Dave Thomas has a wide spectrum of experience in the software industry as an engineer, professor, consultant, architect, executive and investor.   He is a popular, humorous, albeit opinionated keynote speaker with a unique breadth of business experience and technical depth. He is a Managing Director of Object Mentor, and a thought leader in Large-Scale Agile Development. Dave is Founder and Chairman of Bedarra Research Labs — a company specializing in emerging software technologies and applications. Bedarra also provides virtual CTO and CEO, as well as directors, advisors and business mentors to support new initiatives.

Dave is best known as the founder and past CEO of Object Technology International Inc. (formerly OTI, now IBM OTI Labs) and led the commercial introduction of object and component technology. The company is often cited as the ideal model of a software technology company and was a pioneer in Agile product development with a process called Just-In-Time Software.

Dave was the principal visionary and architect for IBM VisualAge Smalltalk and Java tools and virtual machines including the popular open source multi-language Eclipse.org IDE. OTI pioneered the use of virtual machines in embedded systems with Tektronix shipping the first commercial products in 1988. He was instrumental in the establishment of IBM’s Pervasive computing efforts and in particular, the Java tooling and virtual machines.

Dave is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University and the University Of Queensland, and is widely published in the software engineering literature. Dave remains active in various roles within the technical community including ECOOP, AOSD, JAOO,Agile Development Conference, OOPSLA Onward and Dynamic Language Symposium. He is a founding director of the Agile Alliance, an ACM Distinguished Engineer, President of AITO and an advisor for IEEE Software. He also writes an expert column in the Journal Of Object Technology.