Akmal Chaudhri is a Technology Evangelist at GridGain. His role is to help build the global Apache Ignite community and raise awareness through presentations and technical writing. He has over 25 years experience in IT and has previously held roles as a developer, consultant, product strategist and technical trainer. He has worked for several blue-chip companies such as Reuters and IBM, and also the Big Data startups Hortonworks (Hadoop) and DataStax (Cassandra NoSQL Database). He has regularly presented at many international conferences and served on the program committees for a number of major conferences and workshops. He has published and presented widely and edited or co-edited 10 books. He holds a BSc (1st Class Hons.) in Computing and Information Systems, MSc in Business Systems Analysis and Design and a PhD in Computer Science. He is a Member of the British Computer Society (MBCS) and a Chartered IT Professional (CITP).