Dave Hay is a Portal and Collaboration Architect with IBM Software Services for Lotus (ISSL). He has been responsible for the design and delivery of IT solutions for some of IBM's major UK customers. Dave's work is mainly focused on the role of the Infrastructure Solution Architecture, and he has experience with many of the core components that would comprise a portal or collaboration solution.

Dave has worked in a variety of roles with IBM since 1992, and has been with IBM Software Group since 2000. He has worked with WebSphere Application Server for much of that time, starting with v3 and covering a number of platforms, including AIX, OS/400, Linux, and Windows.

Jacek Laskowski has over 15 years of IT experience having focused on software development and architecture design in open source and commercial projects.He's interested in Service Oriented Architecture with Java Enterprise Edition, Business Process Management, and Business Rule Management System solutions. He is a seasoned technology professional with a strong software development and advisory track record. His interests revolve around Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and supportive solutions, be them runtime environments or specifications, like Enterprise OSGi, Service Component Architecture (SCA), WS-BPEL, and WS-BPMN, to name a few.

He is a leader of the Warszawa Java User Group and has been a speaker at local and international conferences. He has been organizing Confitura (formerly Javarsovia) and Warsjawa conferences for the Polish Java community. He contributes to open source projects such as Apache OpenEJB and Apache Geronimo. He envisages himself using functional languages in projects and the decision to learn Clojure (possibly JRuby and Scala) influences his current self-learning activities.

Sharing knowledge is his passion. He mentors students in the IBM Education Student Internship (ESI) program. He is an author of IBM Redbooks publications and has contributed to a few others as a technical reviewer. While supporting business partners and customers with their use of IBM WebSphere BPM products, he regularly runs courses and workshops in Poland and abroad. He is a member of the NetBeans Dream Team–highly-skilled and motivated NetBeans users.

He actively blogs at http://blog.japila.pl and http://blog.jaceklaskowski.pl. You can also follow him at @jaceklaskowski on Twitter.

Meenakshi Verma has been part of the IT industry since 1998. She is experienced in putting up solutions across multiple industry segments using SAP BI, SAP Business Objects, and Java/J2EE technologies. She is currently based in Toronto, Canada and is working with a leading utility company.

Meenakshi has been helping with technical reviews for books published by Packt Publishing across varied enterprise solutions. Her earlier work includes JasperReports for Java Developers, Java EE 5 Development using GlassFish Application Server, Practical Data Analysis and Reporting with BIRT, EJB 3 Developer's Guide, Learning DOJO, and WebSphere Application Server.