Consultant, Trainer and Author, Dreyer Network Consultants
Arek Dreyer is an author, trainer and consultant, specializing in Mac OS X Server. He wrote or contributed to the following Apple Global Training courses through Peachpi: Mac OS X Directory Services, Mac OS X Server Essentials, and Xsan 2 Administration.
Arek has been an Apple Certified Trainer since 2002. Originally an expert in Sun systems, Dreyer shifted his professional focus to Mac OS X shortly after its release. President of Dreyer Network Consultants, Inc, Arek and his wife Heather live in Chicago, but sometimes they get to visit other parts of the world as part of his work. He speaks, delivers courses, and implements solutions for customers.
CEO and Technical Director, Mondada
Duncan McCracken is the CEO and Technical Director of Mondada, a developer of Mac deployment solutions for enterprise. Duncan has a background in UNIX, and since 1996 has worked as a consultant focussing primarily on Apple systems in heterogenous environments.
His experience covers the complete spectrum of Apple and associated third party software (including Final Cut Server, XSAN and Quantum's Stornext).
He is engaged regularly by various Professional Service Providers in Australia, and is an Apple Certified Trainer for Snow Leopard.
Rick is the CEO of Key Options, an Apple systems integration and iOS development group in Australia and Asia. Rick has been consulting and training in the Apple environment since 1988 and his wealth of experience in a variety of technologies has made him a respected member of the Apple community. Rick has a background in Unix and his grounding with core technologies in networking and multimedia allow him to apply his skills to new technical implementations with ease.
He has experience in large scale networking and Xsan design and deployments. He is a certified Xsan trainer and has contributed to Apple training courses such as Xsan 2 Administration.
Over the years, Rick has had numerous speaking engagements including more recently, MacWorld 2008 - 2010 as well as Apple's Advanced Camps in 2008 and 2009.
Rick and his team have embraced iOS technology and now provide end-to-end iOS integration, including development for the corporate, education and government markets.
Global Mac Operations Character, Google
Edward Marczak is a frequent speaker at technology conferences and the co-founder of MacTech Conference.
He writes a monthly column for, and is the Executive Editor of MacTech Magazine.
His days are currently spent on the Mac team at Google. Past the technology, Ed is a husband and father and enjoys traveling and playing music.
Services Engineer, Puppet Labs
Gary Larizza is a professional services engineer at Puppet Labs where he flies all over the world training people on the ins-and-outs of Puppet. Previously, he worked in Education maintaining an all-Mac infrastructure using Puppet, MCollective, and many other open source tools with a couple of G5 XServes and Dell Latitude D810 running CentOS. He's been running Puppet on desktop machines since 2008 and has pointy wrapper scripts to prove it!
Business Development Manager, Commercial Sales, JAMF Software
Blaine has worked with JAMF Software—creators of the Casper Suite, a best-of-breed management solution for OS X and Apple iOS devices—for over four years, spending much of his time working with customers and partners in the European market. His work has allowed him to see hundreds of different IT departments achieve success with Apple products in their environment. Be it a small independent shop with a few dozen Macs, or a global corporate IT department tasked with supporting tens of thousands of Apple devices, Blaine sees different challenges that share similar solutions on a daily basis.
Blaine is based out of Minneapolis and will challenge anyone to find a tougher winter than those in his native Minnesota.
EMEA Regional Systems Engineer, Active Storage UK Limited
Graduating in 2003 Ben holds a multi-discipline Law degree from Keele university including computer sciences. He is currently the SE for EMEA at Active Storage having spent 7 years as an SI in the UK, working with a broad range of manufacturers and clients. This has included Telestream, Building4Media, AJA, Isilon, Apple, NBC, Technicolor, Pearsons, ITV and the BBC amongst others. Working as their senior engineer he was involved in planning/designing, implementing and managing projects from full studio-solutions to small XSAN set-ups. His predominant expertise are in Video-workflow analysis and storage solutions - specifically XSAN and now ActiveSAN.
