About the Contributors
Raj Balasubramanian
Raj Balasubramanian is a Senior Technical Staff Member and the product manager lead for the cloud services offering from Mobile First organization in IBM SWG. In this role, Raj manages and leads the delivery of mobile services in the cloud for IBM. He was previously a senior technologist on the Business Process Optimization (BPO) team within IBM Software Group, with a focus on delivering SOA, BPM, and cloud solutions across industries. Raj has taken on the role of Enterprise Architect, System Architect, and Solution Architect to meet the varied needs of the customer. He has published numerous articles on IBM DeveloperWorks and speaks at industry conferences on a variety of topics. His interests are in distributed systems, applying Web constructs to solution design, and using formal models and analytics to reason about large systems.
Previously in his IT career, he started by building enterprise systems using different technologies to solve business problems that includes Web technologies, SOA, BPM, and various machine learning techniques. He is also pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Texas at Austin. His official profile is on http://raj.balasubramanians.com, which links to his various personas.
David Chou
David Chou is an architect at Microsoft, focused on collaborating with enterprises and organizations in areas such as cloud computing, SOA, Web, distributed systems, mobile apps, etc., and supporting decision-makers on defining evolutionary strategies in architecture. Drawing on experiences from his previous jobs at Sun Microsystems and Accenture, David enjoys helping customers create value from using objective and pragmatic approaches to define IT strategies, roadmaps, and solution architectures.
Thomas Plunkett
Tom Plunkett is a principal consultant with Oracle and teaches graduate-level computer science courses for Virginia Tech. Tom also volunteers for the non-profit organization AtrocityWatch, where he is the Chief Data Officer and uses Big Data technologies to analyze social media to detect crimes against humanity. Tom is the author of several books and has given presentations at over fifty conferences.
Prior to joining Oracle, Tom practiced patent law with Fliesler Meyer in San Francisco, representing Oracle and other Silicon Valley companies. Tom has a B.A. and J.D. from George Mason University, an M.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, and has taken graduate courses in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.