Since the day Mark Crane purchased a TI994/A Home Computer while attending Purdue University in 1983, he was hooked. He fell in love with the personal computer--and with the tools that allowed technology enthusiasts and professionals to maximize their impact.

Upon graduating with an Engineering Degree, Mark returned to his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky and joined the IT Department at PNC Bank where his team deployed and managed one of the country’s first distributed computing networks. The following year, Mark met entrepreneur Doug Cobb and joined The Cobb Group—a tech startup offering the IT industry books, newsletters, and other products,. Over the next 11 years, Mark worked closely with Doug to grow that company into a publishing giant--they became the world’s largest publisher of monthly tips, techniques, and tools for IT professionals.

In his roles as Editor-in-Chief, VP of Marketing, and ultimately Publisher, Mark developed a large and diverse network of people in IT ranging from product experts that write contributing articles to Product Managers at virtually all major software publishers, including Microsoft, Sun, and Apple. Mark continues to work ‘hands on’ with his products, and he enjoys talking with customers to learn both how he can improve existing tools as well as which new products his customers want.

Mark has been named a 2010 Finalist for Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the Kentucky / Southern Ohio region. The winners will be announced on June 24, 2010.

Ali Sareea has 15 years of progressive IT management experience at multiple Fortune 10 companies in senior executive level positions.

His background includes leading large cross functional technology initiatives with multi-million dollar impact and managing teams of over 100 people.  Ali's expertise is in the areas of Applications Development/Software Engineering, Business Intelligence, IT Service Management, and Six Sigma. He is a certified Black Belt and has won accolades for his work on application of Six Sigma techniques for software and systems development.

He holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Bellarmine University, MS in Computer Science from the University of Louisville and an MBA from Vanderbilt University.

Brian has 20 years of progressive IT management experience from small companies to Fortune 50 companies at the executive level.

Brian's experience ranges from leading project teams to develop applications to managing an IT organization of over 200 people. Brian has managed budgets ranging from $50,000 to over $50 million. Brian has had a successful track record of improving the effectiveness of every organization he has led. Brian has implemented IT Service Management, Six Sigma and several operational and management techniques to improve the performance of the organization. In 2005, Brian was recognized for his leadership by being awarded Louisville’s CIO of the year award.

Brian holds a B.S. in Management from Purdue University.

Shannon Kalvar has fifteen years of experience in IT. His career has included stints as a developer, system engineer, enterprise architect, project manager and program manager with detours into being a writer and process designer. Over the last few years his attention has shifted from deploying servers to implementing what we now call IT Governance and realizing ITIL processes for organizations.

Shannon occasionally blogs and has been known to write articles for TechRepublic. Although formerly certified as a developer, system engineer, and total cost of ownership analyst, he only maintains his PRINCE2 Practitioner and ITIL certifications.

Chad Fowler is an internationally known software developer, trainer, manager, speaker, and musician. Over the past decade he has worked with some of the world’s largest companies and most admired software developers. He loves to program computers and, as part of his role as CTO of InfoEther, Inc., spends much of his time solving hard problems for customers in the Ruby language.

He is co-organizer of RubyConf, RailsConf, and RailsConf Europe and author or co-author of a number of popular software books, including the recently released “The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development“.