Tech Experts Discuss the Latest Insights, Technology, and Innovations

Deepak Patil, Vice President, Oracle Cloud Development

As vice president of Oracle Cloud Development, Deepak Patil is responsible for strategy and development for Oracle’s IaaS product portfolio as well as Oracle’s developer relationship efforts. Deepak joined Oracle in 2016 from Microsoft, where he spent 16 years in various engineering leadership roles. He has a proven track record of creating and scaling platforms and services; cloud infrastructure design and management; software development; service operations; business strategies; capital planning; and analytics, with progressively increasing responsibilities across various engineering leadership roles.

Deepak was one of the founders of the Microsoft Azure platform and has been associated with the cloud industry for more than 10 years. With Azure, he assumed diverse engineering leadership roles focused on infrastructure design; long-range global expansion strategy; capacity and capital planning, and strategic customer engagement. While at Microsoft, Deepak designed and delivered one of the largest infrastructure platforms on the planet and led Azure to become one of the fastest-growing businesses in the history of Microsoft.

Amit Zavery, Senior Vice President, Oracle Cloud Platform and Integration Products

Amit Zavery is Oracle’s senior vice president for cloud platform and integration products. He is responsible for product strategy, roadmap, product positioning, and go-to-market initiatives for Oracle Cloud Platform and the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family. Zavery is also general manager responsible for Oracle’s integration platform portfolio covering application integration, streams processing, API management, business process management, batch and real-time data integration, and data-quality offerings.

Since joining Oracle in 1995, Zavery has held various positions in product development, management, strategy, and consulting. He began his career at Oracle as a software engineer on the video server product team. He then joined Oracle Consulting, implementing numerous interactive television applications, and, with the advent of the web, building internet applications for customers. He has worked in the Oracle Database group, where he was a member of the team responsible for planning and defining various Oracle Database releases. Zavery was also responsible for product development and management of Oracle's ecommerce applications and established Oracle's CRM development center in India.

Zavery holds a bachelor's degree in electrical and computer engineering, graduating with highest honors from the University of Texas, Austin. He also holds a master's degree in computer science and business from Carnegie Mellon University.

Siddhartha Agarwal

As vice president of product management and strategy at Oracle, Siddhartha Agarwal is responsible for division strategy and revenue growth (organic and inorganic) for Oracle Cloud Platform (PaaS) and Oracle Fusion Middleware across all product lines globally, a more than $4.5B business.

Prior to Oracle, Agarwal held several leadership positions including worldwide field operations at Zend; vice president of sales at Solidcore Systems; and regional vice president of sales at Totality. He also founded companies such as Teamscape (acquired by Peoplesoft) and Contractor Online as vice president of engineering and CTO. Agarwal started his career at Oracle in development, and, as director of development, built Oracle's CRM eCommerce product, Internet Bill Presentment and Payment.

Douglas Crockford

Douglas Crockford was born in Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, but left when he was only six months old because it was just too damn cold. He turned his back on a promising career in television when he discovered computers. He has worked in learning systems, small business systems, office automation, games, interactive music, multimedia, location-based entertainment, social systems, and programming languages. He is the inventor of Tilton, the ugliest programming language that was not specifically designed to be an ugly programming language. He is best known for having discovered that there are good parts in JavaScript. This was an important and unexpected discovery. He also discovered JSON, the world's most loved data interchange format. He is currently working on making the web a secure and reliable software delivery platform. He has his work cut out for him.

The Post Javascript Apocalypse

This is about JavaScript, clutter, purity, and thoughts on what should be in the language that comes after.

Thomas Kurian

Thomas Kurian is president of Oracle product development and reports to Oracle executive chairman of the board and chief technology officer Larry Ellison. He is responsible for leading software development and transitioning the company’s technology to Oracle Cloud. For the past several years, Kurian has been responsible for the Oracle Fusion Middleware family of products. Under his leadership, that business became the fastest-growing within Oracle and the industry’s leading middleware product suite. Since 2008, Kurian has also led the development for Oracle’s next-generation business applications, Oracle Fusion Applications.

Kurian has been with Oracle since 1996, holding various product management and development positions. Prior to joining Oracle, he worked as a consultant in London, Brussels, and San Francisco with international management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, serving clients in the software, telecommunications, and financial services industries.

Kurian has a BA in electrical engineering from Princeton University, where he graduated summa cum laude. He also has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar. He serves as an advisory member on the boards of several international venture funds and software companies.

Stephen Chin

Stephen Chin is the lead Java community manager at Oracle Technology Network, author of Raspberry Pi with Java, coauthor of Pro JavaFX Platform, and JavaOne Community Chair. He has keynoted numerous Java conferences around the world including JavaOne, where he is a five- time Rock Star Award recipient. Stephen is an avid motorcyclist who has done several pan-European Java evangelism tours, interviewing hackers in their natural habitat and posting the videos on nighthacking.com. When he is not traveling he enjoys teaching kids, including his 13-year old daughter, how to do embedded and robot programming.

Gerald Venzl

Gerald Venzl is senior principal product manager for Oracle server technologies. He started his career in IT during the dot-com era as a PL/SQL developer using Oracle 8.1.5. Soon after, Gerald specialized in Oracle Database performance tuning before he evolved his role to performance tuning in general, mainly working on the J2EE and Oracle Database stack. Gerald has worked in Austria, New York City, and London; he has since moved to Oracle’s Silicon Valley headquarters. There he joined the product management team for Oracle Database and server technologies, focusing on developer communities.

Maria Colgan

Maria Colgan is a master product manager at Oracle and has been with the company since Version 7.3 was released in 1996. Maria’s core responsibility is Oracle Database. She is responsible for evangelizing new functionality and getting feedback from customers and partners incorporated into future releases of the product. Previously, Maria was the product manager for Oracle Database In-Memory and query optimizer. Based on her extensive experience with Oracle Database and SQL tuning, she creates material and lectures on Oracle Database In-Memory Option and best practices for incorporating Oracle Database into customer’s environments. She is also a contributing author to the Oracle Optimizer blog and the new Oracle Database In-Memory blog.

Bruno Borges

Bruno Borges has more than 16 years experience as a developer and conference speaker, and, since 2012, is Oracle’s principal product manager responsible for developer engagement and outbound strategy for Oracle Cloud PaaS services, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Java, and related technologies for application development. You can find him on Twitter @brunoborges.

Joel R. Kallman

Joel R. Kallman is senior director of software development for Oracle's Server Technologies organization. He is responsible for the development and product management of Oracle Application Express. Joel has been at Oracle since 1996 and is the cocreator of Oracle Application Express. He is a contributing author of several books on Oracle technology, including Expert One-on-One Oracle, Beginning Oracle Programming, and Mastering Oracle PL/SQL: Practical Solutions.

Connor McDonald

Connor McDonald is a former Oracle Ace Director who has joined the Oracle Developer Advocates team. Over the past 25 years he has worked with systems in Australia, the UK, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, and the United States. He has coauthored three books and been a popular speaker at Oracle conferences around the world, specializing in topics regarding the database engine and PL/SQL. He won the Inspirational Speaker award from the UK Oracle User Group in 2009 and 2011.

Chris Richardson

Chris Richardson is a developer, architect, and Java Champion. He is the author of POJOs in Action, which describes how to build enterprise Java applications with frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate. Chris was also the founder of the original CloudFoundry.com, an early Java PaaS for Amazon EC2. Today, he is a recognized thought leader in microservices. Chris is the creator of microservices.io, a website describing how to develop and deploy microservices. He provides microservices consulting and training and is working on his third startup eventuate.io, an application platform for developing microservices.

Chris Saxon

Chris Saxon is one of Oracle’s Developer Advocates. He and Connor McDonald form the answer team on Ask Tom, the online repository of questions and answers about building applications on top of Oracle Database. He's here to help you get the best out of Oracle Database. So if you're stuck on some tricky SQL problem, let him know and he'll do what he can to assist!

Shay Shmeltzer

Shay is director of product management for Oracle Development Tools and Frameworks. He is focused on helping developers leverage Oracle products to simplify and streamline their application development efforts. Shay frequently presents at industry events, publishes articles, and blogs regularly. He is on Twitter at @JDevShay.

Shaun Smith

Shaun Smith is director of product management at Oracle, responsible for the Docker-based Oracle Application Container Cloud Service. He's an experienced technical product manager, enterprise framework architect, and software developer with extensive open source and commercial product development, developer relations, and public speaking experience. Prior to joining Oracle, Shaun was a consultant specializing in enterprise application architecture and Agile software development. He's a past committer on a number of Eclipse Foundation projects, notably EclipseLink—the Java Persistence API reference implementation, and is an experienced speaker who has presented frequently at JavaOne, Devoxx, EclipseCon, JAX, and many other developer conferences and user groups around the world.