Nicholas Glowacki

Executive IT Specialist, IBM

Evangelist for IBM^®s integration Portfolio

Nick is a technical evangelist for IBM’s integration portfolio working as a technical specialist exploring current trends and building leading edge solutions. He has spent the last 5 years working in the field and guiding a series of teams through their microservices journey. Before that he spent 5+ years in various other roles such as a developer, an architect and a IBM DataPower specialist. Over the course of his career he’s been a user of node, xsl, JSON, Docker, Solr, IBM API Connect, Kubernetes, Java, SOAP, XML, WAS, Docker, Filenet, MQ, C++, CastIron, IBM App Connect, IBM Integration Bus.

John Carr

Senior Integration Architect, TxMQ

John Carr has over 30 years of experience with architecture consulting, strategic endeavors, development and implementation services to support integration efforts at Fortune 500 companies. He has an extensive background with high volume message processing, transformation and enrichment with IBM MQ, App Connect Enterprise (ACE) and z/OS Connect. John earned his undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in information science from the University of Maryland, College Park, and executive education in product management through the University of California, Berkeley.

Sy Lee

Senior Systems Engineer, Thrivent

Sy is a Senior Systems Engineer supporting multiple middleware platforms in the financial services industry. In addition to expertise in IBM MQ, he supported multiple platforms including Red Hat OpenShift, WebSphere and WebSphere Portal, VMWare Pivotal tcServer, RabbitMQ, Broadcom API Gateway, and Kong.  He also has experience writing scripts in PERL and shell as well as knowledge of IT change/service management processes. Sy has led recent projects to upgrade IBM MQ from version 8 to 9.3 to take advantage of some of the modern features like support for .NET, enhanced SSL, HTTP BasicAuth support, etc. and most recently patch MQ to the latest Fixpack.

Peter D’Agosta

Co-Founder and Chief Product Manager, Avada Software

Peter D’Agosta has been in IT for 35 years. Cofounder/COO and Product Manager at Avada Software, his background includes application and systems programming, enterprise architecture, consulting, management, analysis, strategic 24/7 systems including airline, banking, and internet, as well as technology innovation. Peter oversaw infrastructures for airlines, branch banking, and online service companies before moving into the software vendor arena where he worked with new innovations in email, messaging, portal and web service technology. Interspersed with engagements for some of the world’s largest companies, Peter’s varied background provides him a unique perspective in applied technology.

Greg Hanson, Infrastructure Associate Principal, The Options Clearing Corporation

A software architecture specialist with expertise in Middleware and database interfaces, Greg has served as CTO at numerous organizations and overseen IBM MQ implementations, expansion projects, and re-architectures with clustering and HA.