Anna Liu is (blog) currently an Architect Advisor at Microsoft Australia, where she works with the community of architects involved in enterprise and application architecture. Her goal is to understand enterprises' IT challenges, and to help them with building successful systems through the use of architecture patterns, proven best practices, and reusable frameworks. Anna has extensive experience in the financial services industry and specialises in designing high performance and highly scalable distributed systems.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Anna was a Senior Researcher and Project Manager at CSIRO, where she led the Middleware Technology Evaluation project. Her group evaluated various middleware technologies through rigorous benchmarking studies and provided middleware acquisition advice to various Australian Government agencies and the Financial Services industry.

Anna holds a PhD (Computer Science UNSW) and a BE (Computer Engineering UNSW). She has also held various academic appointments including a senior lectureship at the University of Sydney, and a visiting scientist position at the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. She is also a frequent speaker on software architecture and distributed systems topics at International Conferences including OOPSLA and ICSE.

Nils van Boxsel is (blog) an Architect Advisor working for Microsoft Australia in the Developer and Platform Strategy Group. In this capacity he works with the community of architects involved in enterprise and application achitecture. His goal is to ensure that architects are familiar with the architectural patterns and options for building successful systems on the Microsoft Application Platform.

Prior to joining Microsoft in 2002, Nils was a Lead Solutions Architect for a leading Systems Integrator, responsible for the application and system architecture of large scale eCommerce solutions, including the design and development of various internet/intranet eBusiness solutions in J2EE (Java) technologies and systems integration projects.

Nils has over fifteen years experience in the IT Industry in system design and development, system administration, team leadership, system testing, GUI design and prototyping. He also has experience in the retail and wholesale industries implementing point of sale, inventory control and accounting systems.

Nils lives in Canberra with his wife and two young daughters. He enjoys mountain bike riding, skiing and the beach.

Nigel Watson (blog) is an Architect Advisor for Microsoft Australia, and works with the software architecture community in Melbourne. His role is to help build awareness of Microsoft's platform, tools and architectural practices, while showing how these may be leveraged to provide value in heterogeneous enterprise environments.

Prior to joining Microsoft four years ago, Nigel worked in a range of software engineering roles over a period of nine years - mostly on Unix-based platforms, and mostly in C++ and Java. Specialising in protocols and messaging, his work included development, design and architecture of network-based software systems in the telecommunications and finance industries. Nigel holds a Masters degree in Computer Science (specialising in network and application security) from the University Of Canterbury, New Zealand.

Mark holds a New Zealand Institute of Management (NZIM) Diploma of Business Management and a Bachelor of Business Studies (BBS) degree majoring in Management. His technology selection and architectural approaches are focused on understanding the mix of business drivers affecting their suitability for a particular organisation and applying those through Enterprise Architectures that have a strong business architecture focus. He enjoys employing those skills with a variety of customers and communities within New Zealand.

Before joining Microsoft Mark was with Statistics New Zealand where he was heavily involved with evaluating and choosing technologies that would support the goals of the architectures developed. In the preceding nine years at Statistics New Zealand Mark was also engaged, as both a participant and as a project manager, in a variety of Enterprise, Infrastructure and Application development projects including Security projects, Identity integration, Portals, Year 2000 and Enterprise Architecture establishment.

Mark has also been involved in a number of IT industry groups holding offices as Secretary for GOVIS - a NZ public sector collaboration organisation, until his departure from Public sector, and as current President of Software Quality New Zealand (SQNZ). Mark has also presented at a number of local conferences and events most recently mostly focused on Enterprise and Software architectures. Mark is also the Convenor of the New Zealand Microsoft Architect's council.

Graham Elliott is the Technology Specialist responsible for the Application Platform and Application Architecture within Microsoft Australia's Enterprise and Partner Group. He is responsible for driving demand for Microsoft's Application Platform and helping customers architect, design and build solutions using Microsoft's current and future technologies. He is a frequent speaker on Microsoft's Application Platform offerings, Application Security and Web Services Strategy. Before joining Microsoft, Graham was a Solutions Architect for Avanade Australia and Accenture, developing and supporting Microsoft based enterprise solutions.