Siva Ravada earned a PhD degree from the University of Minnesota in the field of Spatial Databases before joining Oracle's Spatial development team. He is now a Senior Director of Development at Oracle Corporation. At Oracle, Siva was one of the founding team members of the Spatial development team before taking over the team management responsibilities. Siva now manages the Spatial and MapViewer development teams at Oracle. He has more than 15 years of experience in spatial databases and application development. He has also co-authored more than 30 articles published in journals, and holds more than 30 patents. He has also presented key-note speeches at several conferences on the topics of spatial databases and GIS. Oracle is the second largest software company and the number one database company in the world.