Eugene Ciurana is a consultant who specializes in designing and deploying scalable, high availability systems. As Director of Systems Infrastructure at LeapFrog Enterprises, the largest educational toy company in the United States, he and his team deployed a world-class 100% SOA system (CIO Magazine, Computerworld) that handles millions of daily operations from the LearningPath and Connected Products educational systems. He is also a contributing editor to TheServerSide.com. In 2006 he led the first-time adoption of Linux and other open-source technologies at Wal-Mart Stores Information Systems Division as chief liaison between Walmart.com Global and the ISD Technology Council.
Eugene has contributed to Java, Linux, and OS X open-source projects and has architected main line of business applications, embedded platforms, and real-time systems for the largest companies in the world, including LeapFrog Enterprises, Wal-Mart, Bank One/Chase, National Oilwell Varco, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Nortel Networks, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Univex/Celanese, Nexis/Lexis, etc. He's the author of over 50 feature articles and editorials about technology and computer programming topics for such publications as TheServerSide, DZone, Software Guru, Informatique!, Computerworld, EE Times, Byte, PC/Tips, and OMNI, and is the best-selling author of Developing with Google App Engine.
Open-source software became an important part of Eugene's career in 1998, when he began working with Linux. He's advocated or contributed code for such project as OpenOffice.org, the Jetty web server, awke.org, the One Laptop Per Child project, OpenLaszlo, the Mule ESB, Ubuntu, Apache Axis, and others. He was largely responsible for the official adoption of Linux as a main line of business operating system at the largest company in the world.