John Baldwin has over 20 years of experience in data modelling and database design. Since 2007, John has worked for the IBM Software Group in the UK and in the worldwide MDM Centre of Excellence. As a Solution Architect, he has implemented many Master Data Management and Reference Data Management solutions, principally in the banking and insurance sectors. He has created and contributed to best practices pertaining to MDM and to creating an MDM implementation methodology within IBM frameworks.

Before joining IBM, he worked in the Transportation and Logistics sector designing and managing real-time messaging systems and tracking systems; in the Broadcast Media sector building systems for capturing programming metadata; and in the Public sector designing and building screen-based examination systems and configuring and implementing accounting and payroll packages.

Thomas Dunn is an IT Architect in the IBM CIO office focused on enterprise content and taxonomy management solutions. He has been with IBM for 17 years. Most of that time has been spent designing and developing web content management systems and supporting product master data management tools. These systems deliver much of www.ibm.com marketing content and the master data is used by product development, sales, and support sites. For the last two years, he focused on developing processes and tools that improve management of taxonomies that are used to tag content. This solution has InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub as a core component and uses other software in the InfoSphere MDM family. Tom graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in technical theater.

Mike Grasselt is a Senior Software Engineer in the IBM Information Management Development organization in Germany. Mike is currently the Architect and Team Lead for various assets that support data integration tasks for large SAP migrations and consolidation projects. Prior to this role, he was responsible for integrating IBM Master Data Management products into SAP system landscapes and for integrating InfoSphere Information Server with IBM WebSphere® Portal, IBM Business Process Manager, and InfoSphere MDM Server in the context of a broader service-oriented architecture effort. Mike also developed an SQL extension for the Business Processes Execution Language (BPEL) and published several papers about data-aware business processes and web services. He has integrated text analysis technology with content management systems and was an author of an IBM Redbooks publication on this topic. Mike collaborates with several universities in Germany to define integration architectures, and gives lectures on IBM mainframe concepts. In addition to his technical responsibilities, he is a mentor in the IBM technical community.

Shabbar Hussain is an MDM Business Architect with IBM Software Lab Services, based in Toronto, Canada and member of a worldwide team that provides subject matter expertise, best practices, solution architecture, and design during client engagements. He has helped implement MDM solutions across various industry verticals which involved customer, product, and reference data domains. His expertise includes business intelligence and data warehousing. Shabbar holds a Master in Computer Applications degree from University of Pune, India.

Dan Mandelstein is an IBM Certified IT Architect, with over 20 years of working in the IT industry. Currently, he is working in the Master Data Management portfolio and is the Architect and Development Manager for IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management Reference Data Management Hub. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the University of Texas and a Master degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Ivan Milman is a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM, working as a Security and Governance Architect for IBM Master Data Management (MDM) and InfoSphere product groups. Ivan co-authored the leading book on MDM: Enterprise Master Data Management: An SOA Approach to Managing Core Information. Ivan was on the original team that created the IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management Reference Data Management (RDM) product, and Ivan is working on integrating RDM with other IBM products.

During his career, Ivan has worked on a variety of distributed systems and security technology, including OS/2 Networking, DCE, IBM Global Sign-On, and Tivoli® Access Manager. Ivan has also represented IBM to standards bodies, including The Open Group and IETF. Prior to his current position, Ivan was the Lead Architect for the IBM Tivoli Access Manager family of security products. Ivan is a member of the IBM Security Architecture Board and the IBM Data Governance Council. Ivan is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional and a Master Inventor at IBM, and has been granted 14 US patents.

Erik A O’Neill is the Product Manager responsible for the InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub and an evangelist on the merits of a master data management approach for the governance and stewardship of enterprise reference data. Erik helped grow the InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub from being a concept to being a fully supported product within the InfoSphere MDM product family.

Erik has been with IBM in senior product management roles for nine years, and worked on the Master Data Management team for most of that time. Prior to IBM, Erik worked in sales and product management roles for both startups and established enterprise software companies in US, Europe and SE Asia.

Erik graduated from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, with MA and BA degrees in Experimental Physics.

Sushain Pandit is a Lead Engineer in the InfoSphere segment of the Information Management division in the IBM Software Group. His background is primarily in enterprise information management. His recent experience includes key contributions to development, architecture, and technical leadership of InfoSphere MDM Ref DM Hub. His experience also includes core feature development contributions to InfoSphere MDM Server and several advanced platform integration projects in the InfoSphere Information Server suite in the areas of semantics, federation, and linking. He is an IBM Master Inventor with approximately 20 US patent applications, has written several published papers, presented at conferences such as Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI) and IBM Information On Demand (IOD). Sushain holds a Master degree in Computer Science.

Ralph Tamlyn is a Consulting Senior It Architect at IBM. Ralph has worked with content management and delivery systems for most of the last 15 years. His focus has been the taxonomies and user-facing hierarchies to classify, manage, organize, integrate, and deliver that content efficiently and seamlessly. This focus has led him to develop a set of best practices for managing taxonomies and a complementary set of best practices for the classification metadata in which the taxonomies are used. Ralph is currently Lead Taxonomist for the IBM CIO Enterprise Solutions and Web Enablement team. In that role, he is responsible for unifying IBM taxonomies for all internal and external web content. He and his teammates are responsible for establishing the larger strategy to develop processes, governance, and tools to reach that unification goal.

Fenglian Xu is a Lead Software Engineer and a Senior Inventor in InfoSphere Reference Data Management at the IBM UK Hursley lab. She has 16 years of experience in IT research and development field. She worked as a lead developer in IBM WebSphere Service Registry and Repository, WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, and WebSphere Process Server for the last seven years. Prior to joining IBM, she worked in various IT industries such as grid computing and information management, and did research in e-Science and image processing for large stack of neuron images.

Fenglian holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from University of Southampton. Her areas of expertise include information management, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and cloud computing. She also has expertise in service registry and management, Java Messaging Service (JMS), Service Component Architecture (SCA), web services, and XML technologies.

She contributes to IBM developerWorks®, to which she was invited twice to be a featured author. She has over 20 publications about IBM products and her research in IBM developerWorks, International conference proceedings, and journals.