John Goodson: As the executive leader of DataDirect Technologies, John is responsible for daily operations, business development, product direction, and long-term corporate strategy.
John was a principal engineer at Data General for seven years, working on their relational database product, DG/SQL. Since joining DataDirect Technologies in 1992, he has held positions of increasing responsibility in research and development, technical support, and marketing. John is a well-known and respected industry luminary and data connectivity expert. For more than 15 years, he has worked closely with Sun Microsystems and Microsoft on the development and evolution of database connectivity standards including J2EE, JDBC, .NET, ODBC, and ADO. John has been involved with the ANSI NCITS H2 Committee, which is responsible for building the SQL standard, and the X/Open (Open Group) SQL Access Group, which is responsible for building call-level interfaces into relational databases. He is actively involved in Java standards committees, including the JDBC Expert Group. In addition, John has published numerous articles and spoken publicly on topics related to data management. John is also a patent holder in the area of distributed transactions for Microsoft SQL Server Java middleware.
John holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg,Virginia.
Rob Steward: As vice president of research and development for DataDirect Technologies, Rob is responsible for the development, strategy, and oversight of the company’s data connectivity products, including the Shadow mainframe integration suite client software and the industry-leading DataDirect Connect family of database drivers and data providers: Connect for ODBC, Connect for JDBC, and Connect for ADO.NET. Additional product development responsibilities include DataDirect Sequelink and DataDirect XQuery, as well as the management of DataDirect’s Custom Engineering Development group.
Rob has spent more than 15 years developing database access middleware, including .NET data providers, ODBC drivers, JDBC drivers, and OLE DB data providers. He has held a number of management and technical positions at DataDirect Technologies and serves on various standards committees. Earlier in his career, he worked as lead software engineer at Marconi Commerce Systems Inc.
Rob holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from North Carolina State University, Raleigh.