Dave Thomas has a wide spectrum of experience in the software industry as an executive, investor, board member, consultant, architect, and engineer. He is Chairman of Bedarra Corp, which provides consulting on technology and business strategy for emerging technology, products and services. Bedarra provides virtual CTOs and directors, advisors, and mentors to support new initiatives.

Dave served as Chief Scientist/CSO of Kx Systems, First Derivatives Plc. He co-founded Bedarra Research Labs, creators of the Ivy visual analytics workbench. Dave is the founder of YOW! Conferences and Workshops. He was the Managing Director of Object Mentor - a company specializing in the training and deploying Agile and Object-Oriented Software Development Agile methodologies. Founder and past CEO of Object Technology International (OTI), becoming CEO of IBM OTI Labs after its sale to IBM. Recognized as an IBM and ACM Distinguished Engineer for his contributions to Object Technology. He was also the CEO of Online-learning.com.

With a unique ability to see the future and translate research into competitive products, he is known for his contributions to Object Technology, including IBM VisualAge and Eclipse IDEs, Smalltalk and Java virtual machines, Agile Development and Vector functional programming.

Dave is a popular, humorous, albeit opinionated keynote speaker with an impressive breadth of business experience and technical depth. He is a thought leader in large-scale software engineering and a founding director of the Agile Alliance.

With close links to the R&D community, Dave is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University in Canada and held past positions at UQ and QUT in Australia. He has been a business and technical advisor to many technology companies. He has been an angel investor in numerous software companies globally.

Dave is the founder and chairman of the YOW! Australia and Lambda Jam conferences and is a GOTO Conference Fellow.