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ADVISORS

Fergus Porter | CEO, Renewtek
During a career that spans nearly 25 years in technology, Fergus has earned an enviable professional reputation as a consultant, manager and technology executive. His areas of particular expertise include IT strategy, architecture and project delivery. He has also applied his management knowledge internationally, having lived and worked in Europe, the US, Asia and Australia. Prior to joining Renewtek, Fergus held a variety of senior management positions with Superpartners, AXA and DST International. He was a Principal Consultant with Computer Science Corporation (CSC) in Singapore, Japan and Australia. He holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin.


Philip Abernathy | Agile Professional Development Lead, Suncorp (Australia)


In his current role, as Agile Professional Development Lead in Suncorp, Philip is busy setting up an 'Agile Academy', together with major business and educational organisations, thus leading the spread of Agile across the industry as a whole. He now coaches, trains and consults at board room and senior management level to help companies transform to an Agile way of working.

In his own words, "having grown grey on the Waterfall method" in large corporate organisations in the Financial Services, Energy and Telecom sectors, Philip understands the structure and discipline needed by large organisations. Marrying this need with Agile's dynamism is the alchemy he brings to the table. Philip has guided numerous organisations in the use of Agile and Lean based software development methodologies to help them deliver business value faster.

Philip has 27 years of hands-on, information technology experience and over 18 years of consulting and management experience with blue chip companies in the IT international arena. He has been practising and preaching Agile for the last 10 years. He was CIO of Shell Markets Middle East and later founded his own IT services delivery company. Philip has extensive experience in the difficult areas of Agile and Offshoring, Agile and Legacy and Agile Governance and Leadership.


Dave Thomas | Founder and Chairman, Bedarra


Dave Thomas has a wide spectrum of experience in the software industry as an engineer, professor, consultant, architect, executive and investor. Dave is founder and CEO of Bedarra Corporation; which provides virtual CTO and CEO, business mentoring and seed investment to emerging companies. Recently formed Bedarra Research Labs undertakes speculative research on applications of emerging software technologies.

He has many years of experience in structured documents including the design of laser printer controllers, early commercial applications of Tex. He has advised on the IBM B2B strategy, and is on the MS Customer Advisory Council and with OLL contributed to the SCORM elearning standard, and authoring tools. He is Chairman of Xia Systems, Online-Learning.com (OLL), and a director of Stilo/Omnimark, Bitflash, Amikanow and Synop and several other software companies.

Dave is best known as the founder and past CEO and president of Object Technology International Inc. (formerly OTI, now IBM OTI Labs) and led the commercial introduction of object and component technology. The company is often cited as the ideal model of a software technology company.

He was also the principal visionary and architect for IBM VisualAge Smalltalk and Java tools and virtual machines including the initial work on popular multi-language Eclipse.org IDE. OTI pioneered the use of virtual machines in embedded systems with Tektronix shipping the first commercial products in 1988. He was instrumental in the establishment of IBM's Pervasive computing efforts and in particular the Java tooling.

Dave is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University, and the University Of Queensland and is widely published in the software engineering literature. He is a popular humorous albeit opinionated keynote speaker. Dave remains active in various roles within the technical community including ECOOP, AOSD, Evolve, and Agile Development Conference, Agile/XP Universe and OOPSLA Onward. He is a founding director of the Agile Alliance and most recently a founder of Open Augment Consortium. Dave writes expert columns in Otland Online in Germany, and the Journal Of Object Technology in Switzerland where he also serves on the editorial board.

www.bedarra.com


Katrina Rowett | Executive Manager, Business Technology, Suncorp


Katy has over 18 years' experience in Organisational Health, Human Strategy and Executive Coaching. She has collabotatively contributed value as a business partner in the information technology profession within finance, telecommunications and mining industries internationally and in Australia. Currently Executive Manager of the Business Technology Change Program at Suncorp, she is accountable for determining the strategy to introduce a new way of working in Business Technology, namely Agile at an Enterprise Level.

www.suncorp.com.au


Keith Dodds | Director of Sales and Marketing, ThoughtWorks Australia


Keith has over 25 years experience in consulting, story-telling and general rabble-rousing. He has worked across the US, the UK and for over 15 years in Australia. Keith doesn't sell much any more, preferring informed conversations with clients and prospective customers about the likely outcomes of their behaviour and decisions, both rational and unintended, emerging industry trends and new management imperatives. To win a special door prize at Agile Australia, ask him about "a sense of urgency" or "the mask of command".


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