Maqsood Alam is a Director of Product Management at Oracle and has over 17 years of experience in architecting, building and evangelizing enterprise and system software. Maqsood is a pure technologist at heart and has a wide range of expertise, ranging from parallel and distributed systems to high performance database applications and Big Data. His current initiatives at Oracle are focused on Oracle NoSQL Database, Oracle Exadata, Oracle Database 12c and the Oracle Big Data Appliance. He is the coauthor on the book Achieving Extreme Performance with Oracle Exadata published by McGraw-Hill, and also of several whitepapers and best practices dealing with various Oracle technologies. He is an Oracle Certified Professional and holds a Masters and a Bachelors degree in Computer Science.