Biographical sketches of authors

Daniel M. Dias   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: dias@us.ibm.com). Dr. Dias received his Ph.D. degree in 1981 from Rice University, Houston, TX. At IBM Research he manages the Parallel Commercial Systems department, where ongoing projects focus on business-to-business e-commerce, distributed middleware, Web services, and high-volume Web serving. Technologies developed in these projects have been used at the Sydney Olympics Web site as well as large customer sites, and some are now available as IBM products, such as Network Dispatcher, iSeries™ Connect, and Web Cache Accelerator. Dr. Dias's recent work involves scalable and highly available Web servers, frameworks for business-to-business e-commerce, high-performance scalable Web caches, highly available clustered systems, and performance analysis. He has published more than 100 papers in refereed journals and conferences. Dr. Dias has won two best paper awards, IBM Outstanding Innovation and Technical Achievement Awards, and 12 invention achievement awards.

Stewart L. Palmer   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: slp@us.ibm.com). Mr. Palmer is a senior software engineer at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. His current research interest is in the area of reliable business-to-business e-commerce. He is the principal architect of the B2B protocol exchange described in this paper. He has an extensive background in systems software development projects including operating systems for Unisys and IBM, DB2^® (Database 2™) for OS/390^®, and messaging middleware, and he has made contributions to MVS™, and to System/390^® architecture.

James T. Rayfield   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: jtray@us.ibm.com). Dr. Rayfield is a research staff member at IBM Research. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1988 from Brown University, Providence, RI. His research interests include object-oriented transaction-processing systems and database systems.

Hidayatullah H. Shaikh   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: hshaikh@us.ibm.com). Mr. Shaikh is a senior software engineer in the Parallel Commercial Systems department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. His current research area is business-to-business e-commerce, focusing on defining a flexible and scalable framework for new and existing business-to-business protocols. His contributions include the ebXML header specification and tpaML, the electronic trading-partner agreement mark-up language. Previously, he has been involved in the architecture and design of the IBM Supplier Live solution for Ariba Buyer, IBM iSeries Connect, and IBM Commerce Integrator. Mr. Shaikh received an M.S. degree in computer engineering from Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY.

T. K. Sreeram   IBM Software Group, J2 B39, 17 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, New York 10532 (electronic mail: sreeramt@us.ibm.com). Mr. Sreeram is a development manager with the WebSphere Commerce development team. He received his master's degree in computer science in 1994 at the Kerala University, Kerala, India. His interests include catalog management, B2B gateways, and e-commerce.