Rajiv Gupta is widely known as the father of Web Services and SOA. He is the founder and CEO of Securent, and has more than 17 years of successful enterprise software and security experience. Prior to Securent, he was the Founder and CEO of Confluent Software, where he led efforts for the successful development and growth of its policy-based web-services management product, before Confluent was acquired by Oblix in 2004. Before founding Confluent, Gupta spent 11 years at Hewlett-Packard, most recently as the General Manager of the E-speak Division, a division he started in 1998 to bring to market the E-speak technology that he and his team developed at HP Labs. E-speak is the precursor to the Web Service offerings from many major IT companies, and has been inducted into the Smithsonian National Museum. Gupta is the inventor or co-inventor of some of the seminal concepts that underpin Web Services, and has more than 45 patents to his name. He earned his Master's degree and PhD in Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology, and his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.