Dave Thomas is the Founder and Chairman of Bedarra Research Labs (BRL), which specializes in emerging software technologies and practices.  BRL enables clients rapidly deploy innovative solutions using the latest practices and technologies. 

Dave is a popular, humorous, albeit opinionated international keynote speaker with an impressive breadth of business experience and technical depth.  With a unique ability to see the future and translate research into competitive products, he is an ACM Distinguished Engineer and has served on the awards committee for the past 3 years.  He is also an adjunct research professor at Queensland University of Technology in Australia and Carleton University in Canada.  Dave serves on the program committees for many technology conferences and founder of the YOW! Australia conference.

Through Bedarra Corp, Dave has been an investor, and virtual executive and advisor to numerous high tech start-ups in Australia, Canada, Europe and US. Dave has a wide spectrum of experience in the software industry as an engineer, consultant, architect, executive and investor.  He was a co-founder of the OCRI (now Invest Ottawa), and active contributor to Student Venture Competition and Lead to Win supporting start ups.

Dave is best known as the founder and past CEO of Object Technology International Inc. (formerly OTI, now IBM OTI Labs) where he led the commercial introduction of object and component technology.  The company is often cited as the ideal model of a software technology company. He was a principal visionary and architect for IBM Smalltalk and Java IDEs and virtual machines. OTI pioneered the use of virtual machines in embedded systems with Tektronix shipping the first commercial products in 1988. He was instrumental in establishing IBM’s Pervasive Computing efforts. With his partner Brian Barry, they played a major role in setting IBM’s open source agenda with Eclipse.org and the global Open Health Tools consortium.

Dave is the recognized global expert in large-scale Lean and Agile and a founding director of the Agile Alliance. He invented Just in Time Software used to jointly develop products from embedded systems to mainframes applications including the IBM virtual machines, IDEs and strongly influenced aspects of RTC. While a Managing Director at Object Mentor, he was responsible for leading their Lean and Agile in the Large Practice, working with major product and IT clients.

Short Bio

Dave Thomas is the Founder and Chairman of Bedarra Research Labs (BRL), which specializes in emerging software technologies and practices. BRL enables clients rapidly deploy innovative solutions using the latest practices and technologies. Dave is a popular, humorous, albeit opinionated international keynote speaker with an impressive breadth of business experience and technical depth. With a unique ability to see the future and translate research into competitive products, Dave was awarded ACM Distinguished Engineer for his contributions object technology that include IBM IDEs, virtual machines and the open source Eclipse foundation. Dave is a thought leader in Large Scale Lean and Agile Development and a founding director of the Agile Alliance. He maintains close links the R&D community and is an adjunct research professor at Queensland University of Technology in Australia and Carleton University in Canada. Dave serves on the program committees for many technology conferences and founder of the YOW! Australia conference.