Tim Francis is a Senior Technical Staff Member, Tech Lead, and Development Manager working on the WebSphere Studio product at the IBM Canada Toronto Lab. He has been one of the lead architects for the Eclipse-based WebSphere Studio since it was first conceived, and has played a key role in its evolution and development since then. Tim currently leads the development of the WebSphere deployment tools, including the EJB deployment codegen and the server tools unit test environment.
Previously Tim has led development teams for a number of different products, including VisualAge for Java, and the Component Broker Object Builder. Tim holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Electrical Engineering and Master of Mathematics in Computer Science, both from the University of Waterloo (Canada).

Eric Herness is a Distinguished Engineer with IBM in Rochester, Minnesota. He is currently the lead architect for WebSphere Application Server Enterprise. Eric has also been involved in implementing the EJB 2.0 specification in the base application server, especially those parts that enable container-managed persistence.
Eric has been involved in object tech nology and servers that host objects since the late 1980's. In the early years, he drove work on object analysis and design methods, defining how to practically leverage these concepts in large-scale software projects within and outside IBM. Eric played a lead role in the implementation of Component Broker and in the associated component model definition work that planted many of seeds we now see flourishing in J2EE.
Eric holds a Masters in Business Administration from the Carlson school of Management at the University of Minnesota. He has also been an adjunct computer science faculty member at Winona State University in Rochester, MN.

Rob High Jr. is a Distinguished Engineer and the Chief Architect for the WebSphere Application Server product family. He has 26 years of programming experience and has worked with distributed, object-oriented, component-based transaction monitors for the last eight years, including SOMObject Server and Component Broker prior to WebSphere. He helped to define, and then later refine the basic concepts of container-managed component technology, which is now intrinsic to the EJB specification and implemented by WebSphere and other J2EE application servers.
Rob started his career with IBM in 1981 in Charlotte, NC. During his 12 years in Charlotte, Rob primarily worked in Finance Industry as a developer on the 4700 controller, in 4730 and 4736 ATM microcode development with responsibility for the device access methods, led the development of Application Foundation PC software for Retail Branch computing, and culminating in responsibility for the Financial Application Architecture. He moved to Austin, TX in 1993 to lead IBM's participation in the Open Software Foundation's Object Management Framework, which lead eventually to his involvement in SOMObjects, and later Component Broker and WebSphere.
Rob has a bachelor degree in Computer and Information Science from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He graduated from UCSC in 1981.

Jim Knutson is WebSphere's J2EE Architect. He has been responsible for delivering EJB and J2EE technology in IBM products such as Component Broker and WebSphere since the technology's inception and his accomplishments include the first CORBA-based EJB server.
Prior to this, Jim led IBM's BeanExtender project, a rapid development environment for JavaBeans component-based distributed applications, and has been building distributed object systems for over ten years.

Kim Rochat is a Senior Software Engineer at IBM's WebSphere development lab in Austin, TX. He was the project leader for the Web Services Technology Preview and participated in the JSR-101 and JSR-109 standards efforts. Prior to WebSphere Web Services, he implemented Java and CORBA support for WebSphere's predecessor, Component Broker. He has worked for a number of companies in his 27 years in the industry, and joined IBM in 1994.

Chris Vignola is a senior software engineer with IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY. He is presently a lead architect for the WebSphere Application Server product, specializing in WebSphere integration on the z/OS and OS/390 platform and systems management. His experience with WebSphere includes work in the areas of EJB persistence, EJB Container, and JNDI. Chris has been working on distributed, object-oriented, transaction systems since 1995, including work on Distributed SOMObjects and Component Broker, where he lead the team that first brought WebSphere EJB technology to the z/OS and OS/390 platform. His prior experience includes ten years developing the MVS operating system, where he worked on operations console, sysplex, and workload manager. Chris joined IBM in 1984 after graduating from the State University of New York with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. Chris lives and works in New York state, where he resides with his wife and three children.