The Stanford NLP Group released a Named Entity Recognition software, based on Conditional Random Fields and implemented in Java.

It is pretty fast and also acheives quite good performance with the included models.

For integration into IBM's UIMA text analysis frameword, I have written an Analysis Engine component that wraps the Stanford NE Regonizer.
You can download it here: stanford-ner-uima.zip
Just like the Recognizer itself it is licensed under the GPL.

Please let me know if it is useful for you.