In the brave new world of cloud computing, what is the secret to building great companies? That is the question that will be answered by technology visionary Roman Stanek in his Opening Keynote at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo Europe next week in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic. In the meantime, we bring you here a brief round-up of Stanek's achievements 1997-2009. In reverse order...

May 18, 2009 - Stanek will deliver his keynote in Prague, "Building Great Companies on the Cloud."

April 23, 2009 - Good Data closes a $2.5M Series B round of financing from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, OATV and General Catalyst, bringing the total now raised to approx $4.5M. Still everything is done through Amazon Web Services, in the cloud.

March 4, 2008 - After a year in stealth development, Stanek and his latest team unveil Good Data Corporation - purveyor of a complete, on-demand business intelligence platform combining analytics, reporting, data warehousing and data integration. Its primary focus is collaborative analytics and Stanek's vision is to use the cloud 100%, so that Goog Data will never need to own a single server. "We believe that sharing and teamwork will allow our users to move past isolated reports and arrive at the true meaning of 'business intelligence.'" Stanek writes in his blog.

January 2006: Systinet is sold to Mercury Interactive/HP for $105M. "We believe that SOA is the next big shift in IT," says Mercury's SVP of Strategy, Zohar Gilad. "It's definitely becoming the next big shift in IT," he adds.

2004: Stepping down from his CEO post at Systinet, Stanek becomes instead the company's Chief Strategy Officer, splitting his time between its U.S. and European operations.

2000: Stanek founds Systinet, with a primary focus on Java development.

1999 - San Jose, CA: NetBeans is bought by Sun Microsystems for $10M.

1997 - Prague, Czech Republic: While studying at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague, Roman Stanek and some fellow students begin a project known as Xelfi. Later Stanek forms a company around the project and produces commercial versions of what then becomes knows as the NetBeans IDE.

Next week not only Stanek but also Cloud Computing and Virtualization are going to be center stage, 18-19 May, at the Prague Hilton as the Czech Republic plays host to Cloud Computing Expo Europe 2009, co-located with Virtualization Conference Europe 2009 - the first conference outside the USA in SYS-CON's world-beating series of events devoted to the two hottest interlinked topics in Enterprise IT today.

Speakers and attendees alike are traveling to Prague from all over Europe, and indeed many are even flying in from the USA in order to familiarize themselves with where exactly Europe is located on the Cloud/Virtualization spectrum right now. Here is a round-up of speakers, arranged by country of origin.

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