Brigitte Bläser is a Senior Software Engineer at the IBM Böblingen Lab. She is a member of the joint IBM and SAP development team that enables SAP applications for DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows. She leads the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) development team that is responsible for integrating DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows solutions into SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) applications. Brigitte joined IBM in 1984 and worked as a Software Engineer in many database-related projects. She has more than 20 years of experience with DB2 and 15 years of experience with SAP basis and SAP BW technology.

Marco Bonezzi is a Technical Enablement Specialist for DB2 in the Information Management Data Ecosystem team, based in the IBM Dublin Lab in Ireland. He has a Masters degree in Computer Engineering and Embedded Systems. His career started with an internship at IBM Spain in the IBM System x® Technical PreSales team. Before his current role, Marco worked with databases from different vendors including DB2, high availability architectures, and replication environments. His experience is based both on technical pre-sales roles and as project consultant, participating in customer projects mainly involving databases and high availability architectures.

Since he joined IBM in Ireland, Marco has concentrated on DB2 and high availability solutions such as HADR, IBM pureScale®, and IBM PureData™ for Transactions; and currently his main focus is DB2 with BLU Acceleration.

Polly Lau is a Solution Architect in the Information Management Data Ecosystem organization, working at the IBM Toronto Lab. She is focused on DB2 with BLU Acceleration and big data technologies. Before this role, Polly was Manager of the worldwide Information Governance Partner Ecosystem team where she worked for five years in Business Partner technical enablement and consulting. She and her team enabled Business Partners around the world in adopting the appropriate information governance solutions for business challenges of their clients. She regularly delivers technical bootcamps for Business Partners; and she has been a frequent speaker at the annual IBM Information on Demand® conference (now known as IBM Insight™).

In her early years at IBM, she worked on DB2 Warehouse Appliance (currently IBM Smart Analytics System) development and DB2 partner enablement. Together with previous roles elsewhere, Polly has extensive experience from system and database administration to technical consulting in enterprise heterogeneous infrastructure environments.

Jean Cristie Pacanaro is a Senior Software Engineer in the Information Data Management Ecosystem team at IBM Software Lab in Brazil. He graduated in Computer Engineering and has over 18 years of experience in IT area. Jean has been with IBM since 2006 and has had various roles in the company, working in many divisions such as services, IT outsourcing, and currently in Software Group. Jean is a certified IT specialist. His specialty is information and data management. He is a certified DB2 specialist and also holds in-depth knowledge of other database systems such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. Jean provides support for DB2 enablement projects, training, proofs of concept, and proofs of technology. Currently, he focuses on DB2 BLU engagements, enabling clients and business partners in the BLU technology.

Martin Schlegel is a Senior Software Engineer on the Information Management Data Ecosystem team with over 10 years of DB2 experience working at the IBM Toronto Lab in Canada.

He started his career as a Broadband Network Engineer before joining IBM. At IBM, Martin has worked in DB2 quality assurance, in DB2 development, and as an enablement consultant with IBM’s largest customers. Martin has focused on DB2 performance tuning, DB2 High Availability and Disaster Recovery, including HADR, IBM pureScale, IBM PureData™ System for Transactions and their integration with deployment automation, cluster managers, and cluster file systems.

Martin is a regular speaker at the annual IBM Information on Demand conference (now known as IBM Insight), and has held many deep technical training sessions in over 17 countries worldwide for customers, Business Partners, and IBMers.

Ayesha Zaka is a Software Engineer in the Information Management (IM) Data Ecosystem team, working at the IBM Toronto Lab. She is currently working on DB2 with BLU Acceleration and has over four years of experience conducting technical enablement and consulting for various IM products. Ayesha started her career with DB2 9.7 and has been enabling and training business partners and clients since. At IBM, her various roles have allowed her to work with DB2, IBM InfoSphere® BigInsights™, InfoSphere Streams, and PureData for Hadoop. She has enabled business partners and clients around the world in adopting IM solutions within their organizations. As part of her role, she has delivered technical training sessions, worldwide, and has been a frequent speaker at the annual IBM Information on Demand conference (now known as IBM Insight),

Alexander Zietlow works as Software Engineer for the SAP/IBM DB2 Platform Development team since 2013. He works on performance evaluations of BLU Acceleration in the SAP environment. While studying for his Bachelors degree in Information Technology at Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University Karlsruhe, he worked at SAP. He holds a Master of Computer Science degree from the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, Germany. His master thesis is based on an internship at IBM Research and Development Germany in Böblingen.