Aaron Bartell focuses much of his development in the area of creating modern applications using RPG and Java on the IBM i and Android platforms. He is the lead developer of RPG-XML Suite and the primary "pusher" of OpenRPGUI.com. He enjoys being part of the strong IBM i community through forum participation, article writing and providing open source software on his personal website MowYourLawn.com.

Aaron has most recently been pursuing how he can use his abilities to benefit those in need. He started the site SoftwareSavesLives as a mechanism to raise money for digging clean water wells in Africa and feeding starving children. Aaron lives with his wife and five children in southern Minnesota and enjoys playing electric and bass guitar with the band he is in, Scattered Showers.

Dan Cruikshank has been an IT Professional since 1972, and he became an IBM employee in 1998. Since 1999 Dan's primary focus has been on DB2 and SQL performance related issues. Besides continued performance analysis, he also teaches the IBM DB2 UDB for IBM i SQL and Query Optimization class held four times a year in Rochester, MN. In between teaching, Dan is involved in a number of projects including database design reviews, SQL tuning, and the migration of DDS generated databases to SQL DDL created databases.

Cheryl is founder of Wild Genius, a branding and innovation group inspired to unleash the “wild genius” within organizations and individuals. Prior to founding Wild Genius, Cheryl was Partner and the Chief Strategy Officer at Kelliher Samets Volk, a marketing firm with offices in Burlington, Boston, and New York.

Cheryl has been building insightful branding, marketing, and communications strategies for organizations for more than a decade. She particularly enjoys leveraging brand strategy to inspire business innovation inside organizations, and unleashing the "genius" inside of people and teams. She has helped do this for clients like New Balance, Seventh Generation, Efficiency Vermont, National Grid, Sharp and Time Warner.

Cheryl earned her MBA in Sustainable Business from Marlboro College, where she now teaches. Cheryl is particularly inspired by microfinance, systems thinking, how gender relates to issues of sustainability, and tapping into all of our many dimensions as humans to unleash innovative solutions for social change.

Susan Gantner’s career has spanned over 24 years in the field of application development. She began as a programmer developing applications for corporations in Atlanta, Georgia, working with a variety of hardware and software platforms.  She joined IBM in 1985 and quickly developed a close association with the Rochester laboratory during the development of the AS/400 system.

Susan worked in Rochester, Minnesota for 5 years in the AS/400 Technical Support Center.  She later moved to the IBM Toronto Software Laboratory to provide technical support for programming languages and AD tools on the AS/400.

Susan left IBM in 1999 to devote more time to teaching and consulting. Her primary emphasis is on enabling customers to take advantage of the latest programming and database technologies on OS/400.

Susan is a regular speaker at COMMON conferences and other technical conferences around the world and holds a number of Speaker Excellence medals from COMMON.

Steve Kenneally is a Senior Consultant for Ouellette & Associates.  He specializes in helping businesses to deliver consistent IT service and to manage internal client’s expectations.  His focus is on delivering workshops to IT professionals and organizations internationally helping them to succeed in today's increasingly demanding, ever changing business environment.  Clients rave about Steve’s use of real world examples and sense of humor as he facilitates their grasp of the tools and techniques presented in Ouellette’s workshops.

Steve has spent 10 years in the IT Services industry, most recently as a Client Executive managing a commercial account in the northeast for Perot Systems.  While with Perot Systems, he also served as the Site Director responsible for the IT Infrastructure at Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare.   At EDS, he was a Customer Relationship Manager helping EDS through a very challenging transition at the Ma. Blue Cross and Blue Shield account.

As an internal IT Manager, Steve has held Director of IT Client Services positions at both Biogenidec and Boston Edison.   At Biogenidec, he led both internal and outsourced resources in the delivery of client facing services for global operations. While at Edison, he co-led the IT Client Services merger team helping to form NSTAR from the union of Boston Edison and Commonwealth Energy.

Steve was an early pioneer of the Help Desk in Information Technology and was also the developer of one of the first broad based Service Level Management programs in the country.  He has mentored scores of subordinates who have moved on to very successful careers in their own right.   Steve has spoken on Service Level Management at industry conferences and has also been published an article in Software Magazine.

Steve holds a BS in management from Boston University and has certifications in ITIL and TQM to his credit.

Pete Massiello has been working with the AS/400, iSeries, i5 and IBM i since 1989, focusing on systems management and technical support. He has held numerous technical positions through out his career. He is the President of iTech Solutions Group, an IBM Advanced Business Partner delivering solutions and services to IBM i shops throughout the US. He is a member of IBM's certification test writing team, an IBM Certified Systems Expert with certifications in iSeries Design, Administration, Implementation, LPAR, and HMC management.

Mike Pavlak is a Solutions Consultant for Zend Technologies. Mike has been working with IBM midrange solutions since 1992 and IBM mainframes before that. He formerly managed IT development and operations for Tripp Lite. Mike, who lives in suburban Chicago, has been very involved with user groups and COMMON. He has developed applications using RPG, CL and PHP, and he can show you how to extend your RPG skills with PHP and the web.