Choosing Technologies: Perspectives on getting the right match between business requirements and available technologies

At the end of the day (and this panel IS at the end of the day) one of your objectives for attending this conference is probably to help you make the right decisions about which technology to invest in. So with the benefit of 3-days of research, learning and reflection, what decisions can you now make? Amidst the many options, are your choices clearer, or muddier than ever?

Alan Kay said "Perspective is worth 80 IQ points." And our panelists - some of whom have written entire books on how to match new database technologies to business needs - have years of perspective to help you answer your own questions.

Dan McCreary is an enterprise data architect and author specializing in emerging database technologies. He has worked at Bell Labs, with Steve Jobs at NeXT Computer as well as founding his own consulting firm of over 75 people. His background includes topics such as high performance computing, programming languages, databases and XML standards. He has published articles on the semantic web, metadata registries, US Federal XML standards, XForms, XQuery and XRX. He is co-chair of the NoSQL Now! Conference and a co-author of the book "Making Sense of NoSQL" by Manning Publications.

Dr. Vladimir Bacvanski has over two decades of engineering experience with mission critical and distributed enterprise systems and data technologies. Vladimir has helped a number of companies including the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve Bank, the US Navy, IBM, Dell, Hewlett Packard, JP Morgan Chase, General Electric, BAE Systems, AMD, and others to select, transition to, and apply new software and data technologies.

Vladimir is published worldwide and is a keynote speaker, session chair, and workshop organizer at leading industry events. As a founder of SciSpike, Vladimir is focusing on Big Data technologies and highly scalable reactive software architectures with node.js and Scala. Vladimir is the author of the O'Reilly course on Big Data and NoSQL.

Karen Lopez is a Senior Project Manager and Architect at InfoAdvisors. She has 20+ years of experience in project and data management on large, multi-project programs. Karen is a popular speaker known for her highly interactive, practical and sometimes irreverent presentation style. She is a Microsoft SQL Server MVP, She wants you to love your data.

Serial Entrepreneur, Joe is CoFounder of, Diamond Web Services, a software development shop in Venice. He has 20+ years of software development experience; working on projects spanning Search Engine technology, Performance Management, scaling Wide Area Networks; for Internet backbone providers, Investment Banks, Telcos & Media. Joe has served/serves on the advisory boards of leading development industry conferences including Zendcon & SemtechBiz, as well as Cross Campus, a growing force in the startup community. Joe is an organizer of several technology oriented meetup groups in Los Angeles and CoFounded Global Accessibility Awareness Day, bridging the gap between disabled citizens and the Internet.