national professional services firms, including Renaissance Worldwide and eWork.

In 2001 Mr. Aitken founded Olliance Group with other industry veterans to provide management and business strategy consulting to companies leveraging open source. In January 2005, Mr. Aitken spearheaded the software industry’s first “think tank” on the future of commercial open source, now a bi-annual event held in Napa, CA and Paris, France, and regularly attended by the industry’s leading CEO’s and visionaries. Mr. Aitken has participated as an expert witness on the issues of open source and e-voting to the California Senate. Andrew has chaired and spoken internationally at multiple industry and government conferences, is a member of the Open Source Software Institute’s and SDForum’s Board of Directors, Chair of SDForum’s annual Open Source Conference, is on the Board of Advisors of SugarCRM, Actuate, Funambol and Krugle and has personally worked with companies such as: IBM, Sun, Intel, Nokia, HP, and others, assisting them with developing their open source strategies.

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Fabio Da Cunha is a Senior Manager with Microsoft’s Interoperability Alliances team responsible for sales and technical evangelism for Microsoft’s partnership with Novell. Fabio is a native of Brazil and joined Microsoft two years ago after an extensive career in technical consulting across a breadth of Microsoft and Linux-based technologies for the enterprise.

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Frank Rego is a Senior Product Manager in Novell’s Open Platform Solutions business unit and is responsible for managing the technical collaboration with Microsoft. Frank joined Novell from Immunix, a startup company that developed the AppArmor security technology for Linux which is now an integrated piece of the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform. Frank has an engineering degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and an MBA from Portland State University.

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Nick Halsey is the chief marketing officer and executive vice president of corporate development, and manages the company’s overall go-to-market strategy. Nick has over 25 years of experience in the high technology sector, and has played a leading role in the emergence of the commercial open source market.

Prior to SugarCRM, Halsey served as the vice president of marketing and product management at Jaspersoft Corporation, the leading open source business intelligence company. He was a co-founder of Biz360, the leading provider of social media monitoring and market intelligence solutions that was recently acquired by Attensity Group, and also served as the founding vice president of sales and marketing for Brio Software, where over six years he lead the company to $150 million in sales and to a successful IPO. Nick also served as the CMO and executive vice president of corporate development at Alphablox, guiding it to an acquisition by IBM.

Nick holds a B.A. degree in Political Science with a minor in Computer Science from Stanford University, is an avid cyclist, and the father of three energetic young boys.

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Jay covers open source software for The 451 Group, focusing on Linux operating systems and distributors, virtualization, databases and other free and open source software created by communities and used by enterprise organizations. His coverage includes the software itself, the communities and the emerging business and licensing models.

Prior to joining The 451 Group, Jay wrote for LinuxInsider and TechNewsWorld, where he covered open source and a range of other IT topics from 2003 to 2006. He also covered open source software communities, development and products as a contributing editor with NewsForge from 2004 to 2006.

Covering Linux and open source since 2000 with NewsFactor Network, Jay has been a regular contributor to other publications, including those of CMP Media, Web Host Industry Review and Small Times, a nanotechnology website and magazine.

Prior to his focus on the technology industry, Jay worked as a newspaper reporter in Southern California, covering business, government and crime for the Glendale News-Press, a Los Angeles-area daily. His work has also been published by the Associated Press and Time Magazine.

Jay holds a BA in Journalism from San Diego State University.

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