Andy Piper is a Consulting IT Specialist working for IBM Software Group, based at Hursley in the UK.

Andy has been with IBM Software Group since 2001. He is part of the Software Group Development Laboratories, and works on defining product futures, closing sales, producing collateral and improving software consumability, particularly around the WebSphere Connectivity portfolio developed in Hursley.

For the first seven years, he was a member of IBM Software Services for WebSphere, and worked with customers to assist with the implementation of WebSphere products. His specialist areas are the messaging and integration families within the WebSphere portfolio. In particular, he has done a lot of work with WebSphere Message Broker, and has written articles and books on that subject. He also has a special interest in performance and scalability issues, and has worked on a number of major performance benchmarks using IBM WebSphere and DB2 technologies.

Andy speaks on social computing and virtual worlds topics at various events. He also wanders around Second Life and enjoys using Flickr. He co-hosts the weekly technology and innovation podcast, Dogear Nation.

You can find out what Andy is up to by looking at his personal blog, The lost outpost, or follow him @andypiper on Twitter.