Amit P. Acharya is a Senior Product Manager for IBM PureApplication System. His role includes influencing the broader portfolio strategy and the product roadmap. He analyzes the market and gathers product requirements that capture client feedback and competitive insights. Before this role, Amit led the strategic quality planning and execution of the IBM Workload Deployer product for private clouds. He has a strong background in enterprise application development and middleware solutions. Amit wrote IBM Redbooks publications about service-oriented architecture (SOA). He contributed to the IBM patent portfolio. He holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Duke University and a Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University.

Tom Bal is a Senior Certified IT Specialist in the IBM Systems Middleware brand. Tom joined IBM through the Lotus® acquisition in early 2000. For several years, he was part of the services team, assisting clients and IBM Business Partners with Lotus products, including IBM Lotus Notes® and Lotus Workplace. He then became the Technical Pre-Sales Representative for IBM WebSphere® Portal. In January 2012, after two years as a Client IT Architect for the telecommunications industry, Tom rejoined the former IBM Software Group to cover PureApplication System for the region of Europe that includes Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. He is a co-author of IBM PureApplication System Best Practices, SG24-8145. Tom regularly provides posts for IBM developerWorks® and the Expert Integrated Systems blogs. Tom is a Technical Pre-Sales Engineer for IBM PureApplication products. Tom holds a Master of Arts degree in Translation.

Chris Clark works at IBM as a PureApplication Client Technical Professional. He delights in the contribution of IBM offerings to the improvement of a client’s business. His work with PureApplication started in the summer of 2011. Before 2011, he worked with WebSphere offerings, including IBM WebSphere CloudBurst® Appliance. Before IBM, Chris was an Application Programmer who worked directly with operations and users at a manufacturing company. He holds a Masters of Environmental Arts and Sciences degree from the University of Wisconsin Green Bay and a Masters of Business Administration degree from the University of Texas Houston.

Addison Goering is a Certified IT Specialist with the WebSphere Education team. His specialty is the design, development, and delivery of courses in the WebSphere product family. He developed and delivered courses that range from webinars to week-long workshops about products, such as WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), IBM Workload Deployer, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Business Services Fabric, and WebSphere Business Process Management (BPM). He is the Lead Developer on the WebSphere Education team that develops education about IBM PureApplication System. Addison holds a B.S. in Education from Keene State College in New Hampshire, mainframe certification from DePaul University in Chicago, and several certifications from IBM.

David Graesser is a PureApplication System Technical Specialist with IBM. He focuses on Expert Integrated Systems and cloud computing. He actively supported clients with PureApplication System since its announcement in 2012. Before PureApplication System, David worked with clients and IBM Workload Deployer to design and implement deployment automation solutions. In his current role as a Technical Specialist, David uses his 24 years of experience as a Solution Architect and his work with relational databases and development tools. Dave actively supported clients in UNIX, IBM z/OS®, and Linux environments, specializing in distributed applications, and large warehouse systems.

Angelo Littera is a Senior Technology Architect with IBM Global Technology Services® in Italy. Angelo joined IBM in 1996 and during over 19 years of practical experience, mainly in the Public and Financial sectors, his involvement covered all aspects of the project lifecycle, from engagement to delivery. Angelo is responsible for defining technical solutions in the areas of Cloud Computing and DevOps and coordinates the project activities. Angelo was the technical owner of several complex projects, in which he coordinated working groups of professionals from IBM and non-IBM companies, demonstrating horizontal competence and the ability to quickly acquire vertical skills, when needed. From 1996 to 2006, Angelo was an IT Specialist, and he acquired a deep knowledge of IBM products (WebSphere suite) in the areas of web architecture. Angelo is skilled in application development on the Java platform and Java Platform, Enterprise Edition.

Marcelo Manhaes is a Level 3 Certified IT Specialist for IBM Global Technology Services in Brazil. He has 20 years of experience in IT. He works as an IT Delivery Architect with cloud computing, software automation tools, business analytics, and cognitive computing. He is a teacher in the Universidade Positivo. He was an author in other IBM Redbooks publications, such as Designing and Coding Applications for Performance and Scalability in WebSphere Application Server, SG24-7497, and Adopting IBM PureApplication System V1.0, SG24-8113. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Universidade Federal do Paraná - UFPR and an M.S. in Computer Science from Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná - UTFPR.

Gregory Scott was an academic and programmer before he joined IBM in 2001. He taught Java, XML, web services, SOA, ESB, and related technologies. He became a WebSphere Technical Sales Specialist in 2007, focusing on the WebSphere stack. In that capacity, Gregory published articles for IBM developerWorks about WebSphere Application Server, IBM Rational® Application Developer, and JEE development. Since the beginning of PureApplication in 2012, Gregory was part of the PureApplication team. He recently co-authored an article about how to create JBoss patterns on PureApplication. He has an M.A. from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, both in Philosophy.