"Real-World AJAX" faculty added two pioneers to its roster; Jouk Pleiter, co-founder and CEO of Backbase, and Kevin Hakman, co-founder of Tibco's General Interface.

Jouk Pleiter is the CEO of Backbase, a leader in the field of Rich Internet Applications and AJAX development software. Backbase's clients include ING, ABN AMRO, TNT, KPN, Comsys and Heineken. Backbase operates globally with offices in San Mateo (North America) and Amsterdam (Europe). Since 1995, Jouk has been an entrepreneur: he founded three successful software companies. Prior to Backbase, Jouk was part of the founding team at the web content management company Tridion, where he led the product management operations, and was driving the company's efforts to become a leader in the European WCM software market. Jouk previously was part of the founding team at the Interactive Agency Twinspark where he grew the company to a leading market position in Europe and was instrumental in the sale of Twinspark to Agency.com. He has an MBA from the University of Groningen.

Kevin Hakman is the director of product marketing for TIBCO General Interface, the award winning AJAX and Rich Internet Application framework and toolkit. Kevin Hakman pioneered AJAX in the enterprise co-founding General Interface in 2001. Since that time General Interface (aka 'GI') has been powering Web applications that look, feel and perform like desktop applications, but run in the browser at Fortune 500 and U.S. Government organizations. General Interface was also the first to use its own toolkit to provide full visual tooling for AJAX when it released it's 2.0 Version in 2003. TIBCO acquired General Interface in 2004 to extend its vision for service oriented applications to the end user. Kevin is a contributor to the SOA Web Services Journal and the AJAX Developer's Journal.