Connecticut Computer Measurement Group
Spring CCMG Membership Meeting & Vendor Day Agenda
Radisson Hotel, Cromwell - Friday, April 1, 2005

Spring CCMG '05 Agenda      The Speakers

About the Speakers:

George Handera has over 25 years of data processing experience that ranges across application development, DB2/MQ Subsystem support, performance management, systems architecture and capacity roles at Aetna. He has also worked independently creating and selling the copyrights to several mainframe products.

Rick Ralston has worked in Data processing for over 30 years. He's spent 26 of those years working in performance management and capacity planning mostly on IBM mainframes. He is a contributor to the MXG-L listserv and an editor of CMG's web-zine Measure IT. Recently he has been involved with the IBM Sub-Capacity License charge offering for z/OS.

Jay Veazey was born in Dallas, and received a B.A. degree in English and an M.S. in Computer Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied under J.C. Browne. He worked for the U.S. Geological Survey for 5 years as a scientific applications and database programmer. For the last 20 years, he has been with Hewlett-Packard, working variously as a DBMS developer (ALLBASE), a DBMS/OS performance analyst, an image processing architect and image quality expert, a capacity planning tool developer, and currently as a server/hardware performance modeler.
He holds several patents and once (intentionally) built an optical scanner that detected only infrared light. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. Current areas of interest include quantifying R&D design trade-offs and economic analysis of computer servers, as well as decision-support workloads.

Loy Allen is a leader of Perot Systems' Technology Management Consulting practice. He is responsible for guiding the development of and implementing IT related business processes, management practices and governance principles that bring business value for the clients of Perot Systems.
Loy has also worked to develop methodologies, such as the Roadmap to Business Innovation (RBI) and ITIL related best practices with in Perot Systems and to develop the Business Engineering Management track of the Engineer Development Program, an extensive training and leadership development program. Loy has an ITIL foundation certificate and over 5 years of experience developing ITIL processes, performing assessments, advising clients and implementing ITIL processes and enabling organizational structures and technology.

Dr. Neil Gunther, M.Sc., Ph.D. is a leading industry computer performance consultant who founded Performance Dynamics Company (www.perfdynamics.com) in 1994. Prior to that, Dr. Gunther held research and management positions at San Jose State University, JPL/NASA (Voyager and Galileo missions), Xerox PARC research center and Pyramid/Siemens Technology. His performance and capacity planning classes have been given to such worldwide organizations as Boeing, FedEx, Motorola, Stanford University, and Sun Microsystems.
Dr. Gunther is the author of numerous papers on computer performance topics, as well as two books: The Practical Performance Analyst, McGraw-Hill, 1998 and most recently Analyzing Computer System Performance with PERL::PDQ, Springer-Verlag, 2005. He is well-known to CMG audiences for his presentations since 1993, and more recently for the extremely popular “Guerilla Capacity Planning” columns in MeasureIT, CMG’s online magazine. In 1996 Dr. Gunther was awarded Best Technical Paper at national CMG in San Diego. Dr. Gunther was born in Melbourne, Australia (which accounts for the odd accent) and is a member of the AMS, ACM, CMG, IEEE, SIGMETRICS and USENIX.

Dr. Connie U. Smith, a principal consultant of the Performance Engineering Services Division of L&S Computer Technology, Inc., is known for her work in defining the field of SPE and integrating SPE into the development of new software systems. Dr. Smith received the Computer Measurement Group's prestigious AA Michelson Award for technical excellence and professional contributions for her SPE work. She also authored the original SPE book: Performance Engineering of Software Systems, published in 1990 by Addison-Wesley, and approximately 100 scientific papers. She is the creator of the SPE•ED™ performance engineering tool. She has over 25 years of experience in the practice, research and development of the SPE performance prediction techniques.
Together, Dr. Smith and co-author Dr. Lloyd G. Williams have over 50 years of experience in software development. They have worked together for more than 15 years to help clients design and implement software that meets performance objectives. They have published numerous technical papers and articles, and are the authors of Performance Solutions: A Practical Guide to Creating Responsive, Scalable Software, published by Addison-Wesley

return to top