Andy Astor is co-founder, president and CEO of EnterpriseDB. Prior to EDB, he was a vice president at webMethods, Inc., where he was responsible for technical marketing, corporate acquisition integration and standards leadership and evangelism. While at webMethods, he was elected twice to the Board of Directors of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I), and he served as that organization's Marketing Chair. A frequent speaker at industry conferences, Andy is also on the International Advisory Board for SOA Web Services Journal.

Astor's Session Description
This session will detail a best-practices approach to enterprise adoption of open source software, focusing on five common migration mistakes and recommendations for successfully avoiding them. We will cover the characteristics of open source offerings that make them especially suitable for enterprise adoption, including licensing structure, feature equivalency with commercial counterparts, enterprise-class feature sets, the origin of the open source code, and compatibility with the existing engineering skillset and IT infrastructure. Then Andy Astor will cover the characteristics of ideal open source vendors, including their support organizations, direct knowledge of the code base, relationship with the community and ability to provide meaningful indemnities.

The Most Distinguished Conference Faculty of the Year
This year's conference will feature more than 100 distinguished faculty members who are the world's top celebrity experts in their fields, presenting more than 96 sessions and power panels in three distinct themes; SOA Web Services, Enterprise Open Source, and Real-World AJAX. The conference offers seven simultaneous tracks in two information-packed days.

The conference faculty includes Andy Astor, co-founder and CEO of EnterpriseDB; Jeff Barr, SOA program manager of Amazon.com; Brian Behlendorf, founder of Collabnet; Steve Benfield, CTO of Agentis Software; Dave Chappell, SOA expert and chief technology evangelist of Sonic Software; Si Chen, founder of Open Source Strategies; Christophe Coenraets, Ajax-Flex Integration guru of Adobe; Shaun Connolly, product management vice president of JBoss; Dr. Mark M. Davydov, internationally known expert of SOA and Web Services; Christian Donner, senior technical architect of Molecular; Jean-Jacques Dubray, NetWeaver architect of SAP; Yakov Fain, editor of Java Developer's Journal and the co-author of the upcoming book "Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters"; John Fallows, author and Ajax evangelist of Oracle; Dan Foody, CTO of Actional; Zak Greant, leading Free Software and Open Source evangelist; Kevin Hakman, co-founder of Tibco's General Interface; Dion Hinchcliffe, editor of Web 2.0 Journal and the upcoming book "Real-World Ajax: Secrets of the Masters"; Simon Horwith, editor of ColdFusion Developer's Journal; Jonas Jacobi, author and Java evangelist of Oracle; Ajit Jaokar, leading Web 2.0 evangelist; Werner Keil, software architect specializing in Java and Microsoft technologies; Mike Kochanik, vice president of CollabNet; Eugene Kuznetsov, leading SOA and XML pioneer; Jason Levitt, technical evangelist of Yahoo Developer Network; Joe Lichtenberg, vice president of Bowstreet; Morgan Lim, co-founder of open source company RaptorHead; David S. Linthicum, a well-known author and SOA expert; Paul Lipton, well-known SOA evangelist and senior architect at CA; James McGovern, an industry thought leader in SOA; Aaron Mulder, CTO of Chariot Solutions; Eric Newcomer, CTO of Iona Technologies; Duane Nickull, chair of OASIS SOA RM Technical Committee; Jim Phalen, Flash and rich client expert and vice president of Stream57; Eric Pulier, CEO of Digital Evolution; Victor Rasputnis, well-known speaker and expert on SOA technologies; Anil Saldhana, chair of Apache Scout Project and top trainer at JBoss; James Schweitzer, open source specialist of IBM; Alan Shimel, a member of Open Source Snort Rules Consortium Board of Directors; Bruce Snyder, a founding member of Apache Geronimo and SOA expert; Anatole Tartakovsky, CTO of Computer Technology, Inc. and Ajax/Flex expert; Eero Teerikorpi, CEO of Emic Networks; Jason Van Zyl, chair of Apache Maven PMC; Shaun Walker, founder and president of Perpetual Motion Interactive Systems and ASP.NET expert; Tony Wasserman, executive director of the Center for Open Source Investigation and professor at Carnegie Mellon West; Coach Wei, founder and CTO of Nexaweb; Michael Wheaton, SOA expert of Sun Microsystems; Chip Wilson, CTO of Geniant; Peter Yared, founder and CEO of Active Grid; Michael Juntao Yuan, SOA and Java expert of JBoss, Inc.

The conference on-site delegate registrations are limited to 300 attendees, and is expected to sell-out. In addition to the live audience, more than 20,000 simulcast viewers are expected to tune into keynotes and general sessions live on SYS-CON.TV.

Sponsorship and Exhibit Opportunities
Enterprise Open Source Conference, co-located with the SOA Web Services Conference, will be sponsored by a total of eight leading Enterprise Open Source and SOA technology vendors. The conference will offer exhibit opportunities to other vendors in addition to main event sponsors. Additional information on sponsorship and exhibit opportunities can be obtained by email at events(at)sys-con.com or by phone at 201 802-3021.