Trainers and Authors

Andrea Provaglio

Andrea is a independent consultant, mentor and author in the field of enterprise applications, Web applications, object-oriented programming and software design, with a special focus on the Java2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) platform.

He has about twenty years of professional experience; during that time he worked with a number of different technologies and platforms. He currently assists large corporations and financial institutions with building effective solutions using the J2EE technologies and principles; he also helps development teams to operate better as a group.

Andrea has been a frequent speaker at major international IT conferences (occasionally in front of audiences of 1000-2000 people) and contributed to a few books and publications. His activity is driven by his passion for languages and for sharing knowledge.

In 1999 Andrea received approval for a U.S. O-1 visa, for "extraordinary ability in sciences". He moved to San Francisco in 1999 and worked as an associate of Bruce Eckel's MindView Inc. until the end of 2003. During that time, Andrea taught Bruce's and his own courses to a number of relevant companies and institutions in the U.S. and Canada. He moved back to Italy at the end of 2003 to continue his training and consulting business in Europe.

Between 2004 and 2007 one of his main clients was Unicredit – a major European bank. Andrea was their main provider of Java and J2EE training, on a population of about 300 students, and provided technical consulting on the bank's J2EE architectures.

Prior to his consulting and training career, Andrea worked as a professional developer for the industry and for research projects. Today he doesn't do contract programming anymore, but still enjoys writing code during his consulting jobs, or for projects he develops to experiment with the most recent technologies – projects that then become the basis of his seminars and presentations.

Along with Java, Andrea has experience in object-oriented analysis and design methods (UML, Design Patterns, CRC) and in other programming languages, including but not limited to: Ruby, C++, Python, Object Pascal, Smalltalk, Pascal, Fortran, C, PL/1 and some Assembler languages.

Andrea has also been using and teaching CORBA and, in a previous life, he was a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Solution Developer, helping his clients and students to get into the messy world of (D)COM(+)/OLE/ActiveX, Visual C++, ATL and MFC.

Andrea Cogliati

Andrea’s first approach with IT occurred at the age of 8, when his father purchased the third Commodore PET 2001 sold in Italy. He soon started programming in BASIC and 6502 assembler. A few years later, while still at high school, he begun his professional career as a programmer for a small software house, Ultimobyte Editrice. In the late 80s his employer became the Italian sole agent for McAfee Antivirus program so he started his journey into IT Security, focusing in virus and anti-virus technologies and supporting McAfee Italian customers: cooperation with McAfee lasted several years and in 1995 he was part of the very first McAfee AVERT (now McAfee AVERT Labs).

In 1998, after graduating in Mathematics at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Andrea joined Mondadori Informatica Education (the first and most important Authorized Microsoft Training Center in Italy) as a trainer and consultant; he also spoke at several national conferences and events sponsored by Microsoft. In 2000 he moved to Algol, the major Cisco and Extreme Networks distributor in Italy as AlgolCollege New Business Developer Manager. He taught classes on Microsoft, Extreme Networks and Compaq technologies in Italy and EMEA. In 2002 he founded a small consultancy and training company focused solely in IT Security, which was eventually awarded by the Province of Milan as one of the most innovative companies for a biometrics authentication project.

In 2006 Andrea started his cooperation with Andrea Provaglio, developing and teaching security courses for software architects and developers.

In 2007 he moved to Rochester, NY where he started to collaborate with local ISSA and OWASP chapters and spoke at his first conference abroad.

Andrea holds (or has held) several Microsoft, Cisco, Extreme Networks, McAfee and Compaq certifications and he’s also a BS7799 Lead Auditor.

When not working, he enjoys playing keyboards with an amateur rock band. He also likes to cook for his family and friends and share his wine tasting experiences.