Elevate Presenters

Armeen Mazda

CEO, Appeon

Armeen Mazda is the co-founder and CEO of Appeon. Prior to becoming CEO, Armeen served various other roles in Appeon, including Product Management, Business Development, and Operations. Prior to co-founding Appeon, Armeen was co-founder of NetUpSide, a Silicon Valley-based incubator of high-tech startups. Armeen is a graduate of the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley, and holds 5 U.S. patents in the area of Web application technologies.

Julie Jiang

Product Manager, Appeon

Julie Jiang is the Product Manager of Appeon, driving the product roadmap, feature definitions, and release management. Julie joined Appeon in 2002 and worked closely with Sybase to create the first documentation for PowerServer. Julie’s past work experience includes technical support manager at TUV Rheinland and system analyst at Accela Automation. Julie is a graduate of the University of Science and Technology in China, and holds degrees in both Computer Science and Arts.

Chris Pollach

Director Developer Relations, Appeon

Mr. Pollach joined Appeon in 2016 in the capacity as Director, Developer Relations. He is responsible for developer liaison, PowerBuilder courses, technical presentations and support. Mr. Pollach is a former Technical Solutions Architect and DEVOPS specialist with over 30 years experience in Systems Software Analysis, Development, Maintenance and Technical Support IT areas. Mainly in the areas of GUI Design, MS-Windows Programming, Wireless, Application / Web Server Design, Object Oriented Development Tools, Methodologies, Database and Network application development. He has participated in numerous technical, planning and management roles, as well as consulted and educated in these fields for a diverse clientele.

Marco Meoni

Appeon MVP, PBWink

Ph.D in Computer Science. Appeon MVP and PowerServer enthusiast since the early days. Lead Appeon expert in dozens of worldwide migration projects to Web and Mobile architectures. Invited speaker at Elevate conferences and national User Groups. Taught PowerBuilder and Appeon development techniques to hundreds of developers. Keen on Web and Mobile technologies. Pioneered the field of interactive Grid computing at CERN, publishing several scientific articles. Broad knowledge in Big Data programming frameworks and predictive models using Machine Learning.

Bruce Armstrong

Senior Developer, Integrated Data Services

Bruce Armstrong is a senior developer with Integrated Data Services (IDS). Prior to joining IDS in 2004 he spent 15 years as an independent consultant doing PowerBuilder development. He is an Appeon MVP and has done sessions on PowerBuilder at Sybase TechWaves, SAP TechEds, Appeon Elevate conferences, local user group meetings in Columbia, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, England, Italy, Spain and France as well as online webcasts.

Luca Arena

Software Engineer, Omicron Sistemi Srl

Born in 1972. Graduated in computer engineering at the Milan Polytechnic in 1999 and in Business Administration at the University of Bologna in 2022. Software engineer and PowerBuilder Developer since 1996 at the Omicron Sistemi software house in Milan, specialized in applications for accounting, billing and waste management. Co-founder of the Italian Appeon User Group (AUGI). Passionate about software engineering & development, agile methodologies, business design, tennis, music and chess.

Philippos Antonopoulos

Software Developer, Aardvark, isc

Philippos Antonopoulos has been working with Appeon Powerbuilder & SnapDevelop for the past two years. He has developed several 3-tier apps, including an API that interacts with Greek’s government KYC, and is leading the migration team, of AArdVark's PowerObjectErp from 2-tier to 3-tier. He is also studying Philosophy at the American College of Greece.

Christophe Dufourmantelle

CEO, Novalys

Founder & CEO of Novalys for 25 years.

Gian Luca De Bonis

CEO/CTO, Enable Development OÜ

Gian Luca De Bonis is an international consultant, Scrum specialist, and IT project manager, that has created several solutions for PowerBuilder and is consulting customers around the world on PowerBuilder, Agile methodologies, Managed outsourcing, and PowerBuilder-to-C# migration using the .Net DataStore.

Patricia Guzman

Senior Developer, EPMAPS Agua de Quito

Engineer in Computer Science - Master's in information technology - Security Diploma in AI Experience 20 years in PowerBuilder Databases: Oracle, SQL Server Recent Projects: EPMAPS Quito Water Senior Developer - Maintenance and Development of company applications Dora Sistemas Head of Education Department - Creation and delivery of PowerBuilder Courses (FastTrack) Creative Networking Concepts (NJ USA) Senior Developer - Maintenance of PowerBuilder Applications

Simon Jutzi

DevOps Architect, Informaticon

Simon Jutzi has got 7 years of experience in PowerBuilder development. At Informaticon, he's responsible for the development of core libraries, as well as CI/CD tooling and processes for their PowerBuilder applications.

Francisco Martinez

Technical Support Engineer, Appeon

Computer Systems Engineer working for Appeon as a Technical Support Engineer since March 2021.

Miller Rhodes

Senior Powerbuilder Architect, Intertech Consulting

Miller Rhodes has been a member of the professional team at Intertech Consulting for over 6 years. Miller has 32 years of PowerBuilder experience beginning with Version 2.0 Beta. Miller has touched every version leading up to and including Powerbuilder 2022 R3. Miller has also developed extensive knowledge of SnapDevelop and PowerServer as well. Miller previously presented at Elevate in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Mike Searer

Consultant, SBT

Mike has worked in software development, technical consulting, business consulting, software sales, business management.

John Strano

Senior Developer, Intertech Consulting, Inc.

John Strano has been using PowerBuilder since 1991 and has authored articles for multiple industry periodicals. John has been a certified instructor of PowerBuilder and has presented development tools on an international basis since 1997. Over the last 33 years John has developed a variety of applications scaling up to enterprise-class, Web-based projects. He has been a Sybase Technology Evangelist and was a charter member of TeamPowersoft/TeamSybase.

Yakov Werde

Senior Consultant, Intertech US

SAP Mentor, Team Sybase, Sybase MVP, Principal PowerBuilder Instructor, CPD Professional Developing and consulting for governments, and enterprises of all size. Trained thousands of developers in PowerBuilder and Sybase enterprise technologies since version 3.5